… anarchism is not an imaginary dream, but a reality which gives logic and a realistic sense to the revolt of the human spirit against violence. To be anarchist one does not have to speak of fictions such as “absolute, unlimited liberty” and the negation of duty and responsibility. The eternal contradiction, the incompatibility of the individual and society, is insoluable, because it is rooted in the nature of man himself, in his need for independence and his need for society.
Let us openly admit that anarchism admits social norms. The norms of a free society resemble neither in spirit nor in form the laws of contemporary society, the bourgeois society, the capitalist society. Neither do they resemble the decrees of a socialist dictatorship.
These norms will not seek the detachment of the individual from the collectivity, neither will they serve such abstractions as a “common good” to which the individual must sacrifice himself. Anarchist norms will not be a torrent of decrees from a higher authority. They will1 come organically from the restlessness of the spirit which feels in itself the force of creation, the thirst for the creative act, for the realization of its desires in forms accessible to men.
The guarantee of this order of things will be the responsibility for our own liberty and for the liberty of others. Like all social orders, it will have to be defended. The concrete forms of this defense cannot be indicated in advance. They will correspond to the concrete needs of the society at the given moment.
The journal New Politics hosted a symposium on their pages dedicated to the Kronstadt rebellion of 1921. Earlier this year, in March, we shared a number of essays devoted to the same event. And given the significance of the rebellion and its violent suppression by the Bolshevik government, we return to it through the essays published in New Politics.
The repeated publication of essays presented in a socialist journal of Marxist inspiration may raise some eyebrows among anarchists. Among the contributions to the symposium, we can read judgements or conclusions which would seem to beset above all state-centred socialists and not anarchists.
Socialists committed to moving beyond tragedy will need to unbury Kronstadt and address its causes, its impact, and its suppression from the local to transnational levels. An open-minded reading of the symposium’s diverse contributions may help us build a non-sectarian Left … . To avoid repeating the Kronstadt tragedy, and to build toward principled world revolution, we can commit to organizing transnational solidarity and speaking out against all forms of authoritarian repression.
Kronstadt was truly an unavoidable tragedy, a course of events set in place by the dynamics of a centralized revolution and a state at war. If we are to learn our lesson, we will build a social system that can incorporate dissent, and one which can function with decentralized command. And if we are to truly learn our lesson, we will get to it right now.
If one remains committed to the revolutionary Marxist project of actually building organizations, movements, and struggles that can change the world for the better, then to “go beyond Kronstadt” will have an additional meaning: learning from the accomplishments, the mistakes and the tragedies of comrades who came before us, with a commitment to do better in advancing and winning the struggle for a better world.
And yet it is small comfort to think that anarchists, because they believe that revolution must strike first at the state, can altogether avoid the question power, of political power. Emma Goldman, in her evaluation of the significant but ultimately unsuccessful role of anarchists in the Russian revolution, could write “honesty and sincerity compel me to state that their work would have been of infinitely greater practical value had they been better organized and equipped to guide the released energies of the people toward the reorganization of life on a libertarian foundation.”(emphasis mine) (My Disillusionment in Russia) It is the expression “to guide”, however qualified by Goldman’s insistence on the “libertarian principle” of the revolution in its early days and its defeat by Bolshevik governmentalism and centralism, as well as by her defence of the inseparability of political means and ends, that inevitably and quietly force the question of power upon anarchists. What can “to guide” mean in a revolutionary situation if not to assume some kind of power?
In an online conference organised in March of this year Kronstadt as Revolutionary Utopia, 1921-2021 and Beyond, Dmitriy Buchenkow contends that anarchists have historically failed to adequately confront the question of power, its origin, its organisation, its diversity, its inescapability in some form, in all social life. To simply say that anarchists reject power, whatever this might mean, is a grotesque over simplification. To put the issue simply, in the form of a dilemma, quoting Buchenkow: “When anarchists gain dominance in politics, they are forced to use power to consolidate their dominant position”. And the dilemma can be posed regardless of the scale of a social organisation.
