Learning from the Flames

Posted on August 14, 2023 by Julius Gavroche

Reflections on the June 2023 revolt in France, from the CrimethInc. collective (09/08/2023) …

On June 2023, in the city of Nanterre, a suburb of Paris, police brutally murdered a teenager named Nahel Merzouk, continuing a pattern of post-colonial violence directed at a sector of the French population that is treated as second-class citizens. In response, thousands of people in the outlying banlieues of Paris and other French cities engaged in several days of pitched revolt, attacking town halls and police stations, looting shops, and defending themselves against the police. In the following reflection, a participant in the movements of recent years looks back on the revolt of June 2023 and the movements that preceded it, exploring the limits they reached and considering what it would take for them to bring about revolutionary transformation.

For further reflections on the same events, you could begin here.

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Mario Tronti: Through the imperative to understand

Posted on August 11, 2023 by Julius Gavroche
Mario Tronti (1931-2023)

The revolutions of the twentieth century did not fail because of their excessive rigidity, but because of their excessive suppleness: not by reason of their refusal of the late Modern, but because of their poor adaptation to it. The limit of the conservative revolution was to not have found an institution. One does not win, one does not resist, one does not even survive, without giving oneself a political form. Nazism destroyed the conservative revolution. The workers’ revolution found an institution, it made itself a party, without succeeding in making itself a State. It therefore tried to construct a new society without the State-form and to create a new man in the structure of the party. Violent coercion replaced the exercise of politics. Understand me well: it was socialism that vanquished the workers’ revolution.

…

Power is tied to human nature. Humankind cannot be what it is without the dimension of power, without exercising it or without bearing it. For this reason, potentiality/power is necessary in the face of power, a domination over power, a freedom within power. Power becomes necessary from the moment of the “fall”, freedom becomes possible from the moment of the “coming”. It is in the face of evil that one is free. There is no necessity for freedom in Eden; freedom becomes possible in the World. The political obligation, and at the same time, its refusal, is born with the expulsion from paradise. The Coming marks the passage from this refusal of possibility to reality.

…

To speak in the name of all, in a divided world, … amounts to idle prattle. To discover anew what our side is and to base oneself on it so as to construct our own partial point of view, or rather to redefine the partiality of the point of view and reconstruct, from that, the consistency, the force, the organised force, the potentiality/power, of a side? An impulse pushes me to choose the second option. Again: before the “what is to be done?”, “from where to begin?”

…

The overthrow of the present state of things, in the twilight of the West, has no “form”: it has no words in which to express itself, there are no actions by which it makes itself.

Mario Tronti, Dello spirito libero, 2015

For Mario Tronti, a short essay by him entitled A Message From the Emperor, published in Sidecar/NLR and an excellent testimonial essay by Gerardo Muñoz for Ill Will.

If Mario Tronti evinces an interest in intellectual-political figures and events that are less than obvious for many anarchists, the questions he raises through these points of reference are also central to anarchism: What remains of the “revolutionary working class”? Indeed, how is its “revolutionary” nature to be understood in relation to capitalism? What is “politics“? Is “democracy” the last horizon of political practice? What is the relationship between destituent revolutionary praxis and power, constitution, institutionalisation? What remains of revolution, or “anti-capitalism”, in the totalising reality of capital? And the questions multiply in the wake of the uncertainty of our times.

To read Tronti, is to set out on a difficult path of understanding, where questions multiply, without certain or fixed answers. “I must understand. That is the categorical imperative: not ethical but theoretical.” (Dello spirito libero)

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Mario Tronti: On destituent power

Posted on August 10, 2023 by Julius Gavroche

For Mario Tronti, from the Ill Will collective (22/05/2022) …

In his influential 2008 interview with Adriano Vinale, Mario Tronti provides some of the earliest speculations on the possibility of a destituent power. Below we present the first English edition of this influential document, bolstered by a substantial new introduction by Idris Robinson.

