For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn’t any other tale to tell, it’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness.
James Baldwin, Sonny’s Blues
For James Baldwin, his short story “Sonny’s Blues”, originally published in the Partisan Review (1957) and republished in Baldwin’s short story collection, Going to Meet the Man (1965).
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If the hope of giving
is to love the living,
the giver risks madness
in the act of giving.
Some such lesson I seemed to see
in the faces that surrounded me.
Needy and blind, unhopeful, unlifted,
what gift would give them the gift to be gifted?
The giver is no less adrift
than those who are clamouring for the gift.
If they cannot claim it, if it is not there,
if their empty fingers beat the empty air
and the giver goes down on his knees in prayer
knows that all of his giving has been for naught
and that nothing was ever what he thought
and turns in his guilty bed to stare
at the starving multitudes standing there
and rises from bed to curse at heaven,
he must yet understand that to whom much is given
much will be taken, and justly so:
I cannot tell how much I owe.
James Baldwin, The giver (for Berdis)
Freedom is not something that anybody can be given; freedom is something people take and people are as free as they want to be.
James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name (1961) ‘Notes for a Hypothetical Novel’
But I am really saying something very simple. The will of the people, or the State, is revealed by the State’s institutions. There was not, then, nor is there, now, a single American institution which is not a racist institution. And racist institutions – the unions, for one example, the Church, for another, and the Army – or the military – for yet another, are meant to keep the nigger in his place. […] A mob is not autonomous: it executes the real will of that people who rule the State. The slaughter in Birmingham, Alabama, for example, was not, merely, the action of a mob. That blood is on the hands of the state of Alabama: which sent those mobs into the street to execute the will of the State.
James Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket (1985)
August 2nd, 2024, marks the centenary of James Baldwin’s birth. And on this occasion, we celebrate his work, his written word, and the life, the many lives, that found expression in his words.
Our choice to do so may strike some as odd, for was it not Baldwin himself who wrote that my “life on the Left is of absolutely no interest” and it “did not last long”? (The Price of the Ticket, 1985) But then Baldwin adds, from that short lived experience, he at least learned “that it may be impossible to indoctrinate me” and we, like Baldwin, have no interest in the doctrinaire.
James Baldwin’s writing – his novels, essays, short stories, plays, poetry – speaks the truth of an experience, speaks “a truth to power”, that we – those of us who make up “Autonomies” – do not have and therefore only with difficulty are able to express. Baldwin’s writing takes “us” into a world that is and is not ours, that of the North American black man of the second half of the 20th century, pushing thereby against the limits of our senses, our thoughts, our imagination; inviting us to risk our “identities” and to share in the creation of worlds that begin from the suffering and violence of the past, so as to try to see with and beyond it, towards truthful freedom.
James Baldwin remains our contemporary, because the beauty and passion of his words continue to burn for us. And for anarchists, Baldwin forces “us” to see, as few others did and do, the complexity of oppression – with its racisms and xenophobias, sexisms and homophobias -, the difficult and complex place of religion in human self-consciousness – which thus calls for a re-examination of “traditional” anarchist anti-clericalism and atheism -, the place of past and present suffering for the articulation of a future -, thereby challenging simplistic celebrations of “progress”, and so much more.
We share below selections from his brilliant essay “Down at the Cross”, the transcript of his intervention at Cambridge University’s Union Hall, in a debate with William F. Buckley (1965), along with the video recording of the debate, the essay, “The White Man’s Guilt” (1965) and a selection of remarkable video recorded interviews and conversations with Kenneth Clark (1963), Nikki Giovanni (1971), Maya Angelou (1975), and the documentary-report on racism and segregation in San Francisco, “Take This Hammer” (1964). And we close with Toni Morrison’s obituary-tribute to James Baldwin (1987).
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From Freedom News (18/07/2024).
The Suiza 6 face three and a half years each for protesting outside their workplace
Union branches across Spain have denounced the Supreme Court’s confirmation of prison sentences against six bakery workers for picketing. The workers were sentenced to three and a half years in prison and a fine of over 100,000 Euro. The workers at La Suiza bakery in Gijón took action to protest unpaid overtime and poor working conditions.
