France: The desire for revolution

Posted on April 8, 2023 by Julius Gavroche

Every revolution begins when Society has outgrown the view of life on which the existing forms of social life were founded, when the contradictions between life such as it is, and life as it should be, and might be, become so evident to the majority that they feel the impossibility of continuing existence under former conditions. The revolution begins in that nation wherein the majority of men become conscious of this contradiction. As to the revolutionary methods these depend on the object towards which the revolution tends.

Leo Tolstoy, The End of the Age (1906)

April 6th marks another day of protest in france (paris-luttes.info), against the proposed pension reform, against Macron, against … the reign of those who or that which would reduce all that is to disposable commodities.

From pari-luttes.info (04/04/2023), a call to be ungovernable …

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A Coup d’État in Israel?

Posted on March 29, 2023 by Julius Gavroche

From the CrimethInc. collective (27/03/2023) …

A Coup d’État in Israel?: The Bitter Harvest of Colonialism

On Sunday, March 26, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu fired his defense minister in an attempt to consolidate power over the country, precipitating spontaneous mass demonstrations. On March 27, facing the prospect of a general strike, he agreed to delay his effort to push through a judicial reform that will centralize control in his hands. In return for that concession, he gave his extreme-right minister of internal security—the convicted terrorist Itamar Ben-Gvir—permission to establish a militia under his own authority. In other words, having gained control of the government but not yet of the streets, the reigning far-right coalition is buying time to figure out how to suppress popular unrest while intensifying the persecution of Palestinians.

These are just the latest developments in a struggle that has been escalating for months, pitting various sectors of Israeli society against each other. The outcome will impact everyone, but the Palestinians will suffer most of all, no matter which side comes out on top: if the liberal protest movement wins, the prevailing apartheid regime will be perceived as more legitimate, whereas if Netanyahu and Ben-Gvir win, the situation will become even more deadly and dehumanizing for Palestinians. In the following analysis, our correspondent shows how this crisis has emerged out of a conflict between competing elites and their respective colonial models.

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France: The struggle for a water commons

Posted on March 28, 2023 by Julius Gavroche

From lundimatin #376, 27/03/2023 …

What Happened at Sainte-Soline

200 injured, 40 seriously injured, one person between life and death

The rally against the mega-[water] reservoir of Sainte-Soline should have been festive. The defenders of water, who came by the tens of thousands, were to join together to march to the absurd crater, symbol of the monopolisation by a few of a “common good”. There had been threats from the police prefecture, the ban on gathering there and the deployment of 3,200 police agents. Like the previous time, on October 29 and 30, we were counting on the audacity, cunning and inventiveness of the movement to thwart the ridiculous police siege of a hole. Three processions and their totems set off, turquoise eels, yellow otters, pink bustards. If it was a real, life-size game, everyone knew that it would be necessary to thwart the police apparatus, in places to pierce it. Everyone thought that victory was a given; how could 30,000 determined people be prevented from reaching their objective, to penetrate the empty but meaningful crater? No one thought that the state would be ready execute any violence and brutality to save face, to defend the hole. In 1 hour and 30 minutes, 4000 munitions were fired: tear gas grenades, dispersing grenades, rubber bullets. 200 people were injured, 40 seriously, 2 in neuro-surgical resuscitation, including one between life and death.

This article will be updated as the day progresses. Below, the press release from the friends of S. whose life is at risk, the testimony of Layla Staats Mohawk present in Sainte-Soline to defend water, a press release from the Confédération Paysanne, the Soulèvements de la Terre and Bassines Non Merci which refutes one by one the lies of the prefecture as to the course of events Saturday. The testimony of an emergency doctor present at the event is also available here.

[For more news from English language sources on the struggle over mega-water reservoir infrastructure, see Unicorn Riot and La Via Campesina]

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France: Crowds against Pathology

Posted on March 26, 2023 by Julius Gavroche

From the Ill Will collective comes a translation of a short text by Josep Rafanell i Orra on the protests against pension reform in france (23/03/2023) …

Crowds against Pathology

That the president of any republic would invoke Gustave Le Bon (of whom Mussolini was an attentive reader) to justify his idea of politics is strictly speaking a matter of psychopathology. Certainly, we’re dealing with a rather unsavory character — rarely has a president been so hated, inspired such a level of contempt. It is true that the crowds of people who rise up against him see him only as a madman, surrounded by lackeys who patiently wait for their moment of fortune. Certainly, his endless posturing and jeremiads only inspire deeper disgust.

