From Robert Graham’s Anarchism Weblog, reflections on Peter Kropotkin’s newly published The Great French Revolution, by David Berry …
PM Press is publishing a new edition of Peter Kropotkin’s The Great French Revolution (originally published in 1909), with an introduction by David Berry, who has kindly agreed to let me publish the following excerpts from his introduction to Kropotkin’s classic book to mark Kropotkin’s birthday on December 21, 1842.
For Kropotkin, as for so many others throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the French Revolution was where it all began…
Kropotkin’s claim to originality in The Great French Revolution did not lie in the discovery of previously unknown facts—unable to re-enter France for fear of being arrested, his research was not carried out in the Paris archives, but on published material, almost entirely among the British Museum’s albeit considerable holdings. His originality lay in his method, his approach and in his interpretation. Kropotkin’s background in the natural sciences had an influence on the way he worked and wrote, and he prided himself on this.[1] Not only is his work thoroughly researched and based on evidence gleaned from all the most up-to-date studies, his style is also very different from and notably less lyrical and digressive than that of many nineteenth and early twentieth-century historians, including Jaurès. It is scholarly, but written lucidly, in accessible language and with passion.
A recent article in The Guardian by the north american philosopher, Jason Stanley, offers an informed reading of the emerging fascism in the united states. If we do not embrace Stanley’s liberal politics, what this latter lacks is made up for by his own lucid urgency.
The article also takes us back to an equally or more important intervention against fascism by the writer Toni Morrison, which we share below.
If Morrison wrote first from her experience as a black american, her words describe and analyse fascism as a permanent political possibility in all modern states, for racism is structural to the latter.
It is not that the state is the sole source of violence in human life – such a vision would be a caricature of anarchism -, but what fascism is able to accomplish is the channelling of human fears into state forms, with all of the modern technologies of power at its disposal, to try to create the lethal illusion of human life, of human community purified of evil and death.
Part of the heart of anarchy is, dare to go against the grain of the conventional ways of thinking about our realities. Anarchists have always gone against the grain, and that’s been a place of hope.
bell hooks
bell hooks died this last December 15th, and for all that she contributed to critical theory, and beyond, as a writer, but also for what she engaged with as a witness to and “activist” against patriarchal, racist and capitalist violence, we celebrate her life and what will continue to resonate from it.
If her concerns and her ways of expression seem distant for some anarchists, perhaps the difficulty lies with the anarchists.
In grotesque realism… the bodily element is deeply positive. It is presented not in a private, egoistic form, severed from other spheres of life, but as something universal, representing all the people. As such it is opposed to severance from the material and bodily roots of the world; it makes no pretense to renunciation of the earthy, or independence of the earth and the body. We repeat: the body and bodily life have here a cosmic and at the same time an all-people’s character; this is not the body and its physiology in the modern sense of these words, because it is not individualized. The material bodily principle is contained not in the biological individual, not in the bourgeois ego, but in the people, a people who are continually growing and renewed…. This exaggeration has a positive, assertive character. The leading themes of these images of bodily life are fertility, growth, and a brimming-over abundance. Manifestations of this life refer not to the isolated biological individual, not to the private, egotistic ‘economic man,’ but to the collective ancestral body of all the people.
Mikhail Bakhtin, writing of the grotesque in carnival, Rabelais and His World
Politics is never an excuse. Politics is a situation. Of course, the poor and the rich have always existed, and it is around this that politics was born. It is a situation of contrast, collision, debate, of hatred, and also of love.
Lina Wertmüller, from the short documentary, Lina Wertmüller, une cinéaste d’amour et d’anarchie (Vimeo)
If we may venture a claim about a central idea in the films Lina Wertmüller, it is that they express the impossibility of politics without love – such a politics would be reduced to the management of life and the extraction its energy –, and of love without politics – love is shaped and winnowed through the many layers of relations of power that mark everyday life. It is through this lens that Wertmüller reads political ideologies and human behaviour and agency, a lens that can only reveal and revel in tensions, incoherencies and contradictions. If her films defy ideological purity, to the dismay of her critics, she turns the accusation back on them – for those who are willing to see –, unmasking the demands for “purity” as the greatest form of violence, because it can tolerate no disorder, no wild life, no anarchy.
There is no promise of final resolution or redemption in Wertmüller’s work. Her films are intensely political, but not in the sense of offering up agitprop manifestos or declarations about what is to be done. Instead, she tells stories of individuals struggling to realise themselves against worlds that surpass them, which they never fully understand or even begin to control. They accordingly act blindly, but also in the only way that her characters have learned to struggle in adversity; a struggle that therefore can only be incomplete, contradictory, and forever renewed.