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The soulevements de la terre continue …
From Freedom News (23/07/2024).
Struggle against hoarding of water by agro-industry sees five days of action, culminating in a 10,000-strong march on the commercial port of La Rochelle
The French environmentalist movement Soulevements de la Terre (Uprisings of the Land) is carrying on its campaign against mishandling of water resources. This phase of action began on July 16 with the “Village for Water and Land Defense“, a meeting bringing activists from around the world to discuss strategy. This assembly of culminated in two demonstrations of around 10,000 people on the July 19 and 20, despite severe repression by police including teargas, blockades, and police charges at protesters.
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From Freedom News (24/07/2024).
Ilya Shakursky was condemned to 16 years on trumped-up terrorism charges
Franz Kafka’s The Trial opens with the line, “Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., he knew he had done nothing wrong but, one morning, he was arrested.” Josef K. is subsequently thrown into a labyrinthian nightmare as he attempts to exonerate himself from an unnamed charge brought against him by a nonsensical shadowy court system. The lurid unreality of The Trial finds an all too real analogue in the ongoing systematic persecution and torture of anarchists and anti-fascists in today’s Russia.
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… state-ness is not a binary, where something is a state or not a state, but it’s a continuum. So, things that are more a state or less a state. […] My argument would be that when the state has done something emancipatory, e.g. citizenship, it is almost always done with a pistol at its temple. That is to say it has created new rights when it was threatened in a vital way. […] I think the state is with us as a ruling institution for the foreseeable future. The question is, can we domesticate that state, or will it domesticate us?
“Can we domesticate the state or will it domesticate us?” — James C. Scott Interview, In Pursuit of Development, 2021
In 2014 – and still in the warmth of the “Arab spring” and multiple “occupy” movements -, we posted a review of James C. Scott’s then recently published Two Cheers for Anarchism (Princeton University Press, 2012). The later was a kind of self-refection by Scott on his own politics, distilled from many years of anthropological work on “vernacular” resistance to State authorities by non-state actors.
At the time – and still today -, we consider Scott’s intellectual work of enormous importance and as we look back on it, we can only mourn his death, but also express our gratitude for his commitment to sharing so many of the stories of those who refused and created outside state power.
In our review of 2014, we criticised Scott’s Two Cheers (and it is “two cheers”, not “three“) for not taking his anarchism further, for not considering the possibility that his conceptual-empirical opposition between “vernacular” (the space of anarchist “infrapolitics”) and “official” spaces and practices could itself be overcome by a more radical (“anarchist”) transformation of society, creating thereby, in other words, a free, non-hierarchical, self-managed society.
Today, we are perhaps less sanguine about this issue, for if we imagine “anarchism” in the way that Scott did, then it becomes a permanent possibility and necessity against any emergent “official” politics. And if the latter is a constant risk – even after an “anarchist revolution”, then “anarchist” politics is the ever constant and lucid gesture of refusal.
Is this then no longer anarchism? We leave the question to ideological puritans.
Do you consider yourself an anarchist at this point? Is that a label you’ve taken on?
In a way, no other label works as well. It doesn’t work very well but it works better than anything else. If I had a pistol put to my temple and had to answer “what are you?” I’d say “anarchist” probably. It’s just a point of departure.
(Points of Resistance and Departure: An interview with James C. Scott)
In memory and celebration of James C. Scott’s life and work, we republish our review of his essay, Two Cheers for Anarchism.
This is then followed by internet sources where his work may be found, to interviews and a selection of video recorded lectures and interviews.
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… the fascist game can be played in many forms, and the name of the game does not change.
Umberto Eco
Umberto Eco’s essay, “Ur-Fascism” (The New York Review of Books, 22/06/1995) remains a significant text in the cartography of fascist politics. Recognising the diversity of “local characteristics” in the form, Eco nevertheless endeavours to distil a set of common features – fourteen – as symptomatic. And it is not difficult to see them at play today. The mistake would be to read in any one of these qualities some sort of timeless fascist essence, when in fact they “cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.”
