Penny Rimbaud: The howl of life

Posted on April 16, 2022 by Julius Gavroche

Freedom is not an abstract noun to be tossed about in the semantic trash can by dusty academics looking for an intellectual fix. It is a birth; a verb. Like the air we breathe, freedom is free to us all, with one condition, that we are free enough to unconditionally embrace it.

… freedom is not a commodity. This particular ‘real thing’ cannot neither be bought nor sold. Equally, it is not, as bearded bar stool revolutionaries are keen to tell us, ‘in the air’. Free is of the air, born of life. If only we have the eyes to see it, it exists already, an innate force which few of us dare acknowledge, for by doing so we are obliged to face the profound responsibility inherent within it: the Faustian tryst of our birth.

Penny Rimbaud, Freedom is such a big word

The Wikipedia entry for Penny Rimbaud reads that he “is a writer, poet, philosopher, painter, musician and activist”, even though he would most like reject all of these categories insofar as they confine and cripple the life that has animated him and which is in part testified to by his “art”.

Penny Rimbaud acknowledges the influence of anarchism, evident in his work with the punk band Crass. “There is no authority but yourself” is the last line of the music album, Yes Sir, I Will (1983). However, his life took him towards a deeper and fuller understanding of freedom that could not be contained within any ideological or political limit, for it is life itself, the life that runs through us, and to which we can open ourselves to. Indeed, the issue becomes what is this “self” which is “your-self”, for where Penny Rimbaud has arrived is at the notion that it is the “self”, the “ego”, that is the problem.

One might try to summarise the latter as follows: the “self” is an exercise in/a fiction of self-mastery, meaning that what is endeavoured is the mastery of the life which flows through each one of us, an exercise that can only be violent and destructive. Freedom comes when we relinquish this desire for mastery – born of fear and the illusion of cognitive control -, and let ourselves be taken by the “anarchy” of life.

Freedom, then, is an absolute sense of responsibility, an inner reality which can only be truly embraced if it is entirely free of external imposition. Being the opposite of commodity, it stems from inner conviction and commitment: an act of faith.

Penny Rimbaud, Freedom is such a big word

We share below interviews, poetry, music and film, wishing to give just a little more resonance to Penny Rimbaud’s life.

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Wilfred Owen: The pity of war

Posted on April 15, 2022 by Julius Gavroche

The son of Saturn saw them and took pity upon their sorrow. He wagged his head, and muttered to himself, saying, “Poor things, why did we give you to King Peleus who is a mortal, while you are yourselves ageless and immortal? Was it that you might share the sorrows that befall mankind? for of all creatures that live and move upon the earth there is none so pitiable as he is …

Homer, The Iliad

Cry ‘Havoc,’ and let slip the dogs of war.

William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

To us it is incomprehensible that millions of Christian men killed and tortured each other either because Napoleon was ambitious or Alexander was firm, or because England’s policy was astute or the Duke of Oldenburg wronged. We cannot grasp what connection such circumstances have with the actual fact of slaughter and violence: why because the Duke was wronged, thousands of men from the other side of Europe killed and ruined the people of Smolénsk and Moscow and were killed by them.

Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

What in our lives is burnt
In the fire of this?
The heart’s dear granary?
The much we shall miss?

Three lives hath one life—
Iron, honey, gold.
The gold, the honey gone—
Left is the hard and cold.

Iron are our lives
Molten right through our youth.
A burnt space through ripe fields,
A fair mouth’s broken tooth.

Isaac Rosenberg, August 1914

The face of war is hidden by the talk of politics and power. The horror of war is concealed by the illusions of state authority and command, as if military conflict were something mastered from above, when in fact, once unleashed, it tears away all restraint.

