Anarchy among india’s farmers: The story of an insurrection against the state

Posted on November 21, 2021 by Julius Gavroche

From the CrimethInc. collective (19/11/2021) …

In the following report, Pranav Jeevan P1 explores the conflict between the farmers and the far-right government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the character of the movement that the farmers initiated, and the means by which they triumphed.

“People shouldn’t be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.”

-Alan Moore, V for Vendetta

Farmers in India have won a historic victory against state efforts to privatize the agricultural sector for corporate exploitation. The authoritarian right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi finally had to bow before the farmers’ protests, accepting the demand to repeal the three anti-farmer laws. The success of the year-long farmers’ struggle shows that horizontal, self-organized, decentralized protests can involve hundreds of thousands of people—that they can persist against tremendous obstacles—that they can triumph even against determined authoritarian regimes.

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The “forgotten fight” for prison abolition in France

Posted on November 14, 2021 by Julius Gavroche

I am often asked — What reforms of prison I should propose; but now, as twenty-five years ago, I really do not see how prisons could be reformed. They must be pulled down.

Peter Kropotkin, Prisons: Universities of Crime

There is not a single penal institution or reformatory in the United States where men are not tortured “to be made good,” by means of the black-jack, the club, the strait-jacket, the water-cure, the “humming bird” (an electrical contrivance run along the human body), the solitary, the bull-ring, and starvation diet. In these institutions his will is broken, his soul degraded, his spirit subdued by the deadly monotony and routine of prison life. In Ohio, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Missouri, and in the South, these horrors have become so flagrant as to reach the outside world, while in most other prisons the same Christian methods still prevail. But prison walls rarely allow the agonized shrieks of the victims to escape – prison walls are thick, they dull the sound. Society might with greater immunity abolish all prisons at once, than to hope for protection from these twentieth-century chambers of horrors.

Emma Goldman, Prisons: A Social Crime and Failure

The vilest deeds like poison weeds
Bloom well in prison-air:
It is only what is good in Man
That wastes and withers there:
Pale Anguish keeps the heavy gate,
And the Warder is Despair.

Oscar Wilde, The Ballad of Reading Gaol

From Roarmag (13/11/2021) …

The “forgotten fight” for prison abolition in France

Jacques Lesage de La Haye and Scott Branson

When I saw that Jaccques Lesage de La Haye had a new book called The Abolition of Prison, published by the French radical press, Éditions Libertalia, I reached out through my anarchist radio networks to find contact information for him. Jacques is a longtime anarchist and abolitionist in France, who for many years hosted the anti-prison radio show Ras les murs. His book promised to be a culmination of all of his experience writing and struggling against prisons and working to support people both inside and outside.

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Leo Tolstoy: Reading the ecological crisis as the sign of slavery

Posted on November 13, 2021 by Julius Gavroche

Electric lights and telephones and exhibitions are excellent, and so are all the pleasure-gardens, with concerts and performances, and all the cigars, and match-boxes, and braces, and motor cars, but they may all go to perdition, and not they alone, but the railways, and all the factory-made chintz stuffs and cloths in the world, if to produce them it is necessary that 99 per cent. of the people should remain in slavery and perish by thousands in factories needed for the production of these articles. If, in order that London or Petersburg may be lighted by electricity, or in order to construct exhibition buildings, or in order that there may be beautiful paints, or in order to weave beautiful stuffs quickly and abundantly, it is necessary that even a very few lives should be destroyed, or ruined, or shortened — and statistics show us how many are destroyed — let London or Petersburg rather be lit by gas or oil; let there rather be no exhibition, no paints, or materials, only let there be no slavery, and no destruction of human lives resulting from it. Truly enlightened people will always agree rather to go back to riding on horses and using pack-horses, or even to tilling the earth with sticks or with one’s hands, than to travel on railways which regularly every year crush so many people as is done in Chicago merely because the proprietors of the railway find it more profitable to compensate the families of those killed than to build the line so that it should not kill people. The motto for truly enlightened people is not fiat cultura, pereat justitia, but fiat justitia, pereat cultura.

But culture, useful culture, will not be destroyed. Let justice be done, though the world perish. It will certainly not be necessary for people to revert to tillage of the land with sticks or to lighting up with torches. It is not for nothing that mankind, in their slavery, have achieved such great progress in technical matters. If only it is understood that we must not sacrifice the lives of our fellow-men for our pleasure, it will be possible to apply technical improvements without destroying men’s lives, and to arrange life so as to profit by all such methods giving us control of nature as have been devised and can be applied without keeping our brother men in slavery.