Wertmüller, through what may be called an aesthetics of the grotesque, signals the illusions of human perfectibility and progress, illusions which end in regimes of fear. Before the latter, it is her anarchist “man in disorder” that lights a path.
Lina Wertmüller died this last December 9th. We take this moment to celebrate her art of “love and anarchy”.
I would like to stress my horror at these attempted assassinations. These acts are both evil and stupid as they harm the cause that they are meant to serve… But those assassins are also saints and heroes… When their extreme gesture is forgotten, we shall celebrate the ideal which inspired them.
A breath of African air sweeps them [the Visigoths] from the Peninsula (…) I will be told that, despite this, we knew how to complete our glorious eight centuries of Reconquest. And to this I naively reply that I do not understand how you can call “reconquista” a thing that lasts eight centuries.
José Ortega y Gasset, España invertebrada
Not only are the psychological situations of the democratic collectivities, like any human situation, transitory, but it remains possible to envision, at least as a yet imprecise representation, forms of attraction that differ from those already in existence, as different from present or even past communism as fascism is from dynastic claims. A system of knowledge that permits the anticipation of the affective social reactions that traverse the superstructure and perhaps even, to a certain extent, do away with it, must be developed from one of these possibilities. The fact of fascism, which has thrown the very existence of a workers’ movement into question, clearly demonstrates what can be expected from a timely recourse to reawakened affective forces. Unlike the situation during the period of utopian socialism, morality and idealism are no more the questions today than they are in fascist forms. Rather, an organized understanding of the movements in society, of attraction and repulsion, starkly presents itself as a weapon – at this moment when a vast convulsion opposes, not so much fascism to communism, but radical imperative forms to the deep subversion which continues to pursue the emancipation of human lives.
Georges Bataille, The Psychological Structure of Fascism
Within a period of a week, Éric Zemmour, a radical french nationalist journalist and essayist, announced his candidacy in the country’s upcoming presidential elections (30/11/2021) and the creation of a political organisation named the “Reconquête” (05/12/2021).
On both occasions, his speeches offered disturbing text-book examples of fascist discourse, with a theatricality uncommon in contemporary institutional politics.
His words are carefully chosen, but violent, in both their meaning and their consequences. He presents himself as the paladin of the French People, a people with glorious – political, cultural, scientific, economic – past, but past that has been undermined, shattered by a confluence of globalising elites, transnational political authorities and laws, an anti-patriotic left, a gluttonous national tax regime and inflated administrative bureaucracies, de-industrialisation and impoverishment, the loss of criteria of merit and excellence in education, social fragmentation, the destruction of the traditional family, and the “colonisation” of the country by those who would refuse to accept the nation’s values and culture.
If the enemies are not new, forming part of the repertoire of fascist ideology, the explicit targeting of feminism and LGBTQIA advocacy gives a contemporary form to the ideology’s traditional defence of patriarchy. To this is added the figure of the foreign welfare-state beneficiary and, above all, the non-assimilated or non-assimilable muslim. For this last, there are but two options: either accept assimilation or leave.
For Zemmour, the task of French politics today is not to reform practices, institutions or laws, but to save france and the french nation from destruction and eradication. For a thousand years, the french people, Zemmour tells us, have been a beacon to the worlds’s nations. Zemmour promises that it will continue to be so for another thousand years.
La elipse de un grito, va de monte a monte. Desde los olivos, será un arco iris negro sobre la noche azul. ¡Ay! Como un arco de viola, el grito ha hecho vibrar largas cuerdas del viento. ¡Ay! (Las gentes de las cuevas asoman sus velones) ¡Ay!
Federico García Lorca
Suggest an idea for us to improve the cultural situation.
To eliminate the word culture as an institutional concept, to think it and live it as a daily and common experience.
… I betray my public constantly. I am immersed in a permanent process of metamorphosis, and as a consequence, my attitudes, my methods and my ideologies are continually reformulated.
Reading the music of Francisco Contreras Molina, known as Niño de Elche, through Giorgio Agamben[1] …
The western history of art is trapped in an aporia, caught between the poetic (poeisis) and the activity (praxis). In the first instance, art is centred in the work created, in the oeuvre, whereas in the second, in the activity itself, in the artist as agent.
We share below an interview for the danish magazine Eftertryk with Poyâ Pâkzâd and Benjamin Magnusson in October 2021. The interview has also been published by Jacobin magazine and the conversation is also available on youtube (see below).