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Mario Tronti: “I am defeated”

Posted on August 9, 2023 by Julius Gavroche

For Mario Tronti, from Communists in situ; Italian original / Mar 3rd, 2015

Translated by Rees Nicolas

Under the soles of his shoes, you can still recognise the dirt of history. “This is all that remains. A mix of straw and shit by which we delude ourselves into erecting cathedrals to the worker’s dream.” Here’s a man, I say to myself, imbued with a consistency that bursts through in a total melancholy. It’s Mario Tronti, the most celebrated of the theorists of Operaismo. He has only recently finished writing a book on this subject: the origins of his thought, how it has changed and what it is today. I don’t know who will publish it (I would guess a decent publisher). I read a profound sense of despair. Like a chronicle of defeat articulated through the long agony of a past that has not yet passed at all, that refuses to die, but is no longer wanted.

“It’s the others who keep you going”, he says ironically. When life, if only, demands other trials, other choices. Perhaps it is for this reason – to find an escape – that he has distracted himself with Tai Chi: “the gestures of this oriental martial art reveal, in their slowness, a secret harmony. Everything is concentrated on respiration. I did it for a bit. With curiosity and attention. But in the end I realised I wasn’t good enough. Out of place. The orient requires a mindset that can create empty space [il vuoto]. I live in a house full of the things I’ve accumulated over time.

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Mario Tronti: “In art as in politics there is nothing other than struggle”

Posted on August 9, 2023 by Julius Gavroche
László Moholy-Nagy | Photogram, 1941

For Mario Tronti (from Blackout) …

Can you really be outside? This is the question I asked Mario the last time we talked (Francesco Matarrese | Greenberg and Tronti: Being Really Outside?). Today, the eighth of January, his important, extraordinary answer arrived. Now it is here, naturally, in the written struggle, in this paper.

In art as in politics there is nothing other than struggle

Can you really be outside? This is the question. I answer: yes. I am. I feel I am. For sensibility, even before for reason. This world, as it is, as it is historically organized and dominated, does not belong to me, it is not part of me, and therefore it is extraneous to me. I do not stop here. The fact is: I find, before me, a form of being in the world, which is also not metaphysical but historically determined, which demands and obtains a hostile relationship. This way of being, or this world of being, fights me, and I fight it. I am not subjected to the forms of struggle, I choose them: naturally as far as possible. And all my intellectual and practical efforts consist in increasing and possessing the sphere of possibilities. There is a change in the contingencies. And all depends on the power relationships. The “inside and against,” the labor that, from inside capital, had enough power to block the mechanism of its reproduction, describing a high level of struggle, and proposing the concrete utopia of putting the systemic organism into subjective crisis. All this is a past. It no longer affects the present. Is a utopian reading of the past possible? Benjamin showed that it is not only possible but necessary. I shall follow in this direction. With an addition. The past, which I feel has a name: the Twentieth Century—I always write my century in capitals, to mark its majesty—it is not the Edenic age that invokes nostalgia, but rather the epoch of maximum danger for the centuries-old order of dominion and exploitation. And I know, along with Hölderlin, that where danger is greatest, there is salvation. It is only from the disorder of the world of life that new skies and new earths, or rather new forms of life, can be born. The avant-gardes of the Twentieth Century are not neo-Romanticism, they are neue Revolution.

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For Mario Tronti (1931-2023)

Posted on August 9, 2023 by Julius Gavroche

For Mario Tronti, who died this last August 7th, we share a short text by Diego Sztulwark and Mario Tronti’s Thesis on Benjamin.

Today Mario Tronti passed away. His 92 years were many, but he will surely remain the author of Workers and Capital (Italy, 1966). In January 2001, Tronti wrote a reflection on those years in which an anti-bourgeois current, embedded in a revolution to modernise capital, seemed to be the “yes, this time” in history: a rupture and not the restructuring of capital. The spirit of innovation of those years came to break the air of “decline” of the time. And it was not surprising that this happened, if one takes into account that this “divided social form” that is capitalism is inevitably traversed by conflict and the will to integration (this phrase, applied to the Argentine labor movement, resonates with Resistance and integration, title of a great book by historian Daniel James on Peronism).

