Peter Lamborn Wilson: Communities of Resistance

Posted on May 25, 2022 by Julius Gavroche

We share, once again, an excellent video interview with Peter Lamborn Wilson/Hakim Bey dedicated to communities of resistance; a rich summary of Wilson’s work, keeping alive a non-ideological, open anarchism.

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For Peter Lamborn Wilson/Hakim Bey (1945-2022)

Posted on May 25, 2022 by Julius Gavroche

… the TAZ is in some sense a tactic of disappearance.

Hakim Bey

Peter Lamborn Wilson or Hakim Bey coined the phrase “Temporary Autonomous Zone” to refer to autonomous communities of conviviality, of freedom and equality, creating thereby a different time, breaking away from the time of technological and capitalist “progress”.

TAZs happen as expressions of rooted and bodily sharing, of mutuality and joy. Wilson did not invent the TAZ, as a human reality, but endeavoured to conceptualise and theorise it in such a way as to bring it to consciousness and to have it serve as the ground for deepening anarchism and anarchist politics.

Peter Lamborn Wilson died this last May 22. In memory and celebration of Wilson’s work, of his lucidity and eloquence, of his engagement with what can perhaps be called an “anarchist ethics”, we share below the second chapter of his essay “The Temporary Autonomous Zone”, entitled “Waiting for the Revolution”, along with an interview that he did for The Brooklyn Rail Newspaper (07-08/2004), a video recorded interview, a brief video of a “visit” to Wilson and a video interpretation of his text, “Poetic Terrorism”.

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Lucy Parsons’ anarchism

Posted on May 23, 2022 by Julius Gavroche

The philosophy of anarchism is included in the word “Liberty,” yet it is comprehensive enough to include all things else that are conducive to progress. No barriers whatever to human progression, to thought, or investigation are placed by anarchism; nothing is considered so true or so certain, that future discoveries may not prove it false; therefore, it has but one infallible, unchangeable motto, “Freedom”: Freedom to discover any truth, freedom to develop, to live naturally and fully. Other schools of thought are composed of crystallized ideas—principles that are caught and impaled between the planks of long platforms, and considered too sacred to be disturbed by a close investigation. In all other “issues” there is always a limit; some imaginary boundary line beyond which the searching mind dare not penetrate, lest some pet idea melt into a myth.

Lucy Parsons, The Principles of Anarchism

Without pretending to exhaust the extensive writings, or the extraordinary life, of Lucy Gonzales Parsons (1853-1942), we share below a brief selection of a body of work whose passion defies the passing of time.

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For Russell Maroon Shoatz: The tradition of Maroon “anarchism”

Posted on May 23, 2022 by Julius Gavroche

Russell Maroon Shoatz, activist and writer, was a founding member of the revolutionary group Black Unity Council in 1969, as well as a member of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army. In 1972, he would be convicted for a 1970 killing of a Philadelphia police officer. He would spend 49 years in prison (22 of which in solitary confinement), being released in October of 2021 on grounds of compassion, only to die in December of the same year. (“Former Black Panther Russell “Maroon” Shoatz Freed From Prison After 49 Years”, Truthout 26/10/2021)

While not describing himself as an anarchist, Shoatz’s history of decentralised slave and indigenous rebellions in the americas looks “a whole lot like anarchism”. For Shoatz, it was in the diffused, archipelago like resistance of autonomous maroon communities, that colonialism and plantation slavery would find its greatest opposition, to which the colonial would be forced to respond.

Against the “Dragon” of colonial authority, Shoatz celebrates the “Hydra” tradition of a black-indigenous “anarchism” that did not bear this name, but from which anarchists, and others, must learn.

We share below two essays by Russell Maroon Shoatz, to celebrate his legacy and as reflections on what may be called “black anarchism”.

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William C. Anderson: State reform isn’t enough. Our times demand Black anarchism

Posted on May 23, 2022 by Julius Gavroche
A Black Panthers march on 42nd Street, New York

We share again an essay by William C. Anderson, who continues to pursue his important work in black anarchism.

State reform isn’t enough. Our times demand Black anarchism

For many who are marginalised, the state has only ever kicked them around. Redress looks like power directly in the hands of people themselves

William C. Anderson

Open Democracy, 30/04/2022

At the present time, the world is at an impasse. This can only mean one thing: not that there is no way out, but that the time has come to abandon all the old ways, which have led to fraud, tyranny, and murder.

Aimé Césaire

I’m not here to explain Black anarchism, because Black anarchism explains itself. The times we’re living in speak to its relevance. Politics that can conceive liberation only through the nation-state apparatus cannot truly serve people who always fall outside of its considerations.

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Pier Paolo Pasolini: “We are all in danger”

Posted on May 21, 2022 by Julius Gavroche

As we continue to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s birthday, we share Pier Paolo Pasolini’s last interview, on the eve of his murder …

The very few people who made history are those who said no, not the courtesans and the cardinals’ assistants. Therefore, an act of refusal must be total and not partial, in a nutshell it must not focus on this or that, nor must it be dictated by wisdom.

Pier Paolo Pasolini

“We are all in danger”

Pier Paolo Pasolini Interviewed by Furio Colombo

L’Unità, 1st November 1975

We are publishing the text of an interview to Pier Paolo Pasolini by Furio Colombo that appeared on the “Tuttolibri” supplement of the daily La Stampa on 8th November 1975. This interview took place on 1st November 1975, between 4 p.m. and 6 p.m., a few hours before Pasolini was killed. The title of the interview was provided by Pasolini himself. At the end of this conversation that found us on different positions and with diverging points of view, as it often happened us in other cases as well, I asked him if he wanted to choose the title for this article. He thought about it for a little while, then said it didn’t matter and changed subject. But something else brought us back on the main topic that continuously appears in the following answers. “This is the very essence, the final meaning of everything – he said – You do not even know who, in this very moment, is thinking about killing you. If you want, give this title to the feature: Why we are all in danger”.

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Stories from the sudanese revolution

Posted on May 19, 2022 by Julius Gavroche
The Blood Loaf by Abdulrahman Alnazeer

… revolutions are kept alive by stories.

Ahmed Mahmoud

The military coup d’état of October–November 2021 in sudan seems to have brought an end to the country’s revolution, begun in the protests of December 2019. But external observations and evaluations of revolts are never certain or final, because such “events are marked by an implosive logic, in which people are thrown back upon their imagination. Something has been let loose, something has been left floating, the words are running, the signs are sinister; we never see a revolt, but its effect is felt in the dislocation it installs in us.” (Rodrigo Karmy Bolton, The Anarchy of Beginnings) And the stories of the revolt continue to be told …

In Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, an anonymous protester dressed as Spider-Man joins the hundreds of thousands of protesters desperate to protect their fragile civilian government after the military coup in October 2021. ‘Spidey’ has become well known on social media for leaping from billboards and scaling the tops of buildings while dodging teargas. However, it’s his work with some of the poorest children in Khartoum that has shown him to be a positive focus for the resistance, helping a new generation to know their worth and take pride in their country’s rich heritage.

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Rordrigo Karmy Bolton: Fragments of a Chile in Revolt

Posted on May 18, 2022 by Julius Gavroche

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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Michèle Bernstein, the Situationists and May 68

Posted on May 10, 2022 by Julius Gavroche

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.

Michèle Bernstein, Note on the Situationist International

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.

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Nature is the marvelous that the surrealist seeks

Posted on May 10, 2022 by Julius Gavroche

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).

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