The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only at that moment; it has to surrender to it completely and explain itself to it without losing any time. A story is different. It does not expend itself. It preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long time.
Walter Benjamin, The Storyteller
The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers. Although its poise is sometimes in displacing experience it is not a substitute for it. It arcs toward the place where meaning may lie.
Toni Morrison
In celebration of the storyteller and the reader of stories, a short essay by Amador Fernández-Savater.
I remember/ the exact moment in which I realised that/ I had learned to read/ not as when I pretended to do so/ but as when/ I actually read/ a space opened up in space/ it seemed unreal and then/ it seemed real to me / and I came of age and I went in / sorry, I wanted to say / and I went in and I came of age
María Salgado, Salitre
Is reading a kind of subversive experience today? Does it enable heterogeneous ways of being in the world, against the current or in rupture with hegemonic ones?
The Germans were over this house last night and the night before that. Here they are again. It is a queer experience, lying in the dark and listening to the zoom of a hornet which may at any moment sting you to death. It is a sound that interrupts cool and consecutive thinking about peace. Yet it is a sound—far more than prayers and anthems—that should compel one to think about peace. Unless we can think peace into existence we—not this one body in this one bed but millions of bodies yet to be born—will lie in the same darkness and hear the same death rattle overhead. Let us think what we can do to create the only efficient air-raid shelter while the guns on the hill go pop pop pop and the searchlights finger the clouds and now and then, sometimes close at hand, sometimes far away a bomb drops.
The daughters of educated men who were called, to their resentment, ‘feminists’ were in fact the advance guard of your own movement. They were fighting the same enemy that you are fighting and for the same reasons. They were fighting the tyranny of the patriarchal state as you are fighting the tyranny of the Fascist state. Thus we are merely carrying on the same fight that our mothers and grandmothers fought; their words prove it; your words prove it. But now with your letter before us we have your assurance that you are fighting with us, not against us. That fact is so inspiring that another celebration seems called for. What could be more fitting than to write more dead words, more corrupt words, upon more sheets of paper and burn them—the words, Tyrant, Dictator, for example? But, alas, those words are not yet obsolete. We can still shake out eggs from newspapers; still smell a peculiar and unmistakable odour in the region of Whitehall and Westminster. And abroad the monster has come more openly to the surface. There is no mistaking him there. He has widened his scope. He is interfering now with your liberty; he is dictating how you shall live; he is making distinctions not merely between the sexes, but between the races. You are feeling in your own persons what your mothers felt when they were shut out, when they were shut up, because they were women. Now you are being shut out, you are being shut up, because you are Jews, because you are democrats, because of race, because of religion. It is not a photograph that you look upon any longer; there you go, trapesing along in the procession yourselves. And that makes a difference. The whole iniquity of dictatorship, whether in Oxford or Cambridge, in Whitehall or Downing Street, against Jews or against women, in England, or in Germany, in Italy or in Spain is now apparent to you. But now we are fighting together. The daughters and sons of educated men are fighting side by side. That fact is so inspiring, even if no celebration is possible, that if this one guinea could be multiplied a million times all those guineas should be at your service without any other conditions than those that you have imposed upon yourself. Take this one guinea then and use it to assert ‘the rights of all—all men and women—to the respect in their persons of the great principles of Justice and Equality and Liberty.’ Put this penny candle in the window of your new society, and may we live to see the day when in the blaze of our common freedom the words tyrant and dictator shall be burnt to ashes, because the words tyrant and dictator shall be obsolete.
Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas
‘Yet these roaring waters,’ said Neville, ‘upon which we build our crazy platforms are more stable than the wild, the weak and inconsequent cries that we utter when, trying to speak, we rise; when we reason and jerk out these false sayings, “I am this; I am that!” Speech is false.
Virginia Woolf, TheWaves
Virginia Woolf’s essay Three Guineas (1938) is a work for our times. Written as a polyphonic dialogue, it labours to unmask the roots of war in patriarchal society and culture. If Woolf endeavours with care and detail to lay out the conditions in which war may be prevented, these are however neither simple nor transparent, nor obviously attainable.
To say that Three Guineas is of our times is not just to affirm the current relevance of the theme of the essay, the origins and prevention of war – though it is also that. It is to assert its contemporaneity, that is, its untimeliness.
Follow the link below to an excellent discussion around Peter Gelderloos’ essay, The Solutions are Already Here.
Peter Gelderloos joins us again to discuss his recent book “The Solutions are Already Here: Strategies for Ecological Revolution from Below”. The conversation is framed around ecological collapse, the complexity of tackling these issues, and detangling climate change from the conversations around the carbon footprint. How does capitalism utilize climate change to continue its path to exploit the resources on the planet through tools like the green new deal, and how do we respond to this greenwashing?
