From Lundi Matin #435 (02/07/2024) …
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Franco “Bifo” Berardi: Impotence, dementia, nihilism
From Lobo Suelto (28/06/2024) …
We saw the two flabby gladiators fight each other like exhausted fighting dogs for the amusement of millions of spectators who must decide which of the two deserves to be president of a nation that has long been showing clear signs of moral, psychological and political decadence.
One of the two is a serial rapist, a systematic liar, a failed businessman and a fraudster; the other is a genocidal murderer. I don’t want to be forced to choose, but fortunately I’m not American.
Continue readingBertolt Brecht: Writing the Truth – Five Difficulties (1935)
Fascism can be combated as capitalism alone, as the nakedest, most shameless, most oppressive, and most treacherous form of capitalism.
Nowadays, anyone who wishes to combat lies and ignorance and to write the truth must overcome at least five difficulties. He must have the courage to write the truth when truth is everywhere opposed; the keenness to recognize it, although it is everywhere concealed; the skill to manipulate it as a weapon; the judgment to select those in whose hands it will be effective; and the cunning to spread the truth among such persons. These are formidable problems for writers living under Fascism, but they exist also for those writers who have fled or been exiled; they exist even for writers working in countries where civil liberty prevails.
Continue readingIndia: A 100 years of liberal fascist solitude
From lundi matin (#434, 24/06/2024), an interview (largely in English) with the Indian anthropologist, Alpa Shah.
As a complement to this interview and to Alpa Shah’s work, we also share a series lectures, other interviews and links to articles. Her work invites a critical reflection on the understanding of democracy and the possibility of a kind of fascism cohabiting with electoral proceduralism. If there is any positive sense to the concept of “democracy”, then it must re-thought and practiced beyond the forms of “liberal-parliamentary” democracy.
Continue readingAgainst Liberal Fascism
War conducted by states against “communitarianism.” Implosion of popular communities. Negligence toward the weaving of our interdependences. And then, as if this social disaster wasn’t deep enough, emancipators who have nothing better to propose than the prisons of identity politics. A wretched fragmentation indeed.
To this, however, we may oppose another fragmentation, communal and generative in character, at odds with the production of value, beginning with the valorization of ourselves and our supposed identity. A fragmentation motivated by the joy of hospitality, which emerges in the welcoming of difference: communities through heterogenesis. These are the old anarchist values of mutual aid, forms of sharing that are always situated somewhere in particular, and which engender places that express them. These are the values that enable us to shun social determinations as well as any idea of foundation. We are all ungrounded [des effondrés]. We’re free to unfold our interdependencies over a multitude of paths that lead us to new perceptions and sensibilities. That is how we can overcome our fears in the face of the state-created chaos that is building up to new Armageddons.
From the Ill Will collective, an essay by Josep Rafanell i Orra (20/06/2024).
Neoliberal society is in freefall. As the fiction of a social totality crumbles away, we are increasingly confronted by two opposed forms of fragmentation: one designed to terrorize our souls, siphon our living energy, while hyper-mobilizing our bodies through constant exposure to vulnerability; another emerging within the cracks and caesurae of the economic order, through the restoration of a communal fabric of life in the passages between souls, fragment-by-fragment, until a life world comes alive between us. By insisting upon this distinction, the following text seeks to clarify a common misunderstanding related to the anti-political project of communist rupture: to push for desertion and secession from the political project of representation — a project defined first of all by its cultivated negligence toward our interdependencies on one another — does not “imply cutting ourselves off from a fantasized social body, but rather establishing fragmentary worlds within it, where the communities-in-process can materialize and we can relearn to cultivate hospitality and new ways to link together.”
First published in May 2024 on Lundi Matin, “Against Liberal Fascism” was written to accompany the Spanish translation of Josep Rafanell i Orra’s Fragment the World(Éditions Divergences, 2018). October of 2023 saw the release of a major follow-up work, entitled A Short Treatise on Cosmoanarchism, which will hopefully find its way into English translation shortly. For more of his writing in English, see “The World Returns,” “Carnivals and Revolt,” and “Crowds Against Pathology.”
Continue readingThe Collapse of Zionism
From the New Left Review/Sidecar blog, we share a short article by Ilan Pappé (21/06/2024).
Hamas’s assault of October 7 can be likened to an earthquake that strikes an old building. The cracks were already beginning to show, but they are now visible in its very foundations. More than 120 years since its inception, could the Zionist project in Palestine – the idea of imposing a Jewish state on an Arab, Muslim and Middle Eastern country – be facing the prospect of collapse? Historically, a plethora of factors can cause a state to capsize. It can result from constant attacks by neighbouring countries or from chronic civil war. It can follow the breakdown of public institutions, which become incapable of providing services to citizens. Often it begins as a slow process of disintegration that gathers momentum and then, in a short period of time, brings down structures that once appeared solid and steadfast.
