Não tenho medo de nada. Temos que ensinar o medo a ter medo de nós./I am not afraid of anything. We have to teach fear to be afraid of us.
Elza Soares
For her courage and resistance, for her rebellious artistry, for her voice that spoke and sang for those who did not, or could not, as few others have, for giving form to forbidden passions, for Elza Soares …
(From Roarmag magazine online and the 2021, 11th paper issue of Roar Magazine)
The challenge for antifascists today is to build the capacity to act as a buffer for marginalized communities and the movements fighting for a new world.
On August 17, 2019, a coalition of antifascist and progressive groups in Portland, Oregon organized a rally to protest a Proud Boy event planned in the city. The rally had a carnivalesque atmosphere created by PopMob — an antifascist group of concerned Portlanders which seeks to “resist the alt-right with whimsy and creativity” — and brought on a diverse range of organizations, from labor and religious groups and civil rights groups like the NAACP to more militant organizations like Rose City Antifa.
During the protest, the latter, along with autonomous black bloc organizers, acted as a buffer between the crowds at the carnival and the hundreds of Proud Boys amassing at the other side of the waterfront park both groups were occupying. This created a collaborative environment in which militant antifascists joined forces with a coalition of civic groups and successfully worked in concert to confront a common enemy: the crowds were safer because of the militants, and the militants had a sharper edge because of the hundreds of people standing at their backs. This type of coalition means that each group can bring their own unique strategy, tactics and identity, and find that by maintaining their own distinct piece of the larger whole, the entire project becomes stronger.
Over the past five years of far-right confrontations we have seen coalitions and collaborations — and at times also an overlap in membership — between a wide range of left-wing and community groups, including progressive religious groups, Black Lives Matter organizations, migrant support groups and traditional radical left groups — and more militant antifascist groups, and they have been able to pull numbers by working together. The public itself has grown accustomed to taking action from their participation in mass movements like Black Lives Matter, Occupy and even more liberal and conflicted events, like the 2017 Women’s March. This means that antifascist groups have a trained base for organizing in their communities, a base that can adapt more quickly to coordinated actions like rapidly assembled demonstrations to counter far-right mobilizations.
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(From Roarmag magazine online and the 2021, 11th paper issue of Roar Magazine)
To create a world where we all have a home, we have to dismantle the border regime — not just borders, but all bordering, all ordering and all exploitative regimes.
Harsha Walia has been involved in anti-colonial and anti-capitalist migrant justice movements for the past two decades. Her first book, Undoing Border Imperialism, offered a movement analysis of the foundational connections between migration, borders and imperialism, with insights into the grassroots organizing her work comes out of. Building on this, her latest work, Border and Rule offers a crucial resource for going beyond nation-based thinking about border regimes around the world and building an internationalist movement for their abolition.
In Border and Rule, Walia avoids comparisons of one border regime or another as “worse” or “better,” focusing on how borders are consistently a “method of capital” involved in seizing and holding territory and in the segmentation of the working class. Capitalism has always depended on the racialized ordering of social groups and the restriction of pools of labor. Border regimes are the institutional form of a racist logic that sees certain lives as more or less valuable, more or less disposable.
She shows how both right-wing and liberal perspectives converge on the idea that we are living through a “migration crisis,” only differing on whether they see this as more of a threat or a tragedy. Rejecting this crisis image as inaccurate and alarmist, Walia frames the current situation as a crisis of displacement and immobility. The true crisis is around why people move — dispossession, war and spiraling ecological destruction — and the mechanisms designed to then keep them out of sight and out of mind.
Grounded in her own experiences in solidarity struggles and the dedicated study of an array of radical thinkers and movements, Border and Rule helps us to grasp the deep links between forms of violence that are too often thought of as separated from each other: the connections between borders and racial citizenship, settler colonialism, imperialism, patriarchy and environmental destruction.