We return to the imprisonment and trial of Nikos Mataragkas and Giorgos Kalaitzidis, thorough news from Yannis Youlountas‘ blog …
Back from the Tribunal, we have just met at the K*Vox with members of the group and the support committee.
ANARCHISTS 7-0 GREEK STATE ? THANKS FOR ALL THE SUPPORT!
Today we witnessed a magnificent, complete and final victory in this trial which has revealed itself to be a plot of the state against two members of Rouvikonas.
Giorgos and Nikos risked life imprisonment this morning for murder, on the basis of false testimony. But the prosecution witnesses exposed the police manipulations and the prosecution changed sides: power was exposed in its desire to violently neutralise the Greek anarchist group by classifying it among criminal organisations.
Today, Giorgos and Nikos are free and the Rouvikonas group is strengthened. As the many messages that reach us show, the entire social movement recognizes itself in this victory, which is also its own, in the face of a Machiavellian and unscrupulous power. This victory has no borders either: it is also yours, you who, at more than 2,000 km distance, are mobilised in various ways, in support of this crucial struggle.
A big thank you to all the support we received from all over the world, proof once again that we are everywhere!
Our utopias are alive, resistant and persevering! A day will come when the thieves of life will be stripped of their pedestal and the common interest will guide our thoughtful and concerted choices. A day will come when we will move from the noun “power” to the verb “can”, from the domination of others to the ability to freely choose our lives. A day will come when collective intelligence will put an end to the agony of the Earth and those who inhabit it.
Only those who give up have already lost. There is no need to despair, but to act decisively to denounce the absurdity of authoritarian society and the collective suicide that is capitalism. We are the side of life against that of death. It is we who authentically carry the motto Liberty-Equality-Fraternity, and not the political leaders who usurp these words, because we offer concrete freedom, real equality and universal fraternity.
This morning, at the end of the three sessions of the trial, the 3 judges and the 4 jurors all declared Giorgos and Nikos innocent: our comrades in the struggle were acquitted unanimously. This 7-0 victory allows us to rule out any possibility of an appeal by the prosecution. The victory is therefore final. We will celebrate this evening and tomorrow with you in mind!
Thank you again! The struggle continues !
The international support committee of Giorgos and Nikos, Exarcheia on November 25, 2021.
We translated and published our first post dedicated to the Federación Anarquista Gran Canaria in May of 2013. We have since tried modestly and from a distance to follow the remarkable activity of those who have made the Federación and its anarchism a living reality, and this in ways that are today uncommon.
We share below a translation from the UK based magazine Organise! (06/08/2021) of a chronicle of and reflection on the Federación in what is this year, its tenth anniversary. (For the original spanish language text, click here).
Amador Fernández-Savater has written the book La fuerza de los débiles with the desire to understand what happened to 15M and after 15M and to thereby analyze the current world, to continue looking for ways to understand politics. For this, he has made use of the Prussian military man and philosopher Carl von Clausewitz to think about war, strategy, force.
“I was intrigued to know how people who had nothing were able to challenge Napoleon in Spain, for example. Where do those without weapons, technology, power, money, armies draw their strength?”, he explains. That is what his new book is about: how sometimes, throughout history, the weak are capable of transforming the state of things.
Fernández-Savater talks about his new work with elDiario.es in a square in central Madrid, in a spontaneous conversation, with what he would call “thinking on the move.”
David Berry: Kropotkin’s Great French Revolution
From Robert Graham’s Anarchism Weblog, reflections on Peter Kropotkin’s newly published The Great French Revolution, by David Berry …
PM Press is publishing a new edition of Peter Kropotkin’s The Great French Revolution (originally published in 1909), with an introduction by David Berry, who has kindly agreed to let me publish the following excerpts from his introduction to Kropotkin’s classic book to mark Kropotkin’s birthday on December 21, 1842.
For Kropotkin, as for so many others throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the French Revolution was where it all began…
Kropotkin’s claim to originality in The Great French Revolution did not lie in the discovery of previously unknown facts—unable to re-enter France for fear of being arrested, his research was not carried out in the Paris archives, but on published material, almost entirely among the British Museum’s albeit considerable holdings. His originality lay in his method, his approach and in his interpretation. Kropotkin’s background in the natural sciences had an influence on the way he worked and wrote, and he prided himself on this.[1] Not only is his work thoroughly researched and based on evidence gleaned from all the most up-to-date studies, his style is also very different from and notably less lyrical and digressive than that of many nineteenth and early twentieth-century historians, including Jaurès. It is scholarly, but written lucidly, in accessible language and with passion.
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