From the newspaper El Salto Diario, an article by Pedro Castrillo (30/11/2022).
Alfredo Cospito, an Italian anarchist militant, has been on a hunger strike for more than a month in protest against the solitary confinement he has been subjected to since May. So far, three other prisoners have joined the strike in solidarity with him.
Movements reduced to a few square meters for 22 hours a day, with only two hours allowed outdoors. Almost non-existent contacts with the outside world: a maximum of one one-hour visit per month through a separation glass and an intercom; prohibition of receiving any type of object, with the exception of clothing, and a tight control of correspondence, with systematic confiscations. Added to this is the prohibition of participation in any prison activity, collective or individual, and the complete exclusion from any rehabilitation or social reintegration program. Alfredo Cospito, an anarchist militant in prison since 2014, has lived for almost seven months in the 41-bis regime, a “jail in jail” equivalent to the FIES Regime of Spanish prisons, designed to combat the mafia, but which is increasingly applied to prisoners accused of political crimes.
What we are about is a new set of values, the practice of solidarity. Capitalism developed within feudalism as the practice of the idea of contract. What was imagined was a society in which free and equal members of civil society would enter into mutually binding agreements. Thus, the free city. Thus, the guild of artisans. Thus, the congregation of Protestant believers bound together by a “covenant” (a different kind of contract). And thus, the capitalist corporation, its investors, its shareholders. Of course, the reality was and is that the parties to capitalist labor contracts were and are not equal, and therefore the ideological hegemony of the bourgeois idea of contract has always been and still is based on a sham.
Counter-hegemonically, we practice solidarity. Solidarity might be defined as drawing the boundary of our community of struggle as widely as possible. When LTV Steel first filed for bankruptcy in 1986, Youngstown retirees debated whether they should seek health insurance only for steel industry retirees or for everyone. They decided, for everyone. When LTV Steel recently filed for bankruptcy a second time, the United Steelworkers of America made the opposite choice: they asked Congress to subsidize the so-called “legacy costs” of the steel industry, not for universal health care.
But we must also nurture solidarity, not only in struggle with the powers that be, but also within our own movement. This is very hard but absolutely indispensable.
I have the responsibility of carrying on for John Sargent; for Ed Mann; who at meetings of the Youngstown Workers’ Solidarity Club would introduce himself as “Ed Mann, member of the IWW”; for Stan Weir, who learned labor history from Wobblies on ship board during World War II; for Marty Glaberman. You will have the responsibility of carrying on for me. This is as it should be. This is the deepest and most important solidarity. May the circle be unbroken.
It would be impossible to summarise the remarkable political and intellectual life of Staughton Lynd, who died this last November 17th at the age of 92. Perhaps, for us, what is most important is his testimony of and his engagement with what we would call, following his words, an unwavering politics of solidarity.
Those who have lost whom they love, those who say “I have a right to cry, and I still don’t cry because I need to know where and how my loved ones died”, are linking demands for justice with the very ability to access grief. There will be no mourning if there is no justice and accountability, and being deprived of the right to mourn is in itself an injustice. Mourning and the demand for justice go hand in hand and need each other; they bring together pain and anger in an effort to build a new consensus and a new solidarity against violence.
Despite the feeling of being orphaned that circulates on social networks and the comments of so many friends, I think that Hebe de Bonafini did not leave us aground. Rather, she prepared things properly so that we can continue with the fight of the Mothers. Hers is the most moving “heroic deed” [gesta], an expression (well chosen by Osvaldo Bayer) that accounts for the engendering interplay between mothers and children, but also between children and mothers and finally between mothers and the people: a few mothers of some revolutionary militants defeated during the nineteen-seventies, alone before the terror and the power of airplanes, torture chambers and weapons; a few headscarves as a distinctive mark of an unarmed struggle, there, where their children would simply disappear; a few mothers who proposed to set the stage for a justice that was always postponed, while taking care of the stage and the meaning that made their children’s struggle understandable and memorable. A whole lesson from the Mothers: where State terrorism took repressive secrecy to its maximum state expression, they wove a painful and popular counter-narrative, with an enormous charge of defiance of power. Where the truth of power tortured and killed, the truth of these engendering/engendered women was born from the care of bodies. This was a counter-truth that would soon be the only one capable of animating a meaning for a country that was increasingly left without any other truths.
