There are essays that in a few words can sometimes capture the spirit of an idea better than any long, drawn out monograph. Simon Springer’s “I, Dirty Anarchist” (2018) is one such essay: an apology for a Tolstoian anarchism.
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Jacques Rancière, in his most recent essay, explores through Anton Chekhov’s fiction the unpredictable yet ever possible and disruptive appearance of freedom in the everyday lives of his characters; in our lives.
We share below an excerpt from Rancière’s essay, preceded by Chekhov’s short story, “The Student”, which serves as its inspiration. Our own inspiration comes, as it so often does, from the excellent work of the Lundi Matin (30/09/2024) collective and the very recent interview that they conducted with Rancière around his essay; an interview that we also share below.
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From the CrimethInc. collective (23/09/2024).
In August 2024, a wave of protests rocked Indonesia, ostensibly in response to political machinations aimed at anointing a successor to President Joko Widodo, popularly known as Jokowi. Very little information has circulated about these protests in the English-speaking world. To get a sense of the deeper issues at play, we reached out to anarchist participants in different parts of Indonesia.
We interviewed Frans Ari Prasetyo, an independent researcher and photographer in Bandung, and M, a participant in an anarchist collective in Jogjakarta. The photographs are also by Frans Ari Prasetyo.
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From the CrimethInc. collective (17/09/2024).
Thirteen years ago, a thousand demonstrators descended on Wall Street, occupying Zuccotti Park and kicking off what came to be known as the Occupy movement. Revisiting that moment today, we can see how dramatically the terrain of social movements has changed as our society has polarized. The organizers of Occupy Wall Street proposed to create a movement that could bring all society together against the ruling order and the few who profit from it, mobilizing under the slogan “We are the 99%.” Today, the divisions that cut through our society have only deepened, rendering it more difficult to imagine social change. Yet this only renders the legacy of the Occupy movement more important.
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From Ill Will (13/09/2024).
The following is an interview with Azad, an American currently fighting for the revolution in Myanmar. Conducted via email over several weeks between August and September of 2024, Azad’s responses cover a wide range of issues related to the strengths and challenges of a “protracted people’s war.” These include the avoidance of ethnic and political schisms, the decentralization of guerilla combat, the confusions generated by counter-insurrection, and the complex geopolitical dynamics that all uprisings today will be forced to confront sooner or later as they approach the possibility of victory.
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Caliban: You taught me language, and my profit on’t
Is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you
For learning me your language!
Shakespeare, The Tempest
Historical colonialism: extractivism of physical resources
The history of colonialism is a history of systematic depredation of territory. The object of colonisation is the resource-rich physical places that the colonialist West needed for its accumulation. The other object of colonisation is the lives of millions of men and women exploited in conditions of slavery in the territory under colonial rule, or deported to the territory of the colonising power.
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From the It’s Going Down podcast and Bill Brown of the Not Bored journal, reflections on the Situationists.
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In spite of the usefulness we think we derive from them, the sciences cannot make us happy, because man is a speaking being, who needs to express in words joy and pain, pleasure and affliction, while science, in the last analysis, aims at a mute being, which it is possible to know in number and measure, like all the objects of the world. The natural languages that men speak are, at the limit, an obstacle to knowledge and, as such, must be formalised and corrected, eliminating as “poetic” those redundancies to which, instead, we mainly pay attention when expressing our desires and thoughts, our affections as well as our aversions.
Precisely because it is addressed to a dumb man, science can never produce an ethic. That illustrious scientists have unscrupulously carried out experiments on the bodies of deportees in the Lager or of convicts in American prisons in the interests of science should not, in this sense, surprise us. Science is in fact based on the possibility of separating at all levels the biological life of a living being from its relational life, the mute vegetative life that man has in common with plants from his spiritual existence as a speaking being. It is good to remember this, today when men and women seem to have abandoned everything they believed in, to entrust to science an expectation of happiness that can only be disappointed and betrayed. As recent years have shown beyond any doubt, men who look at their own lives with the eyes of their doctor are therefore ready to renounce their most elementary political liberties and to submit without limits to the powers that rule them. Happiness can never be separated from the simple and trite words we exchange, from the shout and laughter of joy or from the shock that makes us weep, we do not know whether from grief or from delight. Let us leave the scientists in the silence and solitude of numbers, let us watch lucidly and attentively so that they do not invade the realm of ethics and politics, which is the only one that can really satisfy us.
