From Lundi Matin #441, 02/09/2024.
What if old words like ‘genocide’ (and why not ‘colonisation’) were false friends? What if the new technologies that subjugate our emotions when we think we’re expressing them were also betraying us? And what if we ourselves were betraying the witnesses in this way? And how can we articulate more than snatches of truth when events take our breath away? This text is not an answer. No answer to the ongoing tragedy is a text.
O gentlemen, the time of life is short!
To spend that shortness basely were too long
If life did ride upon a dial’s point,
Still ending at the arrival of an hour.
And if we live, we live to tread on kings;
William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, The First Part
Having to prove every day, every night, every moment, that we are being colonised, occupied, exploited, expelled, decimated and eradicated, and all of this well before a supposedly fateful date, having to prove again and again massacre after massacre, having to prove the devastating process of ethnic and cultural cleansing that began more than seven decades ago and continues unabated, that is the absolute tragedy, the tragedy of the Palestinians. Having to prove that you are being exterminated, having to prove it over and over again. Because no, ‘our’ images prove nothing, they are not ‘their’ images. ‘Nor are our words. Our dead even less so.
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Miguel Amorós: What is anarchism?
From a las barricadas (02/09/2024).
We share Miguel Amorós’ essay, “What is Anarchism?”, not because we are entirely in agreement with it – that has never been an exclusive criterion of selection for us -, but because of the forcefulness of the argument, because of the need not to ignore the anarchist movement’s history when trying to understand anarchism, as Amorós defends, and because of the absurdity of so expanding the limits of anarchism, that it potentially comes to include everyone and every idea opposed to “excessive” authority.
Yet his insistence on defining anarchism exclusively “as an anti-authoritarian current of revolutionary socialism, the intellectual product of the incipient class struggle typical of capitalist society in the early stages of industrialisation”, as a formerly working class revolutionary theory and practice and the need for it to remain revolutionary today (even with the waning and dissolution of the working class, at least as it existed up until WWII), cuts too deep. And it does so because what Amorós dismisses as non-revolutionary – a “bookish”, purely ideological or theoretical anarchism, which is not anarchism, for him – , begs the question of what anarchist revolution is, for the history of the movement and the broader history of social movements points in no single direction.
To endeavour to divide the real anarchists from the pretenders on the grounds of true revolutionaries versus non-revolutionaries appears to us to risk falling into another intellectual orthodoxy, the very thing that Amorós faults non-revolutionary anarchists with.
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