N’oubliez jamais qu’il suffira d’une crise politique, économique ou religieuse pour que les droits des femmes soient remis en question. Ces droits ne sont jamais acquis. Vous devrez rester vigilantes votre vie durant.
How Feminists and Anarchists Defy Polish Anti-Abortion Laws
In Poland, abortion has been almost completely prohibited since 2020. Nevertheless, a network of anarchists and other feminists strives to ensure that those who need abortions can access them, legally or not. Now that abortion has been prohibited throughout many of the United States, as well, people in North America stand to gain from the experience of those who have already been confronting this situation for years. To learn how Polish activists use direct action and mutual aid to keep abortion accessible, we interviewed participants in this network.
“I don’t know what I shall do,” he said. “When I am healed, I shall know better. But my mission is over, and my teaching is finished, and death has saved me from my own salvation. Oh, Madeleine, I want to take my single way in life, which is my portion. My public life is over, the life of my self-importance. Now I can wait on life, and say nothing, and have no one betray me. I wanted to be greater than the limits of my hands and feet, so I brought betrayal on myself. And I know I wronged Judas, my poor Judas. For I have died, and now I know my own limits. Now I can live without striving to sway others any more. For my reach ends in my fingertips, and my stride is no longer than the ends of my toes. Yet I would embrace multitudes, I who have never truly embraced even one. But Judas and the high priests saved me from my own salvation, and soon I can turn to my destiny like a bather in the sea at dawn, who has just come down to the shore alone.”
D.H. Lawrence, The Man Who Died
A short reflection on the life of life of Jesus Christ, and on a politics of life, in the light of D.H. Lawrence, by Amador Fernández-Savater (Lobo Suelto! 13/11/2022), followed by Lawrence’s short story, “The Man who Died/The Escaped Cock” (1928). And in the background is the voice of León Rozitchner.
What is our founding myth? Not Oedipus says the Argentine philosopher León Rozitchner, but the myth of Christ, “the immolated lamb.”
Christ cancels our debts – contracted in the first rebellion and subsequent expulsion from paradise – with his sacrifice. But what is sacrificed? The sacrifice of the body: he accepts death, death in life, death of the body, as access to the eternal.
This is what this model of founding identification proposes to us. The Law of God will no longer bind us then only from the outside, from the exterior, but also from the inside, from the heart. It is what makes of Christianity a more effective apparatus of domination: it governs us from within, we govern ourselves.
Today, outside this cell, I don’t know what is left of this project. After the disillusionment in the Val Susa struggle, many comrades should perhaps reflect on the need to better calculate one’s action and not lower it, but aim higher and realise that following “people” at all costs becomes counter-productive. The “intermediate” struggle runs the risk of pushing us backwards rather than forwards, making us lose the sense of who we are, a bit like what happened in the last century with anarcho-syndicalism. Those who were not there in those years can be told a lot of stories, but more often we end up telling them to ourselves in order to keep alive comforting illusions or our own garden within the movement. And precisely in order not to tell those stories too, I have to be clear (especially to myself): there is no “pure” practice that does not involve some commitment or risk. “Purity” does not exist, and even less so when we have to throw ourselves into a desperate struggle where the “enemy” is all around us. Nor is there an”indestructible”, “absolute” affinity (disillusionment may always be around the corner),so it is not certain that it will survive all the obstacles that power puts in front of us.
