The Romanian-born Hungarian philosopher and political activist Gáspár Miklos Tamás died this last January 15th. In three posts, we celebrate his discernment, his wisdom and his ethical-political engagements, regardless of whatever differences we may have with his work.
Below, a collection of video recorded interviews, along with links to three published interviews.
Continue reading
Eviction in progress in an occupied village in Germany against the coal industry. From lundi matin #366 (16/01/2023).
This morning, Wednesday January 11, around 9 a.m., hundreds of police cars surrounded a village occupied for almost 2 years in western Germany. Only a few metres from the camp, stands the open pit mine and its metal monsters gradually swallowing up agricultural land, villages, forests, for the benefit of the coal industry [1].
Continue reading
Giorgia Meloni, the leader of Italy’s far-right party, Fratelli d’Italia, spent years on the country’s political margins before she was elected Prime Minister last fall. In this interview, Enzo Traverso sheds light on the significance of her rise and what Fascism means in Italy today.
This interview appears on the Verso Books Blog and was originally published on September 28, 2022 by L’Obs.
Many questions are being asked about the nature of the formation that came out top in Italy’s right-wing coalition. Until four years ago, Fratelli d’Italia [Brothers of Italy], the party led by Giorgia Meloni, was marginal and attracted only those nostalgic for fascism. Italian historian Enzo Traverso is a specialist in totalitarianism, Nazism and anti-Semitism. His latest book, Revolution, An Intellectual History, was published by Verso in 2021.
What was your first reaction when the election results were announced?
To be indifferent would be irresponsible, I am very worried about what is happening in my country. But I can’t say that I am traumatised either. Like most Italians, I expected it. This result was anticipated months ago, it is the logical conclusion of a process whose beginnings go back a long way.
Continue reading
From the CrimethInc. collective (10/01/2023) …
Tracking the Rise of Fascism from the United States to Brazil
On January 8, 2023, far-right supporters of defeated former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro stormed government buildings in Brasília, apparently in grotesque imitation of the fiasco in which Donald Trump’s supporters did the same thing in Washington, DC on January 6, 2021. In the following report, our comrades in Brazil detail the trajectory leading up to these events and discuss the conundrums that opponents of fascism face in Brazil as a consequence.
Yesterday’s far-right incursion poses questions that anarchists and other anti-fascists must confront around the world.
Who is driving far-right efforts to escalate civil conflict and transform state institutions into a battlefield? While many in the United States have suggested the involvement of Steve Bannon, Brazil and Latin America in general have a long history of coups led by local military and right-wing forces and supported by centrists as well as conservatives within the United States government. Unlike Trump, Bolsonaro himself was absent from Brazil during the storming of the buildings, having fled before his presidential term ended. It is probably a mistake to reduce these events to the machinations of few autocrats.
Whoever was behind the incursion, why was the debacle of January 6, 2021 deemed successful enough to be worth repeating? Was the goal of the participants to seize power, to exert pressure on the incoming administration or provoke it into overreacting, to legitimize extra-legal tactics as a step toward building a fascist movement? Or is there no rational goal here, only the side effects of the campaign strategies of far-right demagogues, the increasing polarization of a fragmenting society, and the irresistible pull of memetic tactics?
How can the marginalized populations that are targeted by fascist movements mobilize to defend themselves without legitimizing the same institutions of state that both fascists and centrists employ against them? How can anarchists and others who are invested in profound social change prevent far-right “rebels” from monopolizing the way that the general public sees tactics that we, too, will need to use, albeit in pursuit of liberation?
We hope the following contribution will help our comrades to think through these questions.
Continue reading
Words of Ghassan Salhab, lebanese filmmaker and writer (from lundi matin #365 09/01/2023) …
What remains to be said or done once everything has been said, analysed, dissected of the humiliation that power and its mechanisms represent for everyone? From Beirut, Ghassan Salhab proposes to aim ever further, to clear a path towards the “improbable and last utopia”.
I want to compare a cloud
to a deer.
I can’t.
Over time the good lies
grow few.
Yannis Ritsos
What can still be said that hasn’t been said, repeated, written, rewritten? Where to draw from again? Every minute detail of our daily life, like every institutional or pseudo-institutional structure, or even traditional, customary one, whatever the scale, has been dissected, analysed and contextualized more than once. The different regimes of power that surround and enfold us, calibrate us, hold us, chain us, “here”, in our aberrant political-clannish-financial mess (we really do not know how to name it anymore), like everywhere else in this world, seem more than ever unshakable. Colossi with feet of clay, certainly; colossi nevertheless, always ready to crush, without the slightest hesitation. Are we to repeat this again and to look for a new angle, a new approach that can permanently shake (them) up? But when distress continues to gain ground, both individually and collectively, when it never stops screaming its name, when it makes of itself evermore an abyss, what is left if not the blows, whether they are heavy-handed, spectacular, or on the contrary, imperceptible, almost invisible, that is to say far from the media and social networks, far from any passing resonance? What remains if not acts without a future? What remains when the tomorrows are precisely no longer promises of anything, when the various powers play us realistically, pragmatically, fatalistically as far as they go, obviously exonerating themselves of all responsibility, continuing without shame to force the payment of all kinds of costs, even on those who are already paying the price? What remains when we see that this crisis is their godsend, that nothing stops the frantic trajectory of gains and profits (always finding new territories to draw from, pump, even hypothetically) , that the sums are more and more vertiginous, absurd?