The questions therefore that socialists face before the Kronstadt rebellion are not in the end significantly different from those that anarchists must confront, even if the latter’s point of departure – the rejection of state-centred power – is distinct.
It is with this thought in mind that we then share the essays on the Kronstadt rebellion of 1921 published in the New Politics‘ symposium, beginning with the last, and then posting the first three in their order of publication.
From the Lundi matin collective (#308, 11/10/2021), a text-intervention by Jean-Marc Royer …
La critique d’un ordre social et politique a besoin d’une perspective, d’un horizon de sens pour parvenir à problématiser les analyses; le seul point de vue qui vaille en ces domaines, c’est celui de l’émancipation humaine.
Jean-Marc Royer, Le monde comme projet Manhattan
The Historiography of Misery and the Misery of Historiography
1. Contrary to a thriving European-centred vision, capital accumulation began around 1470 with the expropriation of African peasants and not with the movement of enclosures in England. These slaves were the first proletarians hired in thermo-industrial production in Sao-Tomé, an island that would become the most important world sugar market in the sixteenth century.
An interview for the spanish newspaper, El Salto diario (05/10/2021) …
The Canarian anarchist activist Ruymán Rodríguez visits the Valencian Community, invited by the Mostra del Llibre Anarquista d’Alacant, to share the work carried out by the Sindicato de Inquilinas and the Federación Anarquista de Gran Canaria.
Visiting the southeast of the peninsula last weekend, his first stop was Murcia and from there he travelled to Alicante. Being cities that by train are just over half an hour from each other, he decided to make the hour and a half journey by bus so as not to support scabbing during the Renfe machinists’ strike that began on September 30. Ruymán Rodríguez spoke to El Salto shortly before the start of the presentation of the Mostra del Llibre Anarquista d’Alacant, whose different events will take place during the month of October in the capital of the province. The presentation on Saturday, focused on the theme of the fight for the right to housing, closed with his intervention.
What follows is a translation of an essay on subjectivity and rebellion in the context of capitalism by Martín Colonel, inspired by the work of León Rozitchner and published on the site Lobo Suelto, preceded by a brief introduction.
Lenin Statue from Theo Angelopoulos’ Ulysses Gaze (1995)
This post was born of an exchange of letters between John Holloway and Michael Hardt that focused on the issue of “anti-capitalist social movements” and their “organisation” and “institutionalisation”. The letters date from 2011, but their subject remains contemporary, as does the much older “exchange” between anarchism and Marxism by which we introduce the letters.
SUPPORT FOR GIORGOS KALAITZIDIS AND NIKOS MATARAGKAS OF THE ROUVIKONAS GROUP
Two years after the tremendous outpouring of solidarity without borders which enabled two members of Rouvikonas to avoid prison, a new threat of unprecedented magnitude hangs over the group. A Kafkaesque trial awaits Giorgos and Nikos on October 13, based on false accusations. This attempt to criminalise the social movement can cost these two political activists life imprisonment. Their group, however irreproachable and exemplary, has obviously become too awkward. A new international mobilisation is needed.
Among the many incarnations of ecological practice and theory is a view calling for a more “natural” way of life, or more emphatically, a “return to nature” against “civilisation”, in all of its different manifestations: technology, education, society, and so on. It only takes however a moment of thought to realise that this “return” is anything but clear, for it is neither obvious what we are supposed to return to nor how.
The theoretical work of the philosopher Yuk Hui provides an ensemble of concepts – most notably, “cosmotechnics” and “technodiversity” – that may serve as tools to rethink a radical ecology and radical politics more generally.
This post is a much delayed one for us, for we take Hui’s work as a major contribution to understanding the many parallel and overlapping crises of our time. We share below an interview with Yuk Hui for the french magazine, Ballast (09/07/2020).
In recent months, an astonishing social phenomenon has accompanied the Covid 19 epidemic in the United States. Hundreds of thousands of workers are leaving their jobs. The figure topped four million in April 2021 and has continued to increase at a steady pace ever since. We now call the phenomenon: “The great resignation”. In the land of “free enterprise” and the “invisible hand”, the motivations are not easy to grasp and their extent is questionable. Charles Reeve tries to unearth here what this wave of resignations can mean. His introduction is followed by an interview conducted by the American site Hard Crackers with a psychotherapist who resigned this summer.
