As a person, I pay for what I say. … Refusal has always been a very important act carried out by saints and hermits but also by intellectuals. The very few people who made history are those who said no, not the courtesans and the cardinals’ assistants.
Pier Paolo Pasolini, from an interview with L’Unità interview, 01/11/1975
This is the fifth of a short series that we dedicate to the memory of Chile’s revolutionaries on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the 1973 military coup d’état against the Chilean revolution and the government of Salvador Allende.
The words “there is no revolution without song” are Salvador Allende’s and they point to the profound relationship between what is typically referred to as “political revolution” and “artistic revolution”; or stated differently, any revolution is an eruption of creativity which manifests itself in all spheres of life – spheres whose borders wane and abate in the very process of revolution -, including in what is formally called art.
This is the fourth of a short series that we dedicate to the memory of Chile’s revolutionaries on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the 1973 military coup d’état against the Chilean revolution and the government of Salvador Allende.
A story is told of Salvador Allende, and by him, that as a young man and student in Valparaíso, Chile, he would seek the company after school of an old Italian anarchist and shoe maker, Juan Demarchi, from whom he received his first political education. However fanciful the story is, it does reveal the significance of anarchism and the anarchist movement in the country’s political imaginary, so much so, that it has even been suggested that anarchism was the source of Allende’s own understanding of “popular democracy”.
Human cost: Political prisoner executed after the coup
We share below anarticle debunking myths about Chilean dictator General Pinochet’s supposed “economic miracle.”
This is the third of a short series that we dedicate to the memory of Chile’s revolutionaries on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the 1973 military coup d’état against the Chilean revolution and the government of Salvador Allende.
From Black Flag 216, published in 1999and shared by libcom.org.
Anatomy of an Economic Miracle
With the arrest of General Pinochet, the usual slime of the right pronounced that his dictatorship created an economic “miracle.” We will ignore the “ends justify the means” argument along with the question of why these defenders of “liberty” desire to protect a dictator and praise his regime. Here we concentrate on the facts of the “miracle” imposed on the Chilean people.
Each government is supported by the armed men, ready to execute its will by force, – the class of people, raised to kill everybody who their superiors order to kill. They are the police and, primarily, the army. The army is nothing more than a collection of disciplined killers. Its training is the training of its murderers; its victories are murders. The army always stood and now stands at the heart of the power. The power was always in the hands of those who commanded the army; and always all rulers, from the Roman Cesar to Russian and German Emperors, are preoccupied chiefly with the army. First and foremost, the army supports the outer power of the government. It does not allow the power to be taken from it by another government. War is nothing more than a dispute between several governments about the authority over the subordinates. In the sight of such meaning of the armies, each state is brought to the need to increase its troops; and increasing the troops is contagious, as already one hundred and fifty years ago noticed Montesquieu. But when people think that the government keeps the army only for the protection against external attacks, they forget that the troops governments need primarily for self-defense against their own suppressed and enslaved citizens.
Leo Tolstoy, Superstition of the State (1910)
There’s no new revolutionary subject whose emergence had eluded observers. So if it’s said that the “people” are in the streets it’s not a people that existed previously, but rather the people that previously were lacking. It’s not the people that produce an uprising, it’s the uprising that produces its people, by re-engendering the shared experience and understanding, the human fabric and the real-life language that had disappeared.
The Invisible Committe, To our friends (2014)
This is the second of a short series that we dedicate to the memory of Chile’s revolutionaries on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the 1973 military coup d’état against the Chilean revolution and the government of Salvador Allende.
Patricio Guzmán’s film The Battle of Chile, a three part portrait/chronicle of the revolutionary process that swept the country both before and during the presidency of Salvador Allende’s government and the military coup that destroyed it in 1973, is an extraordinary testimony of the political creation of a people. As Allende is filmed saying, before a massive demonstration in Santiago in defence of his government: “Aqui se siente la historia”/”Here one feels history”. And yet this “history” was never (and never is) singular; it was shot through with tensions, conflicts, that were addressed and worked through, always with uncertainty, in multiple ways.
This September 11th marks the 50th anniversary of the military coup d’état against the government of Salvador Allende. We mark the event in memory of all of those who both within and outside the political institutions of Allende’s “democratically elected”, “socialist” government heroically endeavoured to create a more free, equal and just society, a society in which power was to be exercised by the workers, against the desires and interests of the ruling classes.
If the meaning and achievement of “workers’ power” would be disputed and contested throughout Allende’s reign, within the “Left” – and for those of the omniscient, ideological “Left”, Allende’s errors and his final fall could have been predicted immediately and was perfectly explained in hindsight -, the passion and dedication with which so many embraced a “revolution” was and remains exemplary.
Such enthusiasm cannot be filtered through any ideology, or explained away and evaluated by measures of success and failure, or reduced to cartographies and plans for successful revolutions, however flawed or blind it may reveal itself to be. It was in that enthusiasm that people gave themselves over to create “popular power”/”criar poder popular”.