Continue reading
To describe a sport as an art may appear to be exaggerated. And yet the mastery of sporting technique married to creative imagination does engender moments of artistry. And while this may not be analogous to the art of painting or sculpture or literature, those arts which are able to create for us a lasting and meaningful place, a home, beyond what we make as objects to be used and exhausted (Hannah Arendt), it can share with the performing arts the creation of moments which defy time.
It may be equally problematic for some that we celebrate the footballer Pelé’s artistry, both because, some would say, he is after all only a footballer and also a less than heroic figure politically. We leave the latter evaluations to the judges of moral rectitude. And for those who can see nothing more than “football” – the current commodified spectacle that passes for the game today (as so much else) – in Pelé’s play, we cannot not pretend to cure the blind.
And as for Pelé the “historical” figure, he was both the agent and the offering to the transformation of football into a global spectacle. The young, poor black Brazilian rising up from misery through skill and creativity is a story that moved many, millions even, both inside Brazil and beyond. And his transformation into something more than just Pelé is also part of the story that has only just recently displayed itself in the obscene spectacle of wealth and power that was the Qatar-Fifa World Cup.
For Pelé, or for those who grew up with his art, we share the words of the writer Eduardo Galeano and the words and music of Gilberto Gil, Jackson do Pandeiro, Caetano Veloso, Chico Buarque and Pelé with Elis Regina.
Sabotage as a form of revolt is as old as human exploitation.
Emile Pouget, Sabotage
Sabotage is to this class struggle what the guerrilla warfare is to the battle. The strike is the open battle of the class struggle, sabotage is the guerrilla warfare, the day-by-day warfare between two opposing classes.
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Sabotage
Revolt thus begins as the affirmation of contingency, as an urge to test things by trying to break them.
We share below two articles from the lundi matin collective covering examples of sabotage, or of “eco-sabotage”, in france, via the Inhabit: Territories collective, responsible for the translation of the pieces into english.
Preface
We are excited to publish this pair of report-backs and analyses of recent actions by our friends in the movement for environmental justice in France. They strike us as an exhilarating example of all that has gone well in the movement up until this point and chart a path forward we hope others can imagine walking themselves.
Continue reading
We share below a reflection on and, in its own way, a testimonial of the Syrian revolution, by Catherine Coquio (Lundi Matin #137, March 12, 2018). This is followed by a more recent video recorded interview with her (in french), for the same collective (Lundi Matin #362, December 5, 2022).
On December 14 and 15, 2017, the symposium “Syrie: à la recherche d’un monde/Syria: in search of a world” was held at the University of Paris-Diderot. In order to continue the debate opened by our previous articles and in particular those of Sarah Kilani and Thomas Moreau, we publish the transcription of the brilliant intervention of Catherine Coquio, professor of comparative literature.
“Of what good is the world still?” nihilism, naivety, negation[1]
Only artists continue to believe in the world: the persistence of the work of art reflects the persistent character of the world. They cannot afford to be strangers to the world.
Hannah Arendt[2]
Behind the three grand words of my title, I would like to talk about the world as belief, but by going about it in reverse order, by talking about nihilism and negation. On “naivety”, and about the quotation, I will explain myself. I could have started with another quotation: “Do not waste the blood of martyrs”. This phrase, which I heard for the first time in 2014 in the film Homs, chronicle of a revolt, by Talal Derki, was pronounced by Abdel Basset Sarout, a young footballer who became an activist, then a warrior in the bombarded city of Homs. He utters this sentence repeatedly while he is injured on a stretcher amidst the rubble, with his foot torn up. It was in the spring of 2012. The young man, who was singing songs of freedom at the top of his voice alongside Fadwa Souleiman[3] at that moment, was sobbing.
Continue reading
On the mutation of desire
Franco “Bifo” Berardi
(Nero 15/12/2022 – Lobo Suelto! 23/12/2022)
I started reading Félix Guattari in 1974. I was in a barracks in southern Italy, when military service was compulsory for young men of sound mind and body, but serving the country soon irritated me, and I was looking for a way out when a friend suggested that I read that French philosopher who recommended madness as a way to escape.
Continue reading
Gáspár Miklós Tamás: Between Rousseau and Marx
… what happens if one seriously tries to complete Marx’s project of developing, as he put it in an early essay, a “ruthless critique of everything that exists.” The likely result is a picture of the world so relentlessly bleak that in the end, criticism itself comes to seem pointless.
David Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value
In a excellent essay entitled Telling the truth about class, Gáspár Miklós Tamás argues that the Left carried within itself two contradictory and incompatible ways of reading of capitalism: a Rousseauian egalitarianism critical of caste hierarchies in the name of the people, judged morally superior (for a number of different and overlapping reasons) and a Marxist socialism critical of capitalism as an alienated form of commodity-value production through which social classes (the proletariat and the bourgeoisie) are generated and which socialism must aspire to overcome and destroy.
Continue reading →