The book pushes for a no border politics that involves imagining and fighting for a genuine alternative to the world in its current shape. This means creating alternatives not only to the besieged visions of the right wing, but also to the already murderous and profitable border regimes as developed under neoliberalism. We need to build confident movements and organizations with the ambition of radically changing this world. Border and Rule is a challenging and aspirational work that urges us to aim for that kind of global solidarity and liberation, and it should be studied closely.
Liam Hough
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From the The Volunteer, the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade website, an excellent article (30/08/2017), by Kenyon Zimmer, on North American volunteers in the Spanish Civil War/Revolution.
Among the almost 3,000 foreign anarchists who fought in the Spanish Civil War, more than one hundred came from the United States. Their story has been almost entirely overlooked.
Although much has been written on the Abraham Lincoln Battalion and the International Brigades (IB), one group of volunteer fighters in the Spanish Civil War has been almost entirely overlooked: the approximately 2,000-3,000 foreign anarchists who either joined Spanish militias or IB units. Of these, between 100 and 200 traveled to Spain from the United States, in many cases never to return. Their motives and experiences differed markedly from those of most other volunteers. They highlight the many-sided nature of the Spanish conflict as well as the transnational networks of the pre-World War II anarchist movement.
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We share below an important text on the changing positions of the anarchist CNT labour union during the Spanish Civil War/Revolution, published at Alasbarricadas (11/12/2021) and published in English at Anarkismo.net (20/12/2021). [We have made only minor revisions to the text as it appears at Anarkismo.net]. The significance of the piece is that it takes us away from any simple reading of the Revolution, at least as it touched the anarchists, a reading that tends to treat the events as simply either tragedy (the CNT and the anarchists were crushed from without) or betrayal (the CNT forsook the Revolution for the war against Franco, thereby sealing their defeat). Both interpretations are in the end complementary and what they leave out is the complexity of the political-economic situation on the ground during the war, both within and outside the CNT. And this is a blindness that perpetuates an illusory notion of revolution, of revolution as an all or nothing affair, when it never was, whether in Spain or elsewhere.
The publication of the article at Alasbarricadas invited a response from Octavio Alberola (15/12/2021) which we share by way of closing our own introduction.
Indeed, as the comrades at Alasbaricads say in the introduction to this article, understanding the complexity of that period is not an easy task. But without looking for those responsible for the strategic changes of the CNT and the MLE during that period, what is verified is that from the attempt to implant libertarian communism, they went on to try to implant a kind of “corporate socialism”, as the author of the article says, with a clear tendency to centralisation and bureaucratisation. A practice that continued to predominate in the exiled CNT, despite “denying” those turns and “returning” to the “libertarian communist” line.
Now, although this drift was largely forced by the historical context of that moment (the war against fascism) and it cannot be known if it would not have occurred in another historical context, it seems to me that it shows -as a teaching for the present and future – the limitations and contradictions of conceiving the revolution as an act of force and not as a change of mentality.
…
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It may be said that the “working class”, in political struggles throughout the emergence and expansion of capitalism, was epochal.
We use the word here in its ancient Greek sense. The Greek word epokhe meant “stoppage, fixed point of time,” from epekhein “to pause, take up a position”. (etymological dictionary)
First in Europe, then in the Americas, Asia and Africa, the working classes, from the early 19th century to the mid-20th, would organise to defend themselves, rebel against, and endeavour to overthrow capitalist social relations in a myriad of different ways, as workers, and against being workers, thereby tearing away a social-political horizon that reduced them to wage slavery. They sought, in other words, to bring the machine of oppression and exploitation to a halt, assuming a position against it and beyond it.
One may question the means used and ends sought, for they were never homogeneous or consensual. But for roughly a century, working class revolt offered the promise of a world beyond capitalism through the destruction of Capital’s time, Capital’s history.
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… all history unfolds in every individual life. Of course this only happens when history does unfold, because it can also stop, or turn backward or spin emptily on its own axis like a mechanical top.