The quality of life of an anarchist is directly proportional to the real damage he causes to the deadly system that oppresses him. The less he accepts compromise, his feelings, his passions become stronger, crystal clear, his hatred more lucid, always sharp as a razor. Unfortunately, the vast majority of anarchists act in accordance with the criminal law, many actions are not put into practice simply by fear of the consequences. … We must realize that the worst fate for an anarchist is not death or prison, but surrendering to fear, to resignation.
…
Revolution, with its “simple” possible overturning of social relations is very little, a useless palliative as it creates new civilization. When declaring war on civilization, we satisfy our need to live not outside (that’s impossible, civilization never abandons us, we always carry it inside) but against it.
By creating communities at permanent war with society, we build moments of happiness, we live flashes of intense joy in our lives. Revolution is an insufficient tool, with its political, concrete “realism”, even in its libertarian variant, with its self-managed communes, its administration-ruling of the world, its inevitable creating of status-quo: breaks wings, shatters hopes, creates new chains.
Revolt, with its endless charge of breaking, with its lack of future prospects, with its absolute negation of politics: creates hopes, breaks chains. A woman and a man in revolt, destroy chains without wanting to build other, this is enough to fill up with adventure and happiness any existence.
The following statement of solidarity wasPublished on the Kontrapolis website.
(28/10/2022)
WE WILL NOT ALLOW THE MURDER OF ALFREDO COSPITO ON HUNGER STRIKE SINCE OCTOBER 20
CALL FOR INTERNATIONAL MOBILIZATION
On the 20th of October 2022, the anarchist Alfredo Cospito, during a trial at the Sassari Probation Court, made an attempt to read an articulate statement in which he announced that he had gone on hunger strike against the 41 bis prison regime to which he is subjected and against the life sentence without parole. A battle that Alfredo does not intend to stop, until his own death. The comrade, who has been in 41 bis since last May 5 under a decree signed by then Justice Minister Marta Cartabia, is now being detained in the Bancali prison in Sardinia.
There is no anarchist who would defend militarism, the layered and complex fusion of state power, the economy, and military methods and technologies of control. However this has not, historically, usually translated into anti-war pacifism. While there have been anarchists who were and are also pacifists, the weight of the tradition has always sided with “revolutionary” violence. But then what this latter actually is has been the stuff of intense debate and controversy, defying any categorical and a priori resolution. Only ideologists could think otherwise, and therefore it should be no surprise that, anarchists, leftists more broadly and anti-militarists, should differ about the virtues of supporting the Ukrainian resistance to Russia’s invasion. The illusion lies in endeavouring to elaborate a single political interpretation of events and then dismissing all others as myths. Political life eludes such exercises of conceptual and theoretical purity.
Hurricane Ian made landfall in southwest Florida as a strong Category 4 storm. Ian caused a destructive 10- to 15-foot storm surge, trapping many people in the rising floodwaters across a wide geographic area. Winds rose to 155 mph, causing damage to tens of thousands of homes. Over 150 people lost their lives.
We mourn the dead and fight like hell for the living.
The 2022 elections pitted the authoritarian nationalism of Jair Bolsonaro against the institutional leftism of Workers Party candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Each of these rival strategies for governance presented itself as the only possible salvation for democracy. The entire campaign was marked by acts of violence, and not just from voters: at various points, parliamentarians allied with Bolsonaro exchanged gunfire with police officers and chased opponents in the streets with guns in hand.
On October 30, the second round of the election took place to determine the president and governors, and Bolsonaro lost to former president Lula. But Lula won by only 1.8%, setting the stage for strife that will continue to divide Brazil, just as the 2020 elections in the United States did not mark the end of political polarization.
What follows was inspired by a short newspaper article on the enormous discrepancy in energy consumption and CO2 emissions between the rich and the poor, in the UK. Recalling Jonathan Swift’s brilliant essay, “A Modest Proposal” of 1729, we took it up again, in all modesty, replaced Irish infants with the wealthy of this world, and discovered that it retained all of its urgent relevance.