Antagonism and assemblage are operations that weave with a single thread, from within the opposition of classes. As Gilles Deleuze read it, the novelty of Workers and Capital resided in the – ontological – precedence of potentiality (Workers) over power (capital). Class antagonism changed its face when the perspective of labor struggles was adopted. Tronti seems to believe, in his last reflection, that the wheel of fortune turns under the weight of innovation in production – against the tradition of the political institution -, or that it stops catastrophically under the weight of repression, fetishism of the merchandise and the handling of technique. The methodological core of workerism consisted, for Workers and Capital, in displacing the point of view of the whole (that of capital) towards that of workers autonomy, registering in theory and in practice the centrality of the worker both in counter-culture and in production. The error of the workerism would have been its “orthodox Marxism” – in the sense of Lukács -, although recomposed from the experience of the factories of advanced capitalism.

From a distance, Tronti believes that he made a mistake in reducing the class struggle to direct antagonism. Fascinated by the best Marx, that of the critique of political economy, the workerists of the 1960s had overlooked the role of a decisive third term, without which capital would not have defeated the uprising of labor: the political. More than the defeat of a political collective, however, Tronti registers the demolition of the workers’ centrality itself, which was followed by the great project of capital to erase a proletarian memory. To the question of whether there is a legacy of the workerist tradition in a world that believes itself to be non-workerist, Tronti answers yes. A Benjaminian yes, with which we would like to remember him today. If workers autonomy was the current of Marxism that turned the partial view of the whole into a source of subversive subjectivation – producing a series of events that form the heritage of labor struggles – workers autonomy constitutes a world that cannot be canceled (and something of that we have managed to experience in our 2001 [in Argentina]), belonging only (in his words) “to all those subjected, to all those excluded, to all those dominated

Diego Sztulwark 07/08/2023 (Lobo Suelto)

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For Mário Cesariny

Posted on August 9, 2023 by Julius Gavroche

… true democracy will only be possible when all men are poets. But this … [is] … not democracy – but ANARCHY!

António Maria Lisboa, “Uma carta de António Maria Lisboa”, in Mário Cesariny, A Intervenção Surrealista

I believe in the unbelievable.

Pedro Oom, “O Sonhador Espacializado”, in Mário Cesariny, A Intervenção Surrealista

My name is tired of being written on the list of tyrants: condemned to death!
the days and nights of this century have screamed so much in my chest that there is a miraculous tree in it

Mário Cesariny, Autografia I

Today would be the 100th birthday of the Portuguese surrealist painter and poet, Mário Cesariny de Vasconcelos (August 9, 1923 – November 26, 2006). To celebrate the occasion, his art-life, and perhaps to modestly help to spread the word in the English speaking world, we share below a collection of poems (in Portuguese and English, and unless otherwise indicated, from Poem Hunter website), and interview and a brief biography by Richard Zenith.

Miguel Gonçalves Mendes dedicated a beautiful documentary film to Cesariny, entitled Autografia, released in 2004. The film is available on youtube, but exclusively in Portuguese. We nevertheless close with the film.

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The riot against State-forms: An anarcho-workerist hypothesis

Posted on July 31, 2023 by Julius Gavroche

“All reasoning about the future is criminal, because it prevents pure destruction, and interferes with the progress of revolution.”