Carlo Levi, The Watch (1950)
To read Carlo Levi’s memoires and stories of Italy, of the peasants of Aliano, the village in Lucania (today, Basilicata) to which he would be banished between 1935-36 for anti-fascist activity, of Rome, Sicily and Sardinia, is to travel to worlds which no longer exist. And yet these works are not only beautiful and of extraordinary historical interest – which would be reason enough to read them; they carry within them ideas and notions which give them a resonance beyond their immediate setting and context, above all, that of post-war Italy.
The occasion for this post is the recent re-publication of Levi’s essay Fear of Freedom in Italy (2018) and France (2021), both preceded by an important introduction by Giorgio Agamben, which we share below in translation.
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I believe that it is not certain that we can continue to do as we have done so far, that is, to fight or act in the name of principles and concepts such as democracy, the constitution, law, which perhaps we already knew, we long ago saw losing their meaning. So you can of course continue to wage battles in the name of our rights, but you can do it in a tactical way. Strategically, I think, it may be futile, in the sense that facing a government that ignores legality, it seems a bit vain to invoke human rights. And I repeat: what sense would it make to invoke rights to Hitler, Stalin or Mussolini? It doesn’t make sense, we should not try to counter those who have abandoned all legality with the talk about rights. We are facing a government that has abandoned all legality. If you don’t understand this, you don’t understand the situation we are in.
Giorgio Agamben, conference intervention, Turin, 08/12/2021
We share below an intervention by Giorgio Agamben to students of the University of Venice (21/11/2021).
We thank Lena Bloch for allowing us to post her transcript-translation of Agamben’s words, which appear here with minor revisions.
A revised and written version of the intervention by Agamben is available at Quodlibet. The translation that follows is not of this text.
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Whatever may be the shortcomings of my study, it will make [any revolutionary who reads it] reflect on the necessity of bringing to the next revolution a set of constructive ideas (as well as destructive ones), of thinking them through carefully and pushing for their realisation with great vigour, and to reflect on the means at the people’s disposal to realise those ideas in society.
Peter Kropotkin, L’Idée révolutionnaire dans la Révolution
From Freedom Press, the urgency of thinking through the politics of mutual aid …
In the early days of the pandemic, Freedom put out a call to found mutual aid groups for helping people struggling under lockdown, which went spectacularly viral. Anna K, one of the original organisers of the phenomenon, reflects on lessons learned.
Back in April 2020, I offered five thoughts on the successes and failures of Covid Mutual Aid groups springing up nationwide:
“Anarchism” is just a name- a review of Anarchism and the Black Revolution and The Nation on No Map: Black Anarchism and Abolition
From Freedom Press (13/01/2021), a review of two recently published essays: Anarchism and the Black Revolution, by Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin (Pluto Press) and The Nation on No Map: Black Anarchism and Abolition, by William Anderson (AK Press).
In Summer 2017, as white nationalists prepared to march on Charlottesville, Virginia, the FBI announced its intention to tackle a new and growing menace to public order: a domestic terror movement with an explicitly racial ideology and avowed antipathy towards police. The threat was not the fascist resurgence that would soon leave anti-racist Heather Heyer bleeding to death under the wheels of a Dodge Challenger; or 11 gunned down at the Pittsburgh Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018; or 23 murdered at the El Paso Walmart shooting in 2019. It was the more amorphous and ill-defined threat of ‘Black Identity Extremists’. It is difficult to say with any real certainty who these extremists were. Certainly not the black political establishment who, since the Civil Rights era, had capitalised on moral outrage to cement positions of power and privilege within white supremacist society; nor the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement that, in the years since the 2014 police killing of eighteen-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri had been calling rallies, fighting for accountability within the law, and demanding reforms; nor even the mass of people who turned to the streets in outrage, each time another black person had died as a result of police contact. Black Identity Extremism did not name an organisation, real or potential, so much as a fear – perhaps the fear – constitutive of white American society: the fear of black resistance.
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