There is no war without pillage, torture, rape, slaughter. With modern means, it distills evil of such an intensity that its induced drunkenness is resisted by few. It is impossible to say today, as Hegel did in the 19th century, even as a “philosophical idea”, that “the ethical health of peoples is preserved in their indifference to the stabilisation of finite institutions; just as the blowing of the winds preserves the sea from the foulness which would be the result of a prolonged calm, so also corruption in nations would be the product of prolonged, let alone ‘perpetual’, peace.” (G.W.F Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 1820)

Leo Tolstoy wrote that, “A king is history’s slave.” (War and Peace) By history, he meant the history of states, and it is against this history that Christian love, or pacifism, as he conceived it, rebels. “There does not exist a moral rule for which it would be impossible to invent a situation when it would be hard to decide which is more moral, the departure from the rule or its fulfillment. The same is true of the question of nonresistance to evil: men know that it is bad, but they are so anxious to live by violence, that they use all the efforts of their mind, not for the elucidation of all the evil which is produced by man’s recognition of the right to do violence to others, but for the defense of this right.” (Letter to Ernest Crosby on Non-Resistance)

Whatever political explanation or justification we may give for war, whether in Ukraine or elsewhere, whether in the past or present, its celebration can be nothing other than an obscenity.

So that we may not forget, so that we may never be able to say, with Byron, “He fell, immortal in a bulletin” (Don Juan: Canto The Seventh), we share below a selection of Wilfred Owen’s WWI poetry and a film-reading of this same poetry by Penny Rimbaud.

Reconciliation.

Word over all, beautiful as the sky, Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be utterly lost,
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash again, and ever again, this soil’d world;
For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead,
I look where he lies white-faced and still in the coffin—I draw near,
Bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.

From Walt Whitman, Drum Taps

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Ukraine and the ethical uncertainty of war

Posted on April 14, 2022 by Julius Gavroche
Joe Webb, Papering Over the Cracks, 1976

So that the Alexanders, Carnots, Humberts, and others should not be murdered, but it should be explained to them that they are themselves murderers, and, chiefly, they should not be allowed to kill people: men should refuse to murder at their command.

If people do not yet act in this way, it is only because Governments, to maintain themselves, diligently exercise a hypnotic influence upon the people. And, therefore, we may help to prevent people killing either Kings or one another, not by killing- murder only increases the hypnotism- but by arousing people from their hypnotic condition.

Leo Tolstoy, Though shalt not kill

Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, ‘he that is not with me is against me’. The idea that you can somehow remain aloof from and superior to the struggle, while living on food which British sailors have to risk their lives to bring you, is a bourgeois illusion bred of money and security.

What I object to is the intellectual cowardice of people who are objectively and to some extent emotionally pro-Fascist, but who don’t care to say so and take refuge behind the formula ‘I am just as anti-fascist as anyone, but—’. The result of this is that so-called peace propaganda is just as dishonest and intellectually disgusting as war propaganda. Like war propaganda, it concentrates on putting forward a ‘case’, obscuring the opponent’s point of view and avoiding awkward questions.

George Orwell, Pacifism and the War

There is nothing to be celebrated in modern war. The total mobilisation or militarisation that it calls upon, of resources and their extraction, knowledge and technologies, production, media and myths, population, transforms the whole of a society into an instrument of generalised creative destruction. Older notions bound to specific spaces and times of war and its virtues, such as a battlefield, soldier and civilian, courage and comradeship, war and peace, fall away, to be replaced by a permanent war against everything that would undermine and/or ruin the conditions required for sustaining social life.

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And after the war?

Posted on April 11, 2022 by Julius Gavroche

Reflections on the prospects for Social Struggles in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, by Vladimir Platonenko and published in english by the CrimethInc. collective (31/03/2020) …

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has thrown Eastern Europe into disorder, disrupting an already volatile world order. But what will follow the war? And how will the outcome shape the prospects for revolutionary movements in the region?

The war has created a fertile ground for nationalists and militarists to recruit in Ukraine, Russia, Poland, and elsewhere across Europe. The weaponry that NATO is sending into Ukraine and the surrounding regions will remain there for years to come, intensifying the body counts in future civil wars throughout the region modeled on the proxy wars in Donbas and Syria. The soldiers who survive the fighting will bring back the consequences of traumatic experiences, which some of them will revisit on their own communities—or on others’ communities as mercenaries in future conflicts. Patriarchy and fundamentalism typically intensify as a consequence of warfare, as we have seen from Lebanon and Palestine to Iran and Afghanistan—and arguably, to a lesser extent, in the United States as well, following the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

As Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy has acknowledged himself, this war is a step towards a world of permanent militarization, in which the Israeli model of militarized policing will become the norm and brute force will be the chief means of resolving political differences. Massive refugee populations displaced by wars and economic and ecological crises will be segregated according to national and ethnic hierarchies—received into welcoming homes, crowded into internment camps, or pushed back into the borderlands to die.