As a project, yes. Projection, planning and programming have never done anything but project what it was possible to calculate at a given moment. And consequently, they block the image of a future already hemmed in. Of course, it is necessary to predict and calculate: but we must first manage to see what must be seen and therefore fore-seen. Should we project more cars? Vehicles with different energies but with the same principle of quasi-individual travel? Not cars but other forms of transport? What ones? For what kind of city? What kind of journey? We quickly find ourselves beyond the projectable and the possible. But it’s always a question of something beyond the possible! The burgher of 1430 had no idea what would happen in 1492, when Columbus reached an ‘American’ island. And in 1930, we had little idea of Europe and the world in 1992. Which is not to say that nothing should be done: we should be careful, but careful of what is not visible, not recognisable, not formed…
Jean-Luc Nancy, (interview: L’Humanité, 28 August 2013)
The act of remembrance is not for us, as we so often repeat, one of simple commemoration, nor of retrospective evaluation: was an event, a movement, a revolt, a revolution, significant? The question begs criteria, criteria of what is politically and socially important, which is in turn judged according to “measurable” changes in what exists.
Judgements of this nature however submit and are confined to what is, to existing social relations, institutions, authorities. Politics are gauged by the extent to which these later may be pushed, altered, changed. In other words, it is to engage in reformist (i.e., accepted, legal, institutionalised) politics (or the flipside, opposition to the same) and to thereby accept the existing frame, and therefore limits, of that politics. (A “revolutionary politics” whose ambition is to overthrow what exists and create something against it, can, by this light, also be called “reformist”). A “true radical” politics is then assessed in terms of efficacy, of a possible future projected from what presently exists. The realisable future is thereby defined by the present and any other politics is deemed impracticable and illusory, both at the level of means (method, practice) and ends (utopia).
What is absent from such a politics is what is not, what is not socially evident, what is not politically taken for granted; more positively, what is imaginable, what can be fantasised, dreamed, invented, discovered. It is all of this which reformism sets aside in the name of effective realism.
Leon Trotsky records in his political autobiography, My Life, an encounter – his first – with an anarchist named Luzin.
The first time I ever met a living anarchist was in the Moscow transfer prison. He was a village school-teacher, Luzin, a man reserved and uncommunicative, even cruel. In prison he always preferred to be with the criminals and would listen intently to their tales of robbery and murder. He avoided discussions of theory. But once when I pressed him to tell me how railways would be managed by autonomous communities, he answered: “Why the hell should I want to travel on rail ways under anarchism?” That answer was enough for me. (Leon Trotsky, My Life, 1930)
Trotsky’s contempt for the anarchist is that of the judge of history and of real politics; it is the contempt of the dictator – political, but also ethical and cognitive.
It is in this same spirit that the “occupy movement” of the united states, born with the occupation Zuccotti Park on the 17th of September, 2011, in New York City, as Occupy Wall Street, is judged and condemned: it failed in its goals (in effect, it changed nothing), it was inept in its means (e.g., occupation, horizontal-consensual decision making, absence of leaders and political programme) and bequeaths no lasting legacy.
It is not our intention to invert this judgement by for example recalling the impact of Occupy on the political party debate in the country – which it did and does have -, nor to cite its many afterlives in ongoing political engagements and activity – and they are abundant. Even less is it a call for some new form of organisation – inevitably, a political party with leadership and programme, capable of giving shape to the multitude in struggle on a large enough scale to confront global capital (e.g., in the guise of “reformed” social democratic parties, populist-Left parties, neo-Leninism, and the like).
And if one may point to the obvious: these last examples have been realised nowhere and if they are are to be judged by historical precedent, they will most likely end in monumental and tragic failure. And, furthermore, it is by no means obvious that, by contrast, the small scale, plural, anti-authoritarian, autonomous “micro-politics” fare worse, even by the same criteria of evaluation.