Extreme inequality and wealth concentration undermine the ability of humanity to stop climate breakdown. Very rich people emit huge and unsustainable amounts of carbon and have an outsized influence over our economy. Unlike with ordinary people, 50% to 70% of the emissions of the world’s richest people are the result of their investments.1 They hold extensive stakes in many of the largest and most powerful corporations in the world – large enough stakes to influence the actions taken by these corporations.
The true scale of the investment emissions of these individuals is not systematically calculated or reported. However, using new analysis based on publicly available data, Oxfam calculates that the annual carbon footprint of the investments of just 125 of the world’s richest billionaires in our sample is equivalent to the carbon emissions of France, a nation of 67 million people. This represents an average of 3.1 million tonnes per billionaire, which is over one million times higher than 2.76tonnes2 – the average for someone in the bottom 90% of humanity.
Emissions from billionaire lifestyles, including their private jets and yachts, are thousands of times the average person’s, which is itself unacceptable and unsustainable. But if we include emissions from their investments, then their carbon emissions are over a million times higher.
For preventing the rich people of this world, from being a burden on the rest of us, and for making them beneficial to the publick.
by an honourable member of Autonomies, (in memory and honour of Jonathan Swift, and with indignation)
2022
It is a melancholy object to those, who walk through a great town, or travel in a country, or through the world’s ports of call, when they see the streets, the roads, and the grand hotels, crowded with the wealthy, followed by three, four, or six shopping bags in tow, and importuning every passenger for space. These individuals, instead of being able to work for their honest livelihood, are forced to employ all their time in stroling to shop for their helpless selves who, as they grow richer, either turn thieves for want of work, or leave their dear native country, to consume in more amenable climes, or sell themselves to higher bidders.
I think it is agreed by all parties, that this prodigious degree of consumption, is in the present deplorable state of the kingdom, a very great additional grievance; and therefore whoever could find out a fair, cheap and easy method of making these affluent citizens sound and useful members of the commonwealth, would deserve so well of the publick, as to have their statue set up for a preserver of the nation.
Staughton Lynd: Thinking history, doing politics, from below
What we are about is a new set of values, the practice of solidarity. Capitalism developed within feudalism as the practice of the idea of contract. What was imagined was a society in which free and equal members of civil society would enter into mutually binding agreements. Thus, the free city. Thus, the guild of artisans. Thus, the congregation of Protestant believers bound together by a “covenant” (a different kind of contract). And thus, the capitalist corporation, its investors, its shareholders. Of course, the reality was and is that the parties to capitalist labor contracts were and are not equal, and therefore the ideological hegemony of the bourgeois idea of contract has always been and still is based on a sham.
Counter-hegemonically, we practice solidarity. Solidarity might be defined as drawing the boundary of our community of struggle as widely as possible. When LTV Steel first filed for bankruptcy in 1986, Youngstown retirees debated whether they should seek health insurance only for steel industry retirees or for everyone. They decided, for everyone. When LTV Steel recently filed for bankruptcy a second time, the United Steelworkers of America made the opposite choice: they asked Congress to subsidize the so-called “legacy costs” of the steel industry, not for universal health care.
But we must also nurture solidarity, not only in struggle with the powers that be, but also within our own movement. This is very hard but absolutely indispensable.
I have the responsibility of carrying on for John Sargent; for Ed Mann; who at meetings of the Youngstown Workers’ Solidarity Club would introduce himself as “Ed Mann, member of the IWW”; for Stan Weir, who learned labor history from Wobblies on ship board during World War II; for Marty Glaberman. You will have the responsibility of carrying on for me. This is as it should be. This is the deepest and most important solidarity. May the circle be unbroken.
Staughton Lynd, A Wobbly Strategy for Fundamental Change
It would be impossible to summarise the remarkable political and intellectual life of Staughton Lynd, who died this last November 17th at the age of 92. Perhaps, for us, what is most important is his testimony of and his engagement with what we would call, following his words, an unwavering politics of solidarity.
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