In response to all of this, anarchists hope to advance another vision of the future, establishing solidarity between anti-war, anti-nationalist, and anti-state movements across all borders and lines of difference. Rather than identifying with any government or capitalist coterie, pointing to the misdeeds of some to excuse the misdeeds of others, we aim to build the capacity to interrupt war and exploitation by means of grassroots action. Anticipating the challenges that social movements throughout the region will face after this war could help us to set our priorities.

With our Russian comrades, we have prepared a translation of the following article by Vladimir Platonenko exploring what the prospects will be for social struggle in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia after the war is over. You can read an English translation of an earlier article of his about the war here. Though Platonenko takes for granted that Russia will be soundly defeated—which we hardly consider a foregone conclusion—we consider this text valuable in that it shows the dangers of identifying with the Ukrainian government and emphasizes the responsibility of Russian liberals for the situation in Russia today, which could be repeated all over again even if Putin is somehow ousted from power.

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For Pier Paolo Pasolini

Posted on April 3, 2022 by Julius Gavroche

On the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s birthday …

. . . Take a few steps and you’re on the Appia
or Tuscolana, where all is life
for all. But to be this life’s
accomplice, better to know
no style or history. Its meanings
deal in apathy and violence
in sordid peace. Under a sun
whose meaning is also unfolding,
thousands and thousands of people,
buffoons of a modern age of fire,
cross paths, teeming dark
along the blinding sidewalks, against
housing projects stretching to the sky.
I am a force of the Past.
My love lies only in tradition. 
I come from the ruins, the churches,
the altarpieces, the villages
abandoned in the Apennines or foothills
of the Alps where my brothers once lived.
I wander like a madman down the Tuscolana,
down the Appia like a dog without a master.
Or I see the twilights, the mornings
over Rome, the Ciociaria, the world,
as the first acts of Posthistory
to which I bear witness, by arbitrary
birthright, from the outer edge
of some buried age. Monstrous is the man
born of a dead woman’s womb.
And I, a fetus now grown, roam about
more modern than any modern man,
in search of brothers no longer alive.

Pier Paolo Pasolini, from Poem in the shape of a rose (June 10, 1962)

“We have lost, first and foremost, a poet. And there are not so many poets in the world, only three or four are born in century.”

The words of Alberto Moravia at Pier Paolo Pasolini’s funeral refer not to a mere writer of poems, but to the profound sense in which he understood Pasolini to be a poet as a way of being in the world, in which the “direct word” is both thought and action, whether expressed in poetry, literature, theatre, film, essays or in his “scandalous” sexuality. Pasolini’s thoughts and words always found expression in the flesh.

If Pasolini began with poetry, he would come to feel the need to go beyond it, in a body of prose essays that read like prose scorched by the poetic word.

In the midst of the “Italian Economic Miracle“, he found himself nowhere, vomited from the guts of the new Italy. He found little comfort among artistic and political vanguards, and could only morn the passing of an older Italy still tied the land or to ways of life that were foreign to capitalism. His lament was not however nostalgic; it was rather born of a rage against the violence of an ever expanding novel, petty-bourgeois “fascism” of mass consumption, which possessed the seductive power to capture seemingly any transgressive desire.

His final vision – at least cinematographic -, in Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom, puts in to the mouth of one of the four wealthy libertines, the Duke, these words: “We fascists are the only true anarchists, naturally, once we’re masters of the state. In fact, the one true anarchy is that of power.”

Anarchists have yet to think these words through, without which, they can only fail.

We share below Pasolini’s article, often referred to as the “disappearance of fireflies”, the last piece that he wrote for Il Corriere della Sera in 1975, and subsequently published as part of the Corsair Writings, followed by two documentaries on his life and work.

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Nature doesn’t exist

Posted on March 28, 2022 by Julius Gavroche

By way of Lundi Matin (#332, 28/03/2022), we share below the first episode of Diamant Palace, from Le Biais Vert (available with english language subtitles).

In an occupied theater, from where a pirate radio broadcasts, we take stock of the state of the world, as it is collapsing and of the myth of a nature that is being sold to us. There follows a meeting between the anthropologist Philippe Descola and Rachel Devresse. It is about ecology and ZADs (Zones Autonomes à Défendre), capitalism and the recomposition of worlds.