We explore the concept of community-building, the power of utopia, and what kind of tools are at our disposal to find ways to gum up the system destroying the ecosystem.
You can get Peter’s book from Pluto Press: https://www.plutobooks.com/
When the Russian military invaded Ukraine at the end of February 2022, anarchists and other anti-war demonstrators defied draconian anti-protest measures to take the streets to express opposition. Over the months since those protests were crushed, resistance to the invasion has assumed new forms. Clandestine attacks across Russia have targeted railroads, military recruiting centers, vehicles belonging to pro-war zealots, and Russian state propaganda messaging in favor of the war.
One of the groups promoting these attacks is known as the Anarcho-Communist Combat Organization. In the following interview, they speak about how they see their predecessors in the regional history of anarchist movements, how the political situation in Russia deteriorated to such an extent that it was possible to suppress social movements and invade Ukraine, and what kind of organizing is possible under the prevailing conditions. We also asked them to go into detail about some of their operational protocol, in case this is ever useful for anarchists elsewhere who may be compelled to adopt similar strategies as state repression intensifies around the world.
Let us rather observe this lad of ten, clad in an ancient cap, his father’s probably, shoes worn on bare feet, and nankeen breeches, held up by a single suspender, who had climbed over the wall at the very beginning of the truce, and has been roaming about the ravine, staring with dull curiosity at the French, and at the bodies which are lying on the earth, and plucking the blue wild-flowers with which the valley is studded. On his way home with a large bouquet, he held his nose because of the odor which the wind wafted to him, and paused beside a pile of corpses, which had been carried off the field, and stared long at one terrible headless body, which chanced to be the nearest to him. After standing there for a long while, he stepped[Pg 120] up closer, and touched with his foot the stiffened arm of the corpse which protruded. The arm swayed a little. He touched it again, and with more vigor. The arm swung back, and then fell into place again. And at once the boy uttered a shriek, hid his face in the flowers, and ran off to the fortifications as fast as he could go.
Yes, white flags are hung out from the bastion and the trenches, the flowery vale is filled with dead bodies, the splendid sun sinks into the blue sea, and the blue sea undulates and glitters in the golden rays of the sun. Thousands of people congregate, gaze, talk, and smile at each other. And why do not Christian people, who profess the one great law of love and self-sacrifice, when they behold what they have wrought, fall in repentance upon their knees before Him who, when he gave them life, implanted in the soul of each of them, together with a fear of death, a love of the good and the beautiful, and, with tears of joy and happiness, embrace each other like brothers? No! But it is a comfort to think that it was not we who began this war, that we are only defending our own country, our father-land. The white flags have been hauled in, and again the weapons of death and suffering are shrieking; again innocent blood is shed, and groans and curses are audible.
Leo Tolstoy, The Sebastopol Sketches
History does not repeat itself and analogies between past and present events are only certain when the events are treated as static and closed, and therefore susceptible to unthinking identification. Yet if we take the word in its original Greek sense, then analogy is a form of thinking, of reasoning, based on significantsimilarities between things and events across space and time; similarities which do not erase differences.
It is with this in mind that we share a selection of articles for the New York Tribune written by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels on the Crimean War of October 1853 – February 1856, with Russia’s current war in the Ukraine before us.
Historian Enzo Traverso on his latest book, Revolution: An Intellectual History. The interview originally appeared in the Alias section of il manifesto, 9 July 2022 and was published in the Verso books blog, 01/08/2022, translated by David Broder.
“Revolution — without icons and without capital letters — remains a necessity, as an indeterminate idea of change and as the compass for human will. Not as a model, not as a prefabricated schema, but as a strategic hypothesis and a regulating horizon.” These words by the philosopher Daniel Bensaïd begin Enzo Traverso’s new book, soberly entitled Revolution: An Intellectual History. Traverso, one of Italy’s foremost historians of ideas, now teaches at Cornell University. Il manifesto met up with him in Rome during a recent visit in which he presented his book.
My viewpoint, in telling the history of the United States, is different: that we must not accept the memory of states as our own. Nations are not communities and never have been. The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes exploding, most often repressed) between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex. And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners.
Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (1980)
To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places–and there are so many–where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.
Howard Zinn, “The Optimism of Uncertainty,” The Nation (2004)
Howard Zinn would be a hundred years old this year, and to celebrate this remarkable historian, academic, playwright, political activist, we share a number of texts, interviews and videos below.