But all this is no longer the point. Macron confronts us today as the quintessential Republican. And French republican institutions, since their origins, have served as a permanent machinery of counter-insurrection. Yes, the republican institution and its constitutions were created against the communards. Yes, the French police force is itself republican (this was already the dictum under Pétain). Yes, the republican government can therefore exercise its violence through its police force, which forms the intermediary body between the crowd and power, a power that continues to be founded upon a French arch? deeply anchored in the monarchic matrix, embellished with every manner of courtesan folklore.

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France: The Movement against the Pension Reform

Posted on March 26, 2023 by Julius Gavroche

From the CrimethInc. collective (22/03/2023) …

France: The Movement against the Pension Reform – On the Threshold of an Uprising?

In France, a new surge of protest activity has erupted against the government of Emmanuel Macron in response to an unpopular pension reform. This promises to be the most powerful unrest in France since the Yellow Vest movement. In the following introduction and translation, we explore the roots, forms, and prospects of this movement.

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Giorgio Agamben: Political power and anarchy

Posted on March 20, 2023 by Julius Gavroche
René Magritte, Golconda

In a series of four short essays – in some sense, a summary of much more extensive earlier work -, Giorgio Agamben unveils the anarchy that lies at the centre of sovereign, political power, split between the constitution/state and the government/administration; an anarchy unveiled in the permanent state of exception of our times.

It is not then the task of “anarchism”, or of anarchy, to affirm one side of this duality against the other – for example, the “administration of things” against the state -, but to free anarchy from its capture by the political machine.

The two faces of power

All research on politics is flawed by a preliminary terminological ambiguity, which condemns those who undertake it to misunderstanding. Be it the passage from the third book of the Politics in which Aristotle, at the time of “investigating the politeiai, to determine their number and qualities”, peremptorily states: “since politeia and politeuma mean the same thing and politeuma is the supreme power of the cities (to kyrion ton poleon), it is necessary that the supreme power be either one or a few or the many” (1279 a 25-26). The current translations say: “since constitution and government mean the same thing and government is the sovereign power of the cities…”. Regardless of whether this translation is more or less correct, from it emerges what could be described as the amphibology of perhaps the most fundamental concept of our political tradition, which is presented now as a “constitution”, now as a “government”. In a kind of vertiginous contraction, the two concepts are identified and at the same time differentiated, and it is precisely this equivocation that defines, according to Aristotle, the kyrion, sovereignty.

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In solidarity with Vio.Me: An occupied, workers’ self-managed factory

Posted on March 16, 2023 by Julius Gavroche

VIOME IS IN DANGER!

CALL TO ACTION DURING THE INTERNATIONAL WEEK OF SOLIDARITY #defendViome

For a decade now, VIOME has been the only self-managed factory in Greece, where workers control the production process. It is a node in the ongoing global struggle for rebellious dignity against the capitalist onslaught that sweeps across the planet: from Rojava to Chiapas, from the Yellow Vests in France to Black Lives Matter in the USA, from the occupied factories in Argentina to the landless movements in Brazil and South Africa, from the uprisings in Iran and Chile to struggles everywhere against the privatization of the commons and the pillaging of nature.

Ten years ago, VIOME workers started producing eco-friendly cleaning products in the factory that their bosses had abandoned. Against the attacks of the state and capital, VIOME fought back and survived thanks to the support of a huge wave of solidarity that was expressed on a global scale.

The occupied factory became a crucial space for struggle, creation, and culture: autonomous markets, worker coordination from recovered factories, and cooperative projects from all over the world, the first workers’ clinic in Greece, festivals, visual interventions, theatrical performances, film screenings, concerts, political discussions, solidarity actions for refugees and immigrants.

What has happened?

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Édouard Jourdain: The savage and the political

Posted on March 15, 2023 by Julius Gavroche

Over a series of video recorded interviews, the lundimatin collective has recently engaged with a number of writers to explore the relationships between philosophy, anthropology and anarchism. The series began with Catherine Malabou and her critical reflection on the fragility or absence of any serious philosophical inquiry into anarchism – while some later 20th century philosophers gave considerable attention to the concept of anarchy. With the intuition that anthropology could provide a missing link between the two, the collective then set out to interview anthropologists or writers, philosophers, who work at the borders of anthropology. These include Jean Vioulac (of the series, the only interview recorded only in text), Barbara Glowczewski, Nastassja Martin, Philippe Descola and Alessandro Pignocchi, Patrice Maniglier. And the most recent interview of the series is with Édouard Jourdain (lundimatin, #374, 14/03/2023).