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Serge Quadruppani: The chaos of empire, the paranoia of empire

Posted on March 22, 2022 by Julius Gavroche

From Lundi Matin (#329, 07/03/2022), a reflection on our times of crises, by Serge Quadruppani.

…

Notes on the Nature of the Present Crisis and How to Tackle It

No sooner had the Covid-alarm started to subside that the sirens of war sounded. We could interpret this coincidence as a deliberate sequence engineered by the World’s Masters intended to establish their power a little further, or try to understand this succession as the manifestation of a continuity, as the reappearance in another form of what directs the action of the leaders much more than they orient it: a convergence of crises behind which lies the crisis of the capitalist mode of production. Crisis of the biosphere, crisis of governance, crisis of scales of sovereignty: what links all these crises is perhaps a general crisis of the only real wealth, human relations.

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A very long winter

Posted on March 20, 2022 by Julius Gavroche

Putin’s justifications for the invasion of Ukraine – to bring a halt to the genocide of Donbass Russians by the Ukrainian military and para-militaries, de-Nazification and the defence of Russia –, a war for which he has not hesitated to call upon private soldiers, including Chechen and Syrian mercenaries. And on the Ukrainian side, in addition to those who are simply endeavouring to defend their country or home, are Ukrainian nationalists, from the extreme right to the left, anarchists, foreign nationals covering the same range of political views, including South Americans joining the war on the side of the Ukrainians in the name of a war on “communism” (The Guardian 20/03/2022).

This Babel of political ideologies is testimony to both the total alienation of ideology from the density of social life, here and elsewhere – reality simply does not correspond –, and the violence of ideology as the task of forcing social life into ideological fetters is fully assumed.

Historical distance helps to try to understand events in Ukraine, but always with the modesty dictated by distance. We share below an essay detailing the recent history of Ukrainian politics.

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The Syrian Cantina in Montreuil: Organizing in Exile

Posted on March 16, 2022 by Julius Gavroche

From the CrimethInc. collective (15/03/2022) …

How Refugees Can Continue Revolutionary Struggle in Foreign Lands

Eleven years ago, on March 15, 2011, protests broke out in Syria against the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Over the following years, a revolution took place, wresting much of the country from Assad’s control. Yet as governments around the world intervened to support various factions, the struggle became more and more violent, culminating with the rise of the Islamic State, on one side, while the Russian government stepped in on the other side to enable Assad retain power at a tremendous cost in human lives. Millions of Syrians were forced to flee.

In Paris, some exiles from the Syrian Revolution founded the Syrian Cantina, a community center providing a space for social movements and organizing events to bring together revolutionaries and grassroots organizers from around the world. In the following interview, the participants recount how they were politicized in the course of the revolution, describe the challenges of becoming organizers in a new country, and analyze the roots of a false “anti-imperialism” that silences the voices of the people whose interests it claims to defend. As millions are driven into exile from Afghanistan and Ukraine to Sudan and Haiti, this is an invaluable document about how refugees can continue their organizing in new contexts, how locals can help to make this possible, and the meaning of international solidarity.

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Ukraine in Syria, Syria in Ukraine

Posted on March 16, 2022 by Julius Gavroche

News that the Syrian government is recruiting soldiers from its own army to join the Russian invasion of Ukraine was a reminder – for those who may have forgotten – of Putin’s earlier and extremely bloody intervention to help put down the Syrian revolution. (The Guardian 11/03/2022) And while Syrians who still resist in the remaining pockets of rebel held territory may feel solidarity with Ukraine, it is tempered by the knowledge that their resistance against Russia and their own government has never benefitted from the same assistance from the “international community”. (The Guardian 02/03/2022, 15/03/2022)

The vantage point of geopolitics, however significant, is inevitably a view from above, condemned to the blindness that results from focusing on state and inter-state actors. What is left out are the realities and possibilities of understanding, acting, contagion and effective solidarity across and against borders.

March 15th marked the 11th anniversary of the Syrian revolution. We return to it as an event not only of our past, but of the present, and for its resonances beyond its “failure”, and for Ukraine.

We share a text below authored by Yassin Swehat and published at Al-Jumhuriya (English) on the 1st of March.

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