Leo Tolstoy, The Slavery of Our Times

If we occasionally turn our attention to the COP26 (strangely standing for the “Conference of the Parties”, and now the 26th, and counting) summit in Glasgow, it is difficult to describe how one feels or thinks before this gathering of the “powerful” to whom we are supposed to hand over our fate as a species. To take seriously what is repeatedly described as “our last chance” is to see that we have no chance at all. And how could anyone ever expect those whose power and wealth depends on the ever expanding exploitation of nature to render that exploitation “sustainable”, even if we did know what this last might mean? Indeed, as was always the case, “sustainability” only gains substance or content as a concept when we ask whose and what kind of sustainability is at issue. And when the question is raised, we understand immediately that what is at stake is not the sustainability of hunter-gatherers or peasants, but of those who live or aspire to live, as one can, in the “developed world” (the  islands or oasis of wealth which pepper the globe and overlap any narrow, national borders).

Let us borrow a page from Leo Tolstoy: ours is a world of generalised slavery.

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Solidarity with Gabriel Pombo da Silva and all anarchist prisoners

Posted on November 9, 2021 by Julius Gavroche

‘There is nothing to reform’

(words from Gabriel Pombo da Silvia via culmine, translated by war on society and published with the Anarchist Library):

I am not so naive as to believe that what I am living here is something exceptional… and since “the prisoners” are not born here but come from a very concrete social context I do not look for the directly responsible “only” among the salaried jailers and the jailing administration which, in the end, reproduce on a microcosmic scale the politics and the ignobilities of the System and its “Society”… There is nothing to reform; everything must be demolished down to the foundations…

They are mistaken who believe (or imagine) that my radicality comes from the indigestion of “utopias” and various “theories”… actually, in the end and from the beginning I owe “my radicality” to the System and its miserable Society… or, if someone wants to look for the “theorists” responsible for my radicality, they can start in the offices of Department of Corrections and leave in peace the poets of the dynamite…

(…)

For me, I have never been left indifferent to the beggars who fill the metropolis, those who, brutalized by a whole life of wage slavery end their days taking refuge in programmed leisure activities, alcohol and/or drugs… or those who, in order to survive, sell their bodies to satisfy the pleasure of those who can buy bodies as if they were commodities… but it has not been all this legion of miserable and exploited who have filled me with the strength, inspiration and dignity necessary to combat the system that generates all this… for that my brothers in struggle are responsible: some were “bandits” and others were revolutionaries… that is the fundamental difference between the majority of “anarchists” and me… I do not need “excuses” and revolutionary “subjects” in order to confront the System… I hate the System because it taught me to hate it… and in this path of frontal war against the System I am learning who are my accomplices and who are my enemies, beyond “isms” and “conceptualizations”…

Aachen, July 2011

Gabriel Pombo Da Silva, más de 30 años preso por venganza política e institucional

Exigimos al Estado español la aplicación de sus propias leyes y el cese de esta venganza que descubre la arbitrariedad del autodenominado “Estado de derecho”. El sistema ejecuta una vez más, una venganza institucional y política. Compañero, no estás solo, esta lucha es de todas, es de todos.

We demand that the Spanish state apply its own laws and put an end to this revenge that reveals the arbitrariness of the self-styled “rule of law”. The system is once again executing institutional and political revenge. Compañero, you are not alone, this struggle belongs to all of us, it belongs to everyone.

(From the CNT AIT Cartagena 03/11/2021 and a las barricadas)

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For Albert Camus

Posted on November 7, 2021 by Julius Gavroche

I love beauty, happiness! That’s why I hate tyranny. How can I explain it to them? The revolution, of course! But a revolution for life, to give people a chance at life, understand?

Albert Camus, The Just

With rebellion, awareness is born.

Albert Camus, The Rebel

For more than twenty years of an insane history, hopelessly lost like all the men of my generation in the convulsions of time, I have been supported by one thing: by the hidden feeling that to write today was an honour because this activity was a commitment – and a commitment not only to write. Specifically, in view of my powers and my state of being, it was a commitment to bear, together with all those who were living through the same history, the misery and the hope we shared. These men, who were born at the beginning of the First World War, who were twenty when Hitler came to power and the first revolutionary trials were beginning, who were then confronted as a completion of their education with the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War, the world of concentration camps, a Europe of torture and prisons – these men must today rear their sons and create their works in a world threatened by nuclear destruction. Nobody, I think, can ask them to be optimists. And I even think that we should understand – without ceasing to fight it – the error of those who in an excess of despair have asserted their right to dishonour and have rushed into the nihilism of the era. But the fact remains that most of us, in my country and in Europe, have refused this nihilism and have engaged upon a quest for legitimacy. They have had to forge for themselves an art of living in times of catastrophe in order to be born a second time and to fight openly against the instinct of death at work in our history.

