Every revolt is circumscribed by precise borders in historical time and historical space. Before it and after it lie the no-man’s-land and duration of each and everyone’s lives, in which are fought un- interrupted individual battles. The concept of permanent revolution reveals—rather than an uninterrupted duration of revolt in historical time—the will to succeed, at each and every moment, in suspending historical time so as to find collective refuge in the symbolic space and time of revolt.
Furio Jesi, The Suspension of Historical Time
As chilean politics grinds out through a constitutional convention given the task of writing anew the foundations of the republic, now under the new “progressive” presidency of Gabriel Boric, the events that gave rise to these institutional forms – the chilean popular revolt of 2019-2021 – may slip away from our memories.
The recent english language publication of Rodrigo Karmy Bolton’s collection of essays dedicated to the revolt are an occasion to return to these events and to try to trace out their political significance.[1]
The situationists have designated as the primary terrains of creativity in the future experiments in behavior and the construction of complete settings, moments of life freely created. Since the definition of experimentation of this type is only the other side of a critique of the entirety of current social life and all hierarchical models of society, the situationists have also rejected the impotence and lies of “specialized politics” as a means of transforming the world. They claim that the creative praxis in the totality of everyday life that they herald will be the only route to a new definition of the revolutionary project in our times.
We publish below a recent translation by the Not Bored! collective of a short piece from 2018 by former situationist Michèle Bernstein on May 68 that was generously shared with Autonomies.
For those unfamiliar with Berstein, we also share below an interview with her of 2013, along with a video interview of 2021 and an older interview of 1960 for french television.
The Not Bored! collective has translated a number of her situationist writings into English. See here.
Perhaps my life is nothing but an image of this kind; perhaps I am doomed to retrace my steps under the illusion that I am exploring, doomed to try and learn what I simply should recognize, learning a mere fraction of what I have forgotten.
André Breton, Nadja
A reflection on the marvelous and nature in surrealism, by Shaun Day-Woods (Anarchy Secession Subsistence 02/05/2022).
… si nul n’est bon volontairement, nul n’est esclave du Bien.
Emmanuel Levinas, Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence
In old days men were absorbed in wars, filling all their existence with marches, raids, victories, but now all that is a thing of the past, leaving behind it a great void which there is so far nothing to fill: humanity is searching for it passionately, and of course will find it. Ah, if only it could be quickly! [a pause] If, don’t you know, hard work were united with education and education with hard work. . . [Looks at his watch] But, really, it’s time for me to go. . . .
Vershinin, from The Three Sisters, by Anton Chekhov
The illusion of Chekhov’s character lies perhaps in the belief that the void can or should be filled, the very illusion that ultimately feeds war. Power is such an illusion. It is a force that seeks to fill the emptiness that underlies, that is present in, all that we are. And perhaps a step can be taken in the direction of freeing ourselves from this illusion by living in this emptiness, or what the poet René Char describes in these words: “We belong to no one except the golden point of light from that lamp unknown to us, inaccessible to us that keeps awake courage and silence.” (Leaves of Hypnos)
Sun Tzu, in The Art of War, writes of war as a joust of wills and victory “as the onrush of a conquering force” that is “like the bursting of pent-up waters into a chasm a thousand fathoms deep”.
Power abhors a vacuum.
If wars then are our tragic fate, their mere acceptance as something to be strategically and tactically thought through or as something to be hunted to extinction by moralism and law, is both absurd and obscene. The question is rather how we are to face this reality, ethically.
There is a long tradition of human reflection on the ethics of war (and we are not here speaking of just war theory or the laws of war), on how the seemingly inevitable engagement with it, can possibly push beyond it.
We share a selection of passages from René Char’s notes of resistance of 1943-44, the Leaves of Hypnos.
From the date of his first publication, in 1962, to the present, Tomáz Ibáñez has engaged with anarchism with a depth, sensitivity and generosity matched by few of his contemporaries. To walk through this work is to discover a complex path, like the weave of a rope. But like a rope, held together by a seemingly small set of intuitions or ideas, or perhaps even a method, that Ibáñez continually returns to, not repetitively, but as with an expanding musical refrain, turning ever again on itself, simultaneously changing and clarifying its first steps and the next.
This is a body of work that can in no way be read as “pure theory”, whatever that might mean. Ibáñez’s written reflections bare the traces of a “militancy” that has always marked his life, from a childhood exile to France because of his mother’s anarchist affinities, to his early participation in French and exiled Spanish anarchist youth and student groups, to May 68, to his return to Spain after Franco’s death in 1975, joining the effort to reconstruct the CNT, and the less than negligible work in various anarchist magazines and newspapers.
The seemingly esoteric or more philosophical nature of many of Ibáñez essays are both the herald and the artisan of that very same militancy.
One of the first essays posted on Autonomies was Ibáñez’s 1984 essay, Farewell to the Revolution. This early essay not only remains relevant, but in hindsight and now read in the light of the essay that we share with this post, already points to Ibáñez’s concern with an anarchism freed from dogma, or more profoundly, an anarchism without the comforting conceptual and political ballast of a past that is no longer ours, and cannot be so.
delirium (n.): 1590s, “a disordered state, more or less temporary, of the mind, often occurring during fever or illness,” from Latin delirium “madness,” from deliriare “be crazy, rave,” literally “go off the furrow,” a plowing metaphor, from phrase de lire, from de “off, away” (see de-) + lira “furrow, earth thrown up between two furrows,” from PIE root lois- “track, furrow.” Meaning “violent excitement, mad rapture” is from 1640s.