After the coup, many of those who had given so much would be arrested, tortured, disappeared and killed in the subsequent violent repression of the “revolutionary process”.
The decade we have left behind, the 2010s, was described by the British journalist Paul Mason as a time where “it’s kicking off everywhere.” What began with the Arab Spring protests in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and elsewhere, against the dictatorial regimes that ran those countries and in favor of democratic reforms, then followed with anti-austerity protests in Greece, Spain and Portugal, and in the form of movements like UK Uncut or the 15M in Madrid.
One historical re-telling might then say there was an ‘electoral turn,’ as these movements helped pave the way for the success of Left populist parties and candidates: from Podemos and Syriza to the campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn. We can also speak of a wave of climate protests, from the youth-led school strikes to the movement for a Green New Deal. Most recently, there was another wave of Black Lives Matter protests, which mobilized over twenty-five million people across the United States, with many solidarity protests around the world.
However, the years since 2020 have seen a decline of the Left in America. With the election of Joe Biden, there seems to be a lull in more oppositional forms of protest. It’s within this context that I thought it important to return to one of the movements which kicked off the previous decade: Occupy Wall Street.
I recently sat down for an interview with Matt Peterson, a filmmaker, archivist, and political activist with a history across many radical spaces around New York City. He was active in the occupation movements at the New School for Social Research and Occupy Wall Street and is currently a member of the Woodbine collective in Ridgewood, Queens.
A decade after Zuccotti Park was occupied in New York’s Financial District, what does this experience tell us about our current horizons? From all we’ve seen, from Bernie Sanders’s second failed presidential campaign and the explosive George Floyd Uprising, what might the next spontaneous American social movement look like?
To engage with these questions through Occupy, we must first date it properly. While the ‘official’ occupation of the park was evicted in November 2011, the movement had an afterlife. In 2012, the momentum of Occupy would carry through into two events: the attempted May Day General Strike, and Hurricane Sandy’s arrival to the city on October 29th. Each of these affected how the movement was remembered, especially Sandy, which decisively transformed Occupy into a disaster relief platform.
In effect, we can see these events as forming the beginning of a trajectory of a ‘long Occupy’— a horizon far longer and far broader than the initial occupation. We can draw a line from Zuccotti Park to a number of other organizational forms, including the two iterations of Black Lives Matter protests, the Standing Rock occupations in 2016,[1] as well as projects like Mutual Aid Disaster Relief (MADR) and other spontaneously organized response efforts during the pandemic.
It is also important to acknowledge the entrance of ‘Occupiers’ into mainstream politics, through the creation of progressive grassroots projects like the Fight for $15,[2] as well as the elections of activists like Sandy Nurse to New York’s City Council.[3] We could also point to global uprisings like the protests in Istanbul’s Taksim Square or the Brazilian fare protests. In all this we see a continuous thread: a generation developing skills and competencies to build autonomy.
While it began in Zuccotti Park, Occupy had many manifestations, from Seoul to London, and from Oakland to Washington DC. Our interview will focus on the New York Occupy and try to draw out the threads we take to be implicit in these experiences.
We continue to share material by and about the work of Mario Tronti, in the wake of his recent death. We share a short but excellent essay by Mårten Björk on the trajectory of Tronti’s thought (from NLR/Sidecar 25/08/2023).
Embracing Failure
Mario Tronti, who died earlier this month at the age of 92, was best-known as the author of Workers and Capital (1966). Consisting mostly of essays written in the first half of the sixties, his magnum opus was the most influential text of operaismo, the theoretical current that was then emerging in Italy amid a wave of labour militancy and factory occupations. ‘Workerism’, in the approximate translation, placed renewed emphasis on working-class struggle and consciousness. Foregrounding the primacy of labour in capitalist accumulation, the operaisti argued that the principal focus of Marxism should be not the abstract laws of capital, but workers themselves, without whom capitalism cannot function and who ‘push capitalist production forward from within’. In the bold vision of operaismo, workers act and capital adapts. ‘We too saw capitalist development first and the workers second’, Tronti wrote in ‘Lenin in England’, his editorial in the inaugural issue of Classe Operaia, a journal he co-founded in 1963. ‘This is a mistake. Now we have to turn the problem on its head, change orientation, and start again from first principles, which means focusing on the struggle of the working class.’
Ilya Repin’s Religious Procession in Kursk Province
Justice consists in seeing that no harm is done to men. Whenever a man cries inwardly: “Why am I being hurt?” harm is being done to him. He is often mistaken when he tries to define the harm, and why and by whom it is being inflicted on him. But the cry itself is infallible.
Simone Weil, La Personne et le sacré
Leo Tolstoy’s anarchism is grounded in a religious universalism in which God is identified with love for one’s fellows. The denial of this universalism, its distortion in the religious justification of hierarchical authority, is the root of all violent oppression and slavery.
