An interview with Leïla al-Shami, from Lundi Matin #456, 16/12/2024.
Leïla al-Shami and Robin Yassin-Kassab are the authors of Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War, an important book in which they recounted the early years of the revolution and the profusion of experiments in popular self-organisation. We interviewed them in 2016 and 2019. The following interview is not an interview in its own right, but rather a sort of addendum to the previous ones.
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and if ever i touched a life i hope that life knows
that i know that touching was and still is and will always
be the true
revolution
Nikki Giovanni, When I Die (1972)
… a poem is pure energy
horizontally contained
between the mind
of the poet and the ear of the reader
if it does not sing discard the ear
for poetry is song
if it does not delight discard
the heart for poetry is joy
if it does not inform then close
off the brain for it is dead
if it cannot heed the insistent message
that life is precious
which is all we poets
wrapped in our loneliness
are trying to say
Nikki Giovanni, Poetry (1975)
For the poet and essayist, for the “activist”, for Nikki Giovanni, in her own words …
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From Freedom News (06/12/2024)
The anarchist’s recent arrest continues a long story: ten years ago today, his prison hunger strike brought the country to the edge of insurrection on the anniversary of the 2008 uprising
~ Neil Middleton ~
The recent arrest of Nikos Romanos, following the widely publicised explosion in an Athens apartment, took place in the run-up to today’s anniversary of the start of the 2008 Greek riots. Six years later, in 2014, Romanos was a dedicated insurrectionary serving a prison sentence for bank robbery.
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From the CrimethInc. collective (04/12/2024)
A Report and Video Footage from the Streets of Tbilisi
Tuesday, December 3 marked the sixth consecutive night of clashes between police and anti-government protesters in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia. We offer the following short report and video footage courtesy of Georgian anarchists.
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From the CrimethInc. collective (02/12/2024)
Perspectives on the Conflict from Western and Northeastern Syria
The Syrian civil war has remained largely frozen since 2020, owing to a precarious balance of power between various factions with various degrees of support from Russia, Turkey, Iran, and the United States. Over the past few days, however, taking advantage of the ways that Iran and Hezbollah have been tied down by conflict with Israel while Russia has been distracted in Ukraine, the anti-government forces Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) have seized Aleppo and intensified their campaign against the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad. While Assad has been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and his downfall would be welcome, this development poses new dangers.
As we have explored before, the situation in Syria is complex, and the same events can look very different from different vantage points. In order to triangulate a reality informed by many views, we present here a perspective from participants in the revolution in western Syria alongside a report from anarchists in Rojava, the northeastern region of Syria.
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“Being an anarchist now is no different from 50 years ago. It’s a philosophy and a search for truth. What I want is unity, of Europe and, were it possible, of the whole world, without frontiers, a world in which we all understand each other.”
Joan Busquets Verges, The Guardian (03/12/2024)
During this month of November, Joan Busquets, ‘El Senzill’, has visited Spain to present his claim as a victim of Francoism.
In this post, you can find the chronicle of the event and the recording at the FAL (Anselmo Lorenzo Foundation) on the 19th, the press conference in Barcelona and a conversation between him and the historian and researcher Dolors Marín.
On the morning of 19 November, the CGT had called a rally in front of the Congress of Deputies in Madrid. A group of National Police officers, expressly warned, prevented Joan and several activists from unfurling a banner prepared for this rally. No member of parliament, no party, deigned to leave the building, the seat of the ‘sovereignty’ of the Spanish people, to welcome a person who gave years of his life for freedom.
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The great social measure of the Commune was its own working existence.
Karl Marx, The Civil War in France
The French people seem to have understood this need wonderfully well, and the something new, which was introduced into the life of France, since the first risings, was the popular Commune. Governmental centralisation came later, but the Revolution began by creating the Commune — autonomous to a very great degree — and through this institution it gained, as we shall see, immense power.
Peter Kropotkin, The Great French Revolution 1789-1793
From Ill Will (12/11/2024).
An increasingly combative current of ecological struggle has pushed questions of space and place, territory and its defense, to the forefront of today’s political imagination. These issues, and the politics of space more generally, have long been a focus of Kristin Ross’s writing, reaching back to her first book on Rimbaud and the Paris Commune. As her new book, The Commune-Form: the Transformation of Everyday Life (Verso 2024), hits bookshelves this fall, we reached out to Ross to discuss Les Soulèvements de la terre, federated communes, and how to reclaim the revolutionary offensive in a climate of anxiety and despair.