The so-much decried “Occupy-like” radical politics of the last twenty or thirty years – and one may perhaps trace it as far back as the 1960s – may indeed be burdened by all the fragilities that state-centred “radical” politics contends, but only when estimated against a metamorphosis of the present. But if it is the present that is to be questioned and contested, then any radical politics must root itself in the imagination, in a historical and materialist imagination where the past, the many pasts and presents, remain open and permanent possibilities. It then becomes meaningful, as it must, to say with Trotsky’s “first anarchist”, “Why the hell should I want to travel on rail ways under anarchism?”
What the occupation of the squares of 2011 created was the fragile space-time in which this openness appeared. That this open space-time was not secured, made stable, institutionalised was a failure, but it has been the failure – if we must speak of successes and failures – of all “revolutions” hitherto. Was the Paris Commune of 1871 a failure? Its violent repression would suggest as much. But to declare it so would be to not only betray the lives of those who committed themselves to it in one way or another, but also, and more significantly, to ignore what was truly radical about the event, namely, what it rendered imaginativelypossible in both means and ends.
And by the end of October, early November, the seemingly “harmless” occupy encampments in the major cities of the country were cleared, manu militari, by the police.
On the occasion of the tenth anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, we share three important texts on the events: David Graeber’s “Occupy Wall Street’s anarchist roots” (Aljazeera, 30/11/2011), Mark Bray’s “Horizontalism: Anarchism, Power and the State” (Black Rose Anarchist Federation, 11/07/2018) and Peter Lamborn Wilson/Hakim Bey, “Occupy Wall Street, Act Two” (Interactivist Info Exchange, 16/12/2011). And we close with a modest selection of video records of the occupations, a record of the voices of Occupy.
In this era of disaster, one of the most difficult tasks will be to move beyond continuously reacting to one crisis after another in order to plan more ambitiously for an uncertain future. This already feels overwhelming, and it is not going to get easier. But even in the midst of mayhem, we know that the bonds, skills, and new—or timeless—ways of thinking that emerge when everyday life is disrupted can be lasting and transformative. The powerful cannot dictate the terms of the return to normality; there will be no return to normality, even if we want one. The forecast is uncertainty from here on out.
From the CrimethInc. collective (02/09/2021) and an audio-video interview with Peter Gelderloos on the urgency of the ecological crises, from the Antimídia collective …
Louisiana: Disasters on the Horizon
The Colonial Roots of Climate Crises—and a Path toward Resilience
Drawing on interviews with local anarchists, we explore the colonial roots of the ongoing catastrophes Hurricane Ida has exacerbated in Louisiana and discuss how communities can create truly resilient infrastructure for all.
It has been four days since Hurricane Ida wreaked havoc on New Orleans and the surrounding areas. As hundreds of thousands of people come to grips with how to survive for weeks with vastly reduced access to necessities, many are left asking the same questions they confronted in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, in a climate—and a world—that become less stable with each passing day. In south Louisiana, anticipating another disaster like this has been a question of when, not if.
The city of New Orleans and the rich multicultural patchwork that comprises its soul are both unique, and they face unique challenges. But as we have seen around the globe over the past few years, extreme weather events and associated social crises caused by climate change are accelerating and intensifying across the map. For those who have not yet felt the brunt of a changing climate, the situation in southeast Louisiana compels us to confront a future of looming disasters.
The world we live in has been constructed according to the imperatives of political and economic power, not according to the needs of human beings. We have to implement our own strategies now to prepare for the catastrophes ahead in order build new worlds in the midst of them.
Remembering the Kronstadt Rebellion (IV)
… anarchism is not an imaginary dream, but a reality which gives logic and a realistic sense to the revolt of the human spirit against violence. To be anarchist one does not have to speak of fictions such as “absolute, unlimited liberty” and the negation of duty and responsibility. The eternal contradiction, the incompatibility of the individual and society, is insoluable, because it is rooted in the nature of man himself, in his need for independence and his need for society.
Let us openly admit that anarchism admits social norms. The norms of a free society resemble neither in spirit nor in form the laws of contemporary society, the bourgeois society, the capitalist society. Neither do they resemble the decrees of a socialist dictatorship.