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From the Verso Books Blog, 18/07/2024.
This essay is the third in a roundtable discussion of Alberto Toscano’s Late Fascism. The others, from Jordy Rosenberg and Lisa Lowe, can be found here and here.
What does the word “fascism” mean today, when fossil capitalism continues its accelerated march toward a climate catastrophe and the liberal democracies of North America and Europe support and arm Israel’s genocide of Palestinian people in Gaza? In his powerful book Late Fascism, Alberto Toscano offers us a conceptual and political diagnosis of the emergence in new form of old fascist desires and impulses, a phenomenon he names “late fascism.” Toscano’s main premise is as straightforward as it is crucial: that liberalism and fascism, rather than being polar opposites, have been profoundly entangled with each other in the history of racial capitalism. And he adds that what we call “fascism” cannot be reduced to the ideologies and political regimes that defined it in the Europe of the 1930s and 1940s because it is primarily a type of desire, an eros, or what I would call an affective disposition, a propensity to make the body act in a particular way. Toscano builds his persuasive argument through an extraordinary archival work that examines and rescues multiple, often forgotten genealogies of anti-fascist, Black, and anti-white supremacist thought and action, helping us appreciate the incredible intellectual work of our anti-fascist predecessors and the importance of their insights for understanding the rise of the neo-liberal fascisms of the twenty-first century.
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Fascism attempts to organise the newly proletarianised masses while leaving intact the property relations which the masses strive to abolish. Fascism sees its salvation in granting these masses not their rights, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have the right to change property relations; fascism seeks to give them expression while keeping these relations unchanged. The logical result of fascism is the aestheticising of political life.
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility
The fact of fascism, which has thrown the very existence of a workers’ movement into question, clearly demonstrates what can be expected from a timely recourse to reawakened affective forces. Unlike the situation during the period of utopian socialism, morality and idealism are no more the questions today than they are in fascist forms. Rather, an organized understanding of the movements in society, of attraction and repulsion, starkly presents itself as a weapon – at this moment when a vast convulsion opposes, not so much fascism to communism, but radical imperative forms to the deep subversion which continues to pursue the emancipation of human lives.
Georges Bataille
Georges Bataille reads fascism “psychologically” through the concepts of “homogeneity” and “heterogeneity”. Homogeneity refers to everything that is useful and that is grounded in commodity production, while heterogeneity points to what is in excess of the useful, the marginalised, the impure and the pure or sacred.
Fascism, for Bataille, is a political agency that is able to seduce and marshal the heterogeneity of the working classes – not as labour-power, but as what they are beyond proletarianisation – through the fusion of two powers: military and religious; a fusion effected through the heterogeneity of imperative sovereignty, embodied in the leader.
[And if today the “national-citizens” are no longer called to 1930s military style discipline, technologies of consumption-communication offer different modes of “fusion” and control, as we are surveilled and blinded by the flickering screens of algorithmic revelation.]
Yet Bataille also holds out the possibility of a subversive heterogeneity associated with an anti-fascism no longer reducible to merely ideological opposition, but one between heterogeneous forces that seek to enslave humanity and those that struggle for its emancipation. Bataille’s essay remains retains its urgency – however demanding it can be conceptually –, which is what has motivated our desire to share it, preceded a very good introduction to the essay by John Brenkman.
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James Baldwin: The Uses of the Blues
The title “The Uses of the Blues” does not refer to music; I don’t know anything about music. It does refer to the experience of life, or the state of being, out of which the blues come. Now, I am claiming a great deal for the blues; I’m using them as a metaphor—I might have titled this, for example, “The Uses of Anguish” or “The Uses of Pain.” But I want to talk about the blues not only because they speak of this particular experience of life and this state of being, but because they contain the toughness that manages to make this experience articulate. I am engaged, then, in a discussion of craft or, to use a very dangerous word, art. And I want to suggest that the acceptance of this anguish one finds in the blues, and the expression of it, creates also, however odd this may sound, a kind of joy. Now joy is a true state, it is a reality; it has nothing to do with what most people have in mind when they talk of happiness, which is not a real state and does not really exist.
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