Source: Quodlibet ( 08/09/2024)
From Lundi Matin, #443 (16/09/2024), we share a text by Maria Kakogianni – a manifesto of anarchy -, which by coincidence comes in the wake of our last post, the article by Miguel Amorós, “What is anarchism?”. The contrast between the two pieces may serve to raise – as we believe it does – further, fundamental questions.
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Surrealism: The unfinished revolution
Surrealism is not, has never been, and will never be a literary or artistic school but is a movement of the human spirit in revolt and an eminently subversive attempt to reenchant the world: an attempt to reestablish the “enchanted” dimensions at the core of human existence—poetry, passion, mad love, imagination, magic, myth, the marvelous, dreams, revolt, utopian ideals—which have been eradicated by this civilization and its values. In other words, Surrealism is a protest against narrow-minded rationality, the commercialization of life, petty thinking, and the boring realism of our money-dominated, industrial society. It is also the utopian and revolutionary aspiration to “transform life”—an adventure that is at once intellectual and passionate, political and magical, poetic and dreamlike. It began in 1924; it continues today.
Michael Löwy, Morning Star
If, through Surrealism, we reject unhesitatingly the notion of the sole possibility of the things which “are,” and if we ourselves declare that by a path which “is,” a path which we can show and help people to follow, one can arrive at what people claimed “was not,” if we cannot find words enough to stigmatize the baseness of Western thought, if we are not afraid to take up arms against logic, if we refuse to swear that something we do in dreams is less meaningful than something we do in a state of waking, if we are not even sure that we will not do away with time, that sinister old farce, that train constantly jumping off the track, mad pulsation, inextricable conglomeration of breaking and broken beasts, how do you expect us to show any tenderness, even to be tolerant, toward an apparatus of social conservation, of whatever sort it may be? That would be the only madness truly unacceptable on our part. Everything remains to be done, every means must be worth trying, in order to lay waste to the ideas of family, country, religion. No matter how well known the Surrealist position may be with respect to this matter, still it must be stressed that on this point there is no room for compromise. Those who make it their duty to maintain this position persist in advancing this negation, in belittling any other criterion of value. They intend to savor fully the profound grief, so well played, with which the bourgeois public-inevitably prepared in their base way to forgive them a few “youthful” errors-greets the steadfast and unyielding need they display to laugh like savages in the presence of the French flag, to vomit their disgust in the face of every priest, and to level at the breed of “basic duties” the long-range weapon of sexual cynicism. We combat, in whatever form they may appear, poetic indifference, the distraction of art, scholarly research, pure speculation; we want nothing whatever to do with those, either large or small, who use their minds as they would a savings bank. … [The] unflagging fidelity to the commitments of Surrealism presupposes a disinterestedness, a contempt for risk, a refusal to compromise, of which very few men prove, in the long run, to be capable. Were there to remain not a single one, from among all those who were the first to measure by its standards their chance for significance and their desire for truth, yet would Surrealism continue to live. In any event, it is too late for the seed not to sprout and grow in infinite abundance in the human field, with fear and the other varieties of weeds that must prevail over all.
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… the idea of Surrealism aims quite simply at the total recovery of our psychic force by a means which is nothing other than the dizzying descent into ourselves, the systematic illumination of hidden places and the progressive darkening of other places, the perpetual excursion into the midst of forbidden territory, and that there is no real danger of its activities coming to an end so long as man still manages to distinguish an animal from a flame or a stone-heaven help, I say, the Surrealist idea from beginning to progress without its ups and downs. It is absolutely essential for us to act as though we were really “part of the world,” in order thereafter to dare formulate certain reservations.
André Breton, Second Manifesto of Surrealism (1930)
“Transform the world,” Marx said; “change life,” Rimbaud said. These two watchwords are one for us.
André Breton, Speech to the Congress of Writers (1935)
Man must flee this ridiculous web that has been spun around him: so-called present reality with the prospect of a future reality that is hardly better. Each full minute bears within itself the negation of centuries of limping, broken history.
André Breton, Prolegomena to a Third Surrealist Manifesto (1942)
This month of October marks the hundredth anniversary of the publication of André Breton’s first Manifesto of Surrealism (1924). And we celebrate it in the full awareness of Breton’s own admonition against the “sterility” of the “perpetual interrogation of the dead”.
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