Albert Camus, Speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1957

Albert Camus was born on November 7th, 1913. If the occasion provides us with an excuse to share an excerpt from his essay, The Rebel (1951), this is only partially so, for Camus’ thought remains a central element in our own thinking. And The Rebel continues to resonate, beyond its fragilities.

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The Legacy of Peter Kropotkin

Posted on November 7, 2021 by Julius Gavroche

Disorder is the blossoming of the most beautiful passions and the greatest of devotions, it is the epic of supreme human love.

Peter Kropotkin, Words of a Rebel

Struggle! To struggle is to live, and the fiercer the struggle the intenser the life.

Peter Kropotkin, Anarchist Morality

Words from the anarchist historian and militant, Frank Mintz …

Current society and the pandemic, as seen from a few reflections of Kropotkin

(El salto diario, 02/11/2021)

The analysis of society that we find in Peter Kropotkin’s essays gives us elements to better understand our world, as well as the effects derived from the pandemic.

Long before the pandemic, it was possible to observe a detail that defines our world: 6 million children between 1 and 5 years of age die each year due to lack of access to food and drugs, and this setting aside the mortality of adolescents and adults. It is a figure that is much lower than that of the period of the 50s and 60s. However, if we take these 6 million between 1948 and 2018, in seventy years the mortality represents 420 million people. This total is three times more than the mortality of the two world wars of the 20th century. The first caused 10 million combatants killed and another 50 million civilians. The second was worse, with 20 million combatants and 47 million civilians killed, including the 20 million from Nazism among Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and political dissidents.

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Attica is all of us: 50 years after the rebellion

Posted on November 1, 2021 by Julius Gavroche

We are firm in our resolve and we demand, as human beings, the dignity and justice that is due to us by our right of birth. We do not know how the present system of brutality and dehumanization and injustice has been allowed to be perpetrated in this day of enlightenment, but we are the living proof of its existence and we cannot allow it to continue.

Attica Manifesto 1971

The need, the very urgent need to join our sisters and brothers behind bars in their struggle was brought home during the rebellion and the massacre at Attica last year.

And I would like to close by reading a brief passage from a set of reflections I wrote in Marin County Jail upon hearing of the Attica revolt and massacre.

“The damage has been done, scores of men – some yet nameless – are dead. Unknown numbers are wounded. By now it would seem more people should realize that such explosions of repression are not isolated aberrations in a society not terribly disturbing. For we have witnessed Birmingham and Orangeburg, Jackson State, Kent State, My Lai and San Quentin August 21. The list is unending.

“None of these explosions emerged out of nothing. Rather, they all crystallized and attested to profound and extensive social infirmities.

“But Attica was different from these other episodes in one very important respect. For this time the authorities were indicted by the very events themselves; they were caught red-handed in their lies. They were publicly exposed when to justify that massacre – a massacre which was led by Governor Rockefeller and agreed to by President Nixon – when they hastened to falsify what had occurred.

“Perhaps this in itself has pulled greater numbers of people from their socially-inflicted slumber. Many have already expressed outrage, but outrage is not enough. Governments and prison bureaucracies must be subjected to fears and unqualified criticism for their harsh and murderous repression. But even this is not enough, for this is not yet the root of the matter. People must take a forthright stand in active support of prisoners and their grievances. They must try to comprehend the eminently human content of prisoners’ stirrings and struggles. For it is justice that we seek, and many of us can already envision a world unblemished by poverty and alienation, one where the prison would be but a vague memory, a relic of the past.”

Angela Davis, Speech delivered at the Embassy Auditorium, Los Angeles, California – June 9, 1972

1971: The Attica prison uprising

Against the background of the mass revolutionary, black power and prisoners’ movements in the US, a five day revolt began on September 9, 1971 at the Attica Correctional Facility near Buffalo, NY in the United States. Its repression left 39 people killed.

“If we can’t live as men, we sure as hell can die as men”
– Attica prisoner

In 1970 the National Guard had gunned down unarmed students protesting against the Vietnam War at Jackson State and Kent State Universities. Armed guards smashed a Teamsters truckers’ strike. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King had both been murdered. When George Jackson, Black Panther and political prisoner was murdered at San Quentin by the guards on August 21, 1971, his book “Soledad Brother” was being passed from prisoner to prisoner, tensions were running mounting. A prisoners’ rights movement was growing.