These norms will not seek the detachment of the individual from the collectivity, neither will they serve such abstractions as a “common good” to which the individual must sacrifice himself. Anarchist norms will not be a torrent of decrees from a higher authority. They will1 come organically from the restlessness of the spirit which feels in itself the force of creation, the thirst for the creative act, for the realization of its desires in forms accessible to men.
The guarantee of this order of things will be the responsibility for our own liberty and for the liberty of others. Like all social orders, it will have to be defended. The concrete forms of this defense cannot be indicated in advance. They will correspond to the concrete needs of the society at the given moment.
Alexei Borovoy, Anarchism and Law
The journal New Politics hosted a symposium on their pages dedicated to the Kronstadt rebellion of 1921. Earlier this year, in March, we shared a number of essays devoted to the same event. And given the significance of the rebellion and its violent suppression by the Bolshevik government, we return to it through the essays published in New Politics.
The repeated publication of essays presented in a socialist journal of Marxist inspiration may raise some eyebrows among anarchists. Among the contributions to the symposium, we can read judgements or conclusions which would seem to beset above all state-centred socialists and not anarchists.
Socialists committed to moving beyond tragedy will need to unbury Kronstadt and address its causes, its impact, and its suppression from the local to transnational levels. An open-minded reading of the symposium’s diverse contributions may help us build a non-sectarian Left … . To avoid repeating the Kronstadt tragedy, and to build toward principled world revolution, we can commit to organizing transnational solidarity and speaking out against all forms of authoritarian repression.
Daniel Fischer, Beyond Tragedy: Postscript on Kronstadt at 100
Kronstadt was truly an unavoidable tragedy, a course of events set in place by the dynamics of a centralized revolution and a state at war. If we are to learn our lesson, we will build a social system that can incorporate dissent, and one which can function with decentralized command. And if we are to truly learn our lesson, we will get to it right now.
Samuel Clarke, Kronstadt, an Unavoidable Tragedy?
If one remains committed to the revolutionary Marxist project of actually building organizations, movements, and struggles that can change the world for the better, then to “go beyond Kronstadt” will have an additional meaning: learning from the accomplishments, the mistakes and the tragedies of comrades who came before us, with a commitment to do better in advancing and winning the struggle for a better world.
Paul Le Blanc, Beyond Kronstadt
And yet it is small comfort to think that anarchists, because they believe that revolution must strike first at the state, can altogether avoid the question power, of political power. Emma Goldman, in her evaluation of the significant but ultimately unsuccessful role of anarchists in the Russian revolution, could write “honesty and sincerity compel me to state that their work would have been of infinitely greater practical value had they been better organized and equipped to guide the released energies of the people toward the reorganization of life on a libertarian foundation.”(emphasis mine) (My Disillusionment in Russia) It is the expression “to guide”, however qualified by Goldman’s insistence on the “libertarian principle” of the revolution in its early days and its defeat by Bolshevik governmentalism and centralism, as well as by her defence of the inseparability of political means and ends, that inevitably and quietly force the question of power upon anarchists. What can “to guide” mean in a revolutionary situation if not to assume some kind of power?
In an online conference organised in March of this year Kronstadt as Revolutionary Utopia, 1921-2021 and Beyond, Dmitriy Buchenkow contends that anarchists have historically failed to adequately confront the question of power, its origin, its organisation, its diversity, its inescapability in some form, in all social life. To simply say that anarchists reject power, whatever this might mean, is a grotesque over simplification. To put the issue simply, in the form of a dilemma, quoting Buchenkow: “When anarchists gain dominance in politics, they are forced to use power to consolidate their dominant position”. And the dilemma can be posed regardless of the scale of a social organisation.
The questions therefore that socialists face before the Kronstadt rebellion are not in the end significantly different from those that anarchists must confront, even if the latter’s point of departure – the rejection of state-centred power – is distinct.
It is with this thought in mind that we then share the essays on the Kronstadt rebellion of 1921 published in the New Politics‘ symposium, beginning with the last, and then posting the first three in their order of publication.
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