The interviews are in french, but the significance of the effort is such that we felt that the possible language barrier was not reason enough to not try to share something of what has been registered and we can only commend the lundimatin collective for this endeavour.

Below, we share the last interview with Édouard Jourdain (an author who, among other things, has written extensively on Pierre-Joseph Proudhon), along with a translation of a review-summary of his recently published essay that is the occasion for the interview: Le Sauvage et le Politique, PUF, 2023.

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Annie Le Brun: For a communism of darkness

Posted on March 11, 2023 by Julius Gavroche
Toyen, Der Paravent, 1966

A secret harmony exists between the earth and the peoples whom it nourishes, and when reckless societies allow themselves to meddle with that which creates the beauty of their domain, they always end up regretting it. In places where the land has been defaced, where all poetry has disappeared from the countryside, the imagination is extinguished, the mind becomes impoverished, and routine and servility seize the soul, inclining it toward torpor and death.

Élisée Reclus, The Feeling for Nature in Modern Society

… the system of unlimited competition … is after all nothing but a continuous implacable war.

William Morris, Art Under Plutocracy

In fact, it is war, a war that has been going on for a long time, a war that unfolds on all levels, a war without frontiers. It is an escalating war that worsens as the anonymity of power increases its strength along with the weakness of those who oppose it.

For many, they have seen but the fire. The majority ignore even that they are the actors of this strange, ongoing struggle between what is shown, what is not and what must not be. … It would be too easy to conclude that there is a war of representation, while this is only one of the aspect of a proteiform struggle, of which the breadth and complexity paradoxically succeeds at dissimulating its existence.

For I could just as well speak of a war against silence, of a war against attention as well as a war against sleep, or again of a war against tedium, of a war against reverie. But also and above all, of a war against passion. In other words, of a war waged against everything “that nothing of value can be extracted from”. (Jonathan Crary. 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep)

Annie Le Brun, Ce qui n’a pas de prix

A recent video interview with Annie Le Brun for the lundimatin collective is the occasion to return to her critical work. Below, we share this interview, followed by a second for Le Média, and an excerpt from her essay, Ce qui n’a pas de prix, translated from the french by the NOT BORED! collective.

A beautiful documentary film by Valérie Minetto and written by Minetto and Cécile Vargaftig dedicated to Annie Le Brun entitled, L’échappée, à la poursuite d’Annie Le Brun (2014) (and in this case, with english language subtitles), is well worth the viewing and is available on Vimeo.

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Giorgio Agamben: On Anarchy Today

Posted on March 8, 2023 by Julius Gavroche
Photograph by Francesca Pompei, from the series The women of Rebibbia. Walls of stories, 2019

Below, we share Giorgio Agamben’s recent essay On Anarchy Today, whose english language translation by the ill will collective was generously shared with us by the same.

Giorgio Agamben conceives the “place” of anarchy as lying and maintaining the distance or non-coincidence between government and administration – a tertium, as he calls it in the essay below. If historical anarchism defended the administration of things against the state or state government (e.g., Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s “administration of things” against the “government of men”), it perhaps failed to see in the former a kind of governmentality that can only function with a state; that the state works through the apparatuses of governmentality, and that without these last, the state is impotent, an infinitely distant “first mover” that exists only at the level of ideas.

Anarchy then is the undifferentiated space of the non-coincidence of these two poles of power; an undifferentiated space where the sovereign is profaned and the pulls and pulleys of government are suspended, rendering other possibilities, other ways of life, possible as possibilities.

But what is this tertium? Is it even something that can be grasped in answer to a question about what it is? Agamben speaks about it as a form of life where the form of life and naked life coincide in a potentiality that aspires not to command or to ground itself, but to exist-live in a form that may always be otherwise, or simply not be.

How this “anarchy” might translate into an “anarchism”, or whether “anarchism” remains a possibility (it would be an “anarchism” without transgression, without revolution) , is a question we leave unanswered.

On Anarchy Today

Giorgio Agamben

Other languages: Español, Italiano

If, among those who think about politics, anarchy has never ceased to be relevant, given that it constitutes its extreme focal or vanishing point, it is so additionally today given the unjust and vicious persecution to which an anarchist is being subjected by the Italian prison system. However, to speak of anarchy, as one has had to do, on the plane of law necessarily implies a paradox, for it is contradictory (to say the least) to demand that the state recognize the right to deny the state, just as, if the right of resistance were to be carried to its ultimate conclusions, one cannot reasonably demand that the possibility of civil war be legally protected.

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