Souvarine, from Émile Zola’s Germinal

In the wake of France’s July riots, an essay/reflection by Erwan Sommerer, inspired by a work by Nicola Massimo De Feo. (lundimatin #391, 11/07/2023)

Published in 2020 by Divergences, Contre la révolution politique [Against Political Revolution][1] by Nicola Massimo De Feo is a decisive book that brings together Italian workerism and Russian anarchism of the late 1860s. De Feo’s thesis is that the pamphlets resulting from the ephemeral collaboration between Bakunin and Nechayev, in particular the Revolutionary Catechism, deserve to be brought back to the forefront of anti-capitalist reflection after a long period of discredit: the primitive and brutal anarchism that we discover there, far from being the mark of a bygone era, on the contrary illuminates the contemporary conditions of revolutionary struggle and autonomy in a context of increased social disintegration, alienation and dehumanisation.

I would like to show here that this theoretical analysis finds an echo in the current riots. The aim is not to lay down an overarching or anachronistic exegetic grid on these revolts, nor to speak in the place of those who participate in them, but to propose some avenues for interpretation.

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France: Let there be order

Posted on July 31, 2023 by Julius Gavroche

… power is not defined only by its capacity to be obeyed but, first of all, by its capacity to give orders and commandments, even if those orders are not totally obeyed. A power does not fall when it is no more obeyed or completely obeyed, but when it ceases to give orders.

Giorgio Agamben, Che cos’è il commando?/ What is a commandment?

“The lesson I draw is order, order, order. Our country needs a return of authority at every level, and firstly in the family.” – French President Emmanuel Macron speaking in an a television interview, on July 24th, 2023 (Politico 24/07/2023)

“Knowing that he is in prison is stopping me from sleeping … In general, I believe that ahead of a possible trial, a police officer should not be in prison, even if he may have committed serious faults or errors in the course of his work.” – France’s national police chief Frederic Veaux in an interview for the newspaper Le Parisien, 23rd of July, 2023

The two statements, the second, from France’s police chief and the first, from the country’s President, coincide perfectly to reveal the nature of political power: to command, without justification, for the sake of commanding, or, inversely, the justification for commanding is to command.

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Rodrigo Karmy Bolton: The ashes of the Republic

Posted on July 14, 2023 by Julius Gavroche

Reflections on the French police murder of Nahel Merzouk and the country’s July riots, by Rodrigo Karmy Bolton. (Lobo Suelto! 11/07/2023)

What does it mean when France burns under barricades? Perhaps, that not only France but also the Republic, as a modern model of the political, is in ashes. Towards the end of the 18th century, the philosopher Immanuel Kant described the event of the French Revolution that had burst onto the threshold of history as follows: “”The revolution of a people full of spirit, which we have seen carried out in our days, may be successful or fail, then, perhaps, to be so full of miseries and cruelties, that a right-thinking man, who could hope to start it a second time, would not decide to undertake an experiment of such costs: such a revolution, I say nevertheless, finds in the the spirits of all the spectators – who are not themselves involved in the game – such a participation in desire, that it borders on enthusiasm even if its expression is dangerous; such, in short, that it can have no other cause than a moral disposition of the human race.” The revolution can bring infinite costs, spread blood throughout history, but in the “cheers of the spectators,” it finds the crucial “enthusiasm” for which, despite the danger it entails, “participation in desire” shows that its “cause” is nothing other than the “moral disposition of the human race”. The French Revolution brings with it hope in the midst of humanity traversed by despotisms. Spectators can watch a game that borders on enthusiasm to the extent that the modern notion of progress stands out in it. In the French Revolution, it allows us to contemplate precisely that it will be the “human race” that “progresses towards the better”. Although there are setbacks, the Revolution marks a before and an after in the story of human moralisation.

If in Kant the Revolution marks the era of moral progress, the contemporary riots that have set the streets of Paris on fire mark the debacle of that idea, the end of modernity as the era of progress. They are the denunciation that progress has been nothing more than a single catastrophe, as Walter Benjamin was able to indicate in the lucid fragments dedicated the concept of History. Progress was nothing more than the design of destruction, the total mobilisation by which the oligarchies that dominate the planet share out the spoils of humanity. The France of Kant, which offered a horizon of progress, is no longer our France: the modern utopia has been entangled in the paralysis of devastation.

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