It is high time for the living to get tough, for toughness is indispensable in the struggle to safeguard and develop the life-force; this will not detract from their goodness, as long as they stand courageously by the truth. There is ground for hope in the fact that among millions of decent, hard-working people there are only a few plague-ridden individuals, who do untold harm by appealing to the dark, dangerous drives of the armored average man and mobilizing him for political murder. There is but one antidote to the average man’s predisposition to plague: his own feelings for true life. The life force does not seek power but demands only to play its full and acknowledged part in human affairs. It manifests itself through love, work and knowledge.
Wilhelm Reich, Listen, Little Man!
War reveals, unmasks, and thus for this reason it is one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse.
The war in ukraine uncovers all that is morally grotesque in the species – one more occasion for revelation -, and as the lens is refined, the horror of modern warfare and those who would feed it are there for all to see: the many headed violence of our hatred for and fear of life is accompanied by menagerie of politicians of different strips and tenors, weapons and energy merchants, food speculators, holy men of gilded churches, medal stained military officers, academicians and court jesters of geopolitics … a more loathsome parade of humans is difficult to imagine.
And yet even here, in the midst of so much that is appalling, how many gestures of kindness, courage, solidarity, are not also on display?
Where then does our judgement fall? Are we finally intrinsically evil or good? The questions are of course misplaced, for we are capable of both. What is however obscene are those who would justify the horror by appeals to moral nobility.
The war in ukraine is not between tyranny and democracy – what meanings can such words have amidst generalised and hitherto unknown contemporary forms of tyranny -, but between those who would govern others by the sword and those who would govern themselves in freedom and equality. The latter is not reducible to a conflict between nation states (both russia and ukraine bear a sword, even if ukraine’s is more just today), though it may find voice or expression, dissonantly, in a nation’s struggle (ukraine’s today, palestine’s in the recent past, and so on). The latter pushes beyond national sovereignties and economies, as a living potentiality, as an unleashing of life.
We continue to probe, to sound out, the war in ukraine, this time with an essay by Franco “Bifo” Berardi (from the Institute of Network Cultures 15/04/2022; Lobo Suelto! 01/05/2022).
We recently received this anonymous contribution, and we publish it as a part of ongoing discussion on the Russian invasion against Ukraine. Text does not necessarily reflect collective views of Autonomous Action.
A text recently appeared on It’s Going Down decrying support for anarchists in Ukraine who are fighting against the Russian army. Entitled “No War but the Class War,” it begins with a quotation from Rosa Luxemburg and concludes with a dedication: “In the spirit of Sholem Schwarzbard.” These two historical figures—a Jewish Marxist from Poland, active in Germany, and a Jewish anarchist from Ukraine, active in France—are conscripted to legitimize the authors’ polemic.
We continue to share below film-maker and journalist Alexis Daloumis’ ongoing news reports about and interviews with european anarchists on the russian invasion of ukraine(from Freedom News 27/04/2022).
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Freedom is pleased to present the next Ukraine video dispatch produced for us by film-maker and journalist Alexis Daloumis. Alexis spent last few weeks in Kiyv, and previously you may have heard of him due to his other production, Belkî Sibê: A Journey Through The Syrian War and Rojava Revolution. If you haven’t watched last week’s dispatch, it is here.
We share a rich essay by Luke Francis Beirne on the relations between surrealism and radical politics, published by the anarchist The Commoner (23/04/2022).
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‘Freedom is the only cause worth serving,’ Andre Breton, 1924
‘It was in the black mirror of anarchism that surrealism first recognized itself,’ Breton, 1952
In the early twentieth century, a group of artists in Paris saw that restrictive, arbitrary frameworks had been imposed upon society by structures of power. They recognized that these frameworks ran so deeply that they penetrated the mind and shaped the very way that it perceived reality. They also saw that things could be otherwise and took it upon themselves to develop a practice which could radically re-enchant the world and produce an alternative reality – a superior reality: surreality.
Rordrigo Karmy Bolton: Fragments of a Chile in Revolt
Every revolt is circumscribed by precise borders in historical time and historical space. Before it and after it lie the no-man’s-land and duration of each and everyone’s lives, in which are fought un- interrupted individual battles. The concept of permanent revolution reveals—rather than an uninterrupted duration of revolt in historical time—the will to succeed, at each and every moment, in suspending historical time so as to find collective refuge in the symbolic space and time of revolt.
Furio Jesi, The Suspension of Historical Time
As chilean politics grinds out through a constitutional convention given the task of writing anew the foundations of the republic, now under the new “progressive” presidency of Gabriel Boric, the events that gave rise to these institutional forms – the chilean popular revolt of 2019-2021 – may slip away from our memories.
The recent english language publication of Rodrigo Karmy Bolton’s collection of essays dedicated to the revolt are an occasion to return to these events and to try to trace out their political significance.[1]
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