The latter cannot be addressed by merely changing social and economic arrangements – the illusion of political reformers and revolutionaries –, but only by a radical transformation of human “spirituality”. If this last word is difficult for the agnostic and atheistic – especially among anarchists opposed to all religion –, it is for these political reformers to demonstrate that their proposed changes will not imply violence in turn. Should they do so, then it is difficult to see in what way their celebrated ends will not be undermined and corrupted by the means employed; indeed, it would appear to be difficult how they will not in turn fall to the siren calls of violence.
But what of Tolstoy’s “God” – whom he so often identifies with an original Christianity –, must one embrace it? Without wishing to deny Tolstoy’s own convictions on the matter, pointing as they do to the necessity of belief in a divine source of life, his “moral universalism” points to what Simone Weil described as the impersonal in all ethical engagements. Ethics grounded in a “respect for the person” or for the law will always be conditional, justifying thereby all manner of exceptions; exceptions that are for their part reflective of or grounded in the violence of power.
“So far from its being his person, what is sacred in a human being is the impersonal in him. Everything which is impersonal in man is sacred, and nothing else.” (Simone Weil, La Personne et le sacré)
How we understand this sacred, or what Weil also calls the supernatural, or that Tolstoy calls love and God, remains open, but that it should not be merely set aside by atheistic reflexes seems obvious.
We share below Leo Tolstoy’s eloquent and still timely essay, “Must it be so?”.
The following is a statement collaboratively written and endorsed by anarchist organizations around the world. This statement originally appeared on Anarkismo.net and is reproduced here in full.
International anarchist solidarity call
Our anarchist comrades are still in Sudan and were hoping to be able to continue their agitation activities there clandestinely. We provided financial aid before the war and even at the beginning. But the situation has become untenable and no longer allows for any social or political activity. Some members of the group decided to leave the country as quickly as possible after their house was ransacked by the RSF. Others have decided to stay for the time being, and we are trying to help them too.
The world is on fire. The climate crisis is getting worse and worse. Instead of masks against Covid-19, people now have to wear masks against smoke from forest fires. At the same time huge areas getting flooded due to heavy rain caused by the ongoing pollution of the environment. Nothing of that is caused by individual decisions of the people. It is not cause by buying the wrong product in the supermarket. It is caused by the systematic exploitation of nature and humanity. Governments and big corporations are the ones steering us into a climate catastrophe that, at this point, seems to be unstoppable.
Governments and big corporations that created a world where wealthy people are more important than others. This was especially visible while the global media had nothing better to do than talking for 5 days about a missing submarine filled with 5 rich people, while hundreds of others are dying in the mediterranean sea during their try to get chances for a better life.
Extreme right, conservative and authoritarian politics are increasing all around the world. Some use it to start Wars and kill thousands of people, some build fences and guard what they think is their property and others use it to arm up in the digital world. Surveillance is increased and the states are leaping more and more into our private spaces, analyzing our private conversations and collecting data about us with a depth of detail we could never have imagined. The tools of the states to crush resistance, crush even the idea of fighting the system, are sharpened with every minute. Many anarchists, anti-authoritarians, environmental activists, and antifascist around the world face repression because acting anonymous in a digitalized world is as difficult as never before.
With all the obstacles put into our way during the struggle for a better world, anarchist ideas and values remain important. In times of crisis methods of collective organizing, mutual aid and the principle of solidarity start to shine. The system will fall apart and we should get ready to take back a world that was stolen by companies, yacht owners and the war industry. A world that was meant for everyone. And while our friends are put behind bars and states try to hide them in the darkest corners of their prisons, we will not hold still but fight till they are free again.
Let’s break out together! That is why we are calling again for International Week of Solidarity with Anarchist Prisoners. Do some action of solidarity! Write letters, organize speeches or film screenings, make our comrades visible on the streets with a banner drop or a graffiti and let them show that they are in our hearts and that we are fighting together.
Let’s remember those who fought against this injustice and payed with their lives. No one is free, till all are free!
Chile: “no hay revolución sin canciones”
As a person, I pay for what I say. … Refusal has always been a very important act carried out by saints and hermits but also by intellectuals. The very few people who made history are those who said no, not the courtesans and the cardinals’ assistants.
Pier Paolo Pasolini, from an interview with L’Unità interview, 01/11/1975
This is the fifth of a short series that we dedicate to the memory of Chile’s revolutionaries on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the 1973 military coup d’état against the Chilean revolution and the government of Salvador Allende.
The words “there is no revolution without song” are Salvador Allende’s and they point to the profound relationship between what is typically referred to as “political revolution” and “artistic revolution”; or stated differently, any revolution is an eruption of creativity which manifests itself in all spheres of life – spheres whose borders wane and abate in the very process of revolution -, including in what is formally called art.
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