The difficulty lies in spotting the early indicators. Here, I will argue that these are clearer than ever in the case of Israel. We are witnessing a historical process – or, more accurately, the beginnings of one – that is likely to culminate in the downfall of Zionism. And, if my diagnosis is correct, then we are also entering a particularly dangerous conjuncture. For once Israel realizes the magnitude of the crisis, it will unleash ferocious and uninhibited force to try to contain it, as did the South African apartheid regime during its final days.
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Posted in Commentary
Tagged anti-statism, colonialism and anti-colonialism, Ilan Pappe, israel, palestine
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What is dual power?
Via It’s Going Down
Video mini-documentary from subMedia.Tv on the anarchist concept of dual power.
Dual Power, sometimes referred to as counter-power, is a stage in a revolutionary movement where two competing political frameworks occupy the same space. For anti-state revolutionaries this implies a significant mobilization of people organizing autonomously and outside of and against existing power structures and institutions.
In this episode of A is for Anarchy, we examine the historical origins of dual power and analyze current examples and those throughout history.
The Strategy of Separation
The main takeaway is this: if we find at the core of the French Revolution — “mother to all of us,” as Kropotkin says — the main currents of the later revolutionary movement, first and foremost the libertarian and the authoritarian and Jacobin ones, we must nevertheless recognize the limits of this filiation. While it is certain that the trove of inventions and organizational forms that animated the popular tradition between 1789 and 1793, in continuity with a much longer journey, are a feature of the revolutionary becoming that runs throughout the history of the oppressed, it is important to understand that neither constituent representation nor permanent revolution is a legacy for our party. Both of these poles enter into the ontological-political machine of modernity, which a destituent praxis sets out precisely to shatter. Deepening and weaving an underground pattern of forms and uses capable of affecting struggles without putting ourselves at their head, intensifying an autonomy in conflict without deferring to the language of politics also requires altering the coordinates that bind us to imaginary origins. Neither subversive progress nor the political regulation of equality, but the invention of radical novelty through the reservoir of communal heresies, separation, and ethical secessionism. We are the disorganizing party.
Michele Garau, The Strategy of Separation
The Ill Will collective has now published a series of essays by the Italian philosopher Michele Garau, significant essays, which through their language and their conceptual apparatuses, seek to challenge fossilised patterns of “radical leftist thought and practice”, while pointing to and endeavouring to sketch out new possibilities of destituent and separatist actions.
The importance of this work has led us to share the latest of the essays by this author published by Ill Will and we reference below the other essays that the collective has also published.
Continue readingFrance: For an anti-fascist uprising
From the Soulèvements de la terre, in France …
1 – The neo-fascist danger is real
All over Europe and the world, neo-fascist parties are seizing power. Everywhere in society their xenophobic and authoritarian ideas are spreading. However, there is no question of trivialising what happens to us. There is no question of normalizing a party founded by the SS and supporters of French Algeria.
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Mark Bray: Five Historical Lessons for Anti-Fascists
Over the years – and long before us and no doubt after us – we have written about and against fascism and its many incarnations and have shared the words of many authors better than us who have written about the same, with the aim of trying to comprehend and modestly contribute to anti-fascist thought and practice.
But as Karl Polanyi noted some years ago, fascism is a virus that lives within the body of capitalism and though it may be beaten back and seemingly rooted out of the social body, it only remains dormant and always attentive to exploit weaknesses in the our imperfect immunity to it.
In other words, fascism resides within capitalism as a permanent possibility, not only as a rearguard to defend capitalist exploitation, but as a sort of illness, an ethical corruption, that seeps deeply into the social fabric. Anti-fascism can only then make sense as anti-capitalism, but anti-capitalism in the broadest sense possible; as the permanent struggle against not only capitalist social relations, but against the conditions that render those social relations possible: the hierarchical oppression and violent dispossession of what renders free, creative life possible.
We share below as one more and by no means final contribution to the understanding of fascism a chapter from Mark Bray’s Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, Melville House Publishing, 2017, and this with the recent French parliamentary elections in the background (elections in which the far right party Rassemblement National won the first round of the elections and threatened to win the elections overall, only to be cut short by a second round in which the left-wing coalition, the Nouveau Front populaire, garnered the largest popular vote).
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