Zinn looked at and wrote of history with what the anthropologist James C. Scott called an “anarchist squint”. And Scott’s “two cheers for anarchism” could very well be Zinn’s. Their apology for anarchism is not that of the ideologist or of the sectarian militant. It is born rather of an “anarchist squint”,(xii) a way of looking “at the history of popular movements, revolutions, ordinary politics, and the state” from “below”, from a perspective freed from the State. What is then revealed (and Zinn’s histories and Scott’s anthropological work bear testimony to this) is “that anarchist principles are active in the aspirations and political action of people who have never heard of anarchism and anarchist philosophy.”(xii) (James C. Scott’s Two Cheers for Anarchism, Princeton University Press, 2012)
To brandish Karl Kraus’ 1914 essay “In these great times” against our own may seem out of place. And in some sense it is, for the First World War is not ours. Yet Kraus condemns not only the war, but the media and commercial culture that contributed to its advent and which fed it daily with a profitable and malignant patriotism. In this, our times have only degenerated further. The printed press has been supplanted by the radio, television and, of course, more recently, by the virtual diarrhea of hate and fear that floods daily the internet.
Kraus painfully witnessed the debasement of language and of sound judgment brought on by the press, something that could only culminate in a culture of stupidity. But equally, and no less significant, he saw how the expansion of “newspapers” transformed the relation between the events reported and the reports, between reality and its representations, with the written medium now capable of generating its own reality, from which actions follow. “Today the connections between catastrophes and editorial offices are far more profound and hence less clear. For in the age of those who live through it, deeds are stronger than words, but the echo is stronger than the deed. We live on the echo, and in this topsy-turvy world the echo arouses the call.” Or, as he states it more bluntly: “Wire dispatches are instruments of war.” (Karl Kraus, “In these great times”)
In such times as these, those “who now have nothing to say because actions are speaking continue to talk.” Then let “him who has something to say come forward and be silent!”, a silence from which great “and elemental forces must have the strength to cope with evils by themselves”, without “the stimulation and need of a writer.” (Karl Kraus, “In these great times”)
Walter Benjamin would say of Kraus: “To the ever-repeated sensations with which the daily press serves its public he opposes the eternally “news” of the history of creation: the eternally renewed, the uninterrupted lament.” (Walter Benjamin, “Karl Kraus”).
We share below Karl Kraus’ essay, “In these great times”, as it appears in english translation in the volume In These Great Times: A Karl Kraus Reader, Harry Zohn ed., Manchester, U.K., Carcanet Press, 1984.
It would be almost impossible to describe any of the regular participants or contributors to Autonomies as catholic, or christian, or even religious, in any traditional or institutional sense of the latter. And yet we are equally aware of the enormous contribution, past and present, of religious thought and practice to anarchism, taking this last as broadly as possible.
The death of Tom Cornell, long time member of the Catholic Worker, on the first of August (1934-2022), is the occasion to modestly remember his work and that of the movement to which he gave much. We do not agree with all that the Catholic Worker movement has done or the way it has done things, but there is much that we can embrace and to dismiss it merely because of its christianity would be absurd. As Dorothy Day asked in the first issue of the Catholic Worker newspaper, “Is it not possible to be radical without being atheistic? Is it not possible to protest, to expose, to complain, to point out abuses and demand reforms without desiring the overthrow of religion?” And we may ask, today, whether it is possible and/or desirable to imagine any radical political-social change premised on the overthrow of religion? If the answer is yes, then we may rest assured that religion will outlive any revolutionary desire.
We share below an interview with Tom Cornell, short writings by him in defense of Catholic Worker anarchism and a brief introduction to the Catholic Worker Movement. (For obituaries dedicated to Cornell, see America: The Jesuit Review and the National Catholic Reporter).
Stepping back a little, we share written and video material by and on Peter Maurin, Dorothy Day and Ammon Hennacy. And we close with a lecture by the north american philosopher-activist, Cornel West, dedicated to Dorothy Day.
Amador Fernández-Savater: Having superpowers – Reading as an experience of emancipation
For N al-K …
The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only at that moment; it has to surrender to it completely and explain itself to it without losing any time. A story is different. It does not expend itself. It preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long time.
Walter Benjamin, The Storyteller
The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers. Although its poise is sometimes in displacing experience it is not a substitute for it. It arcs toward the place where meaning may lie.
Toni Morrison
In celebration of the storyteller and the reader of stories, a short essay by Amador Fernández-Savater.
I remember/ the exact moment in which I realised that/ I had learned to read/ not as when I pretended to do so/ but as when/ I actually read/ a space opened up in space/ it seemed unreal and then/ it seemed real to me / and I came of age and I went in / sorry, I wanted to say / and I went in and I came of age
María Salgado, Salitre
Is reading a kind of subversive experience today? Does it enable heterogeneous ways of being in the world, against the current or in rupture with hegemonic ones?
Continue reading →