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Remembering the Kronstadt Rebellion (VII)

Posted on October 26, 2021 by Julius Gavroche
Moscow. Lev Trotsky, Vladimir Lenin and Lev Kamenev (L-R).

(On the 100th anniversary of the Kronstadt events, New Politics is hosting a symposium on the historic tragedy, its meaning and significance, and its implications for today’s socialists. We are posting articles by Alexei Gusev, Samuel Clarke, Paul Le Blanc, Daniel Fischer, and Tom Harrison. -Eds.)

Beyond Kronstadt

Paul Le Blanc (New Politics, 12/10/2021)

One must go beyond Kronstadt to understand Kronstadt. One must grasp, first of all, the struggle for human liberation and the hope of Communism.i

From revolutionary Russia in October 1917, John Reed, sent a cable back to his socialist comrades in the United States: “The rank and file of the Workmen’s, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Councils are in control, with Lenin and Trotsky leading. Their program is to give the land to the peasants, to socialize natural resources and industry and for an armistice and democratic peace conference…. No one is with the Bolsheviki except the proletariat, but that is solidly with them. All the bourgeoisie and appendages are relentlessly hostile.” Two years later, Reed’s classic account Ten Days That Shook the World explained: “The only reason for Bolshevik success lay in their accomplishing the vast and simple desires of the most profound strata of the people, calling them to the work of tearing down and destroying the old, and afterward, in the smoke of falling ruins, cooperating with them to erect the frame-work of the new.”ii

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Remembering the Kronstadt Rebellion (VI)

Posted on October 26, 2021 by Julius Gavroche

(On the 100th anniversary of the Kronstadt events, New Politics is hosting a symposium on the historic tragedy, its meaning and significance, and its implications for today’s socialists. We are posting articles by Alexei Gusev, Samuel Clarke, Paul Le Blanc, Daniel Fischer, and Tom Harrison. -Eds.)

Kronstadt, an Unavoidable Tragedy?

Samuel Clarke (New Politics, 08/10/2021)

In March 1921, a commune of sailors known as the “pride and glory” of the Russian Revolution, turned against the Bolsheviks they had helped into power some four years earlier. Despite having only lasted 16 days before being crushed quite easily by the Red Army, their defeat has had an enduring legacy. In the ensuing debates over that legacy, two primary questions come to the fore:

“Were the sailors right to rebel against Bolshevik rule?’

And:

“Were the Bolsheviks right to suppress the sailors in order to maintain order?”

My controversial answer to both questions is yes. Not because of any moral considerations, but a consideration of the group-interest of both sides of the conflict, and the material relations which govern that interest. As the historian of the Kronstadt rebellion Paul Avrich puts it:

“Throughout the conflict each side behaved in accordance with its own particular goals and aspirations. To say this is not to deny the necessity of moral judgement. Yet Kronstadt presents a situation in which the historian can sympathize with the rebels and still concede that the Bolsheviks were justified in subduing them. To recognize this, indeed, is to grasp the full tragedy of Kronstadt.”i

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Remembering the Kronstadt Rebellion (V)

Posted on October 26, 2021 by Julius Gavroche

(On the 100th anniversary of the Kronstadt events, New Politics is hosting a symposium on the historic tragedy, its meaning and significance, and its implications for today’s socialists. We are posting articles by Alexei Gusev, Samuel Clarke, Paul Le Blanc, Daniel Fischer, and Tom Harrison. -Eds.)

The Kronstadt Revolt of 1921 as a part of the Great Russian Revolution

Alexei Gusev (New Politics, 04/10/2021)

On March 8th 1921 “Izvestia of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee of Kronstadt’s sailors, Red Army soldiers and workers” published the declaration “What we are fighting for?”, where the nature of Kronstadt revolt against Communist party dictatorship was defined in the following way: “Here in Kronstadt has been laid the first stone of the third revolution, striking the last fetters from the laboring masses and opening a broad new road for socialist creativity. This new revolution will also rouse the laboring masses of the East and of the West, by serving as an example of the new socialist construction as opposed to the bureaucratic Communist ‘creativity’1. Thus, the March revolution of 1921, initiated by “Red Kronstadt”, had to complete the cause of the February and October revolutions of 1917.

But not only rebels used the notion of the “third revolution”. A day before, on March 7th, a representative of the opposite side, Plenipotentiary of the Special Section of the All-Russian Cheka Vasilii Sevei reported to War Commissar Leon Trotsky: “These sailors [of the Baltic Fleet] were and still are professional revolutionaries and could well form the basis for a possible third revolution”2.

Was the “third revolution” just a rhetorical phrase, or had any real foundations in 1921?

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