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The most striking political phenomenon of our recent era, which some rightly call the era of authoritarian leaders, is the rise of the extreme right in the partycratic/party-dominated capitalist countries. Some prefer to call it the radical, ultra-nationalist or populist new right, and the more belligerent, the neo-fascist right. For some reason, a disappointed and angry crowd, some of them workers, who feel hurt, discriminated against or insufficiently cared for by the institutions they had trusted, turn to this political option. Neither Franco, nor Hitler, nor Mussolini have been resurrected, even if historical revisionism casts their regimes in a nostalgic light and encourages a relative understanding. This is a very modern phenomenon. For a better understanding of it, it is necessary to study the context in which it has occurred in order to reveal one by one the factors that have contributed to its emergence and development. First of all, the disappearance of the labour movement.
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A 2014 restatement of the meaning of “anti-developmentalism” by the Spanish activist and author, Miguel Amorós, which he defines as the new form of the “modern class struggle”.
Anti-developmentalism: What It Is and What It Wants
In one respect, anti-developmentalism emerged from the critical re-evaluation of the period that ended with the failure of the old autonomous workers movement and with the global restructuring of capitalism; it was thus born during the seventies and eighties of the last century. In another respect, it arose amidst the incipient attempts at ruralization that had taken place during that same period and in the popular mobilizations against the presence of factories emitting pollutants in the core urban areas and against urbanization projects and the construction of nuclear power plants, highways and dams. It is simultaneously a theoretical analysis of the new social conditions that takes the contributions of ecology into account, and a struggle against the consequences of capitalist development, although those two aspects do not always proceed in tandem. We may define it as a form of critical thinking and an antagonistic practice born from the conflicts provoked by development during the last stage of the capitalist regime, which corresponds to the merger of the economy and politics, Capital and the State, industry and life. Due to its novelty, and also as a result of the spread of submission and resignation among the de-classed masses, reflection and combativity do not always proceed hand in hand; one postulates goals that the other does not always want to fight for: anti-developmentalist thought envisions a global strategy of confrontation, while the struggle is often reduced to tactical considerations, which only benefit domination and its supporters. The forces mobilized are almost never conscious of their historical task, while the lucidity of critique is likewise not always capable of contributing to the development of consciousness in these campaigns.
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Syria: The dictator has fled, long live the revolution
In less than two weeks, the Bashar al-Assad regime of Syria collapsed, with his flight to Russia, in the face of a military offensive conducted by a coalition of armed groups led by Hay?at Tahrir al-Sham. If we count his father’s reign, initiated in a 1970 coup d’état, the 8th of December of 2024 marked the end of 54 years of violent, authoritarian rule. And the celebration on the streets of Syria’s towns and cities and the opening up of the regime’s prisons is testimony to the joy and pain of the end of the dictatorship.
What lies ahead, we do not pretend to know and we reject exclusively “geo-political” readings of the events that would reduce them to the consequences of regional and global power machinations. Assad’s regime collapsed not only because of the military offensive that forced his escape, but above all because “his own people” refused to defend him. The regime, already moribund, was simply pushed to play out its last act.
Behind, lies the horrific violence of Syria’s civil war – sustained with the assistance of competing “national” interests beyond the country’s borders and para-state military forces –, the Syrian State’s terror against its own people – the torture and killing of hundreds of thousands – and the mass displacement of millions, both inside and beyond Syria, generating the largest refugee crisis since World War II.
And yet there was also a revolution in Syria, for the country’s “Arab Spring” was more than the desire to see the end of the dictator; it was equally the expression of the desire for a new kind of society, more just and free, with “anarchist” resonances in the organisation of Local Coordination Committees.
To remember the revolution of this country’s peoples, we share a chapter from the excellent essay by Leila Al-Shami and Robin Yassin-Kassab, Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War (London: Pluto Press, 2016), a chapter entitled “The Grassroots”, preceded by a selection from the essay’s “Preface”.
And we close with the 2017 documentary film, Syria’s Disappeared: The Case Against Assad, by Sara Afshar.
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