For several weeks now, they have begun to appear in the rivers, mainly in the Cauca and in various areas where there has been a strong social mobilisation, bodies of young people killed and dismembered, many of them in plastic bags.
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CIGANOS
Tudo o que voa é ave.
Desta janela aberta
A pena que se eleva é mais suave
E a folha que plana é mais liberta.
Nos seus braços azuis o céu aquece
Todo o alado movimento.
É no chão que arrefece
O que não pode andar no firmamento.
Outro levante, pois, ciganos!
Outra tenda sem pátria mais além!
Desumanos
São os sonhos, também…
Miguel Torga
The Roma, Gypsy, Tsingani, Sinti, Manush, or by the many other names that they are known, are a people who have defied State authority in ways that find no obvious political expression (in any movement or ideology). And yet, they have resisted – even in the face of the most grotesque racist violence, culminating in the holocaust of Roma during the nazi regime in germany -, and in this, they inspire.
I recall a gypsy saying of my childhood – which in fact I do not know for certain to be a “gypsy saying” – which I have held to ever since: “should there come a day when we can no longer travel, then the end of the world is upon us.”
Raymond Gurême, a life of struggles
(from paris-luttes.info, 14/06/2021)
Part of the Voyageurs/Travellers community, a former resistance fighter and tireless activist, Raymond Gurême died on May 24 at the age of 94. Of Manouche origin, he spent his life fighting against injustices and putting into practice this phrase that he repeated over and over again: “Always standing, never on my knees”.
Born in 1925, Raymond Gurême was only 15 years old when he and his family were arrested in the early hours of October 4, 1940, in Petit-Couronne, near the port of Rouen. Two French gendarmes, who came on motorbikes, summon them to follow. Raymond Gurême will say in Interdit aux nomades, the book he wrote with Isabelle Ligner: “It was on this occasion that I learned that the chickens come home to roost at dawn.”
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Political affinities very often transgress ideological borders; indeed, if they did not, politics would be far poorer, if not dead. Politics is the gathering together of singularities for collective life, in dissension.
This post is in memory of the intellectual and political work of Horacio González. While perhaps little known outside of south america or the hispanophone world, he was a central figure in his own country, argentina.
But why celebrate a “Peronist”, some may ask? A ready answer lies in the fact that “Peronism” was never homogenous, and González was among its most critical and heterodox “followers”. And more importantly, González and his work were never reducible to the ideology and/or the movement.
Below we share a text by González that takes us back to the argentinian uprising of 2001, an event which remains of enormous significance for the understanding of anti-capitalist politics in the present.
This is followed by a tribute to González, authored by Diego Sztulwark.
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The clitoris is an anarchist.
Through translated fragments, we share the work of a writer, some few words of Catherine Malabou.
We begin with a very brief summary of her essay, Le plaisir effacé: Clitoris et pensée [Pleasure erased: Clitoris and thought], followed by the transcript of a conversation (the original may be heard here) around the essay. And we close with two video-conferences.
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From lundi matin #293 21/06/2021 …
At what point is destituent communism? Its theory? It continues apace. From its Italian sources, it has provoked fruitful debates, even across the Atlantic.
Let us bring to the subject a little more material, with these 13+1 theses signed (collectively), Grisha.
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From the CrimethInc. collective (14/06/2021) …
Every Flag Is Black in a Fire: The Black Flag—Emblem of Rebellion, Negation, and Hope
In the following selections, a range of authors and artists from across a century and a half reflect on the meaning of the black flag, the anarchist standard of rebellion and negation.
Raúl Zibechi is perhaps one of the most significant and lucid writers today on “social movements” in latin america. Below, we share a recent text authored by him, in translation.
We also share a conference-conversation with Zibechi and Rita Segato (in spanish). We close the post with websites/news sources where Zibechi publishes regularly.
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For those who may not of heard …
Protests in Colombia that began in late April over a proposed tax hike have morphed into a generational outcry over the country’s deep-rooted inequalities.
Fifty-eight people have died in six weeks of unrest – at least 45 of them killed by police – and dozens of people have gone missing. Protesters have set up more than 2,000 roadblocks around the South American country, hitting businesses and the government, as well as slowing down humanitarian access. Police stations and civic buildings have been torched, and the images of smoke-filled streets and skirmishes between frontline protesters and riot police have become a daily reality.
(News from The Guardian)
Corrupt politicians want to keep us poor so they can stay rich. They want us to go home, but after a month we’re still here. Older generations never made Colombia a better place, but young people have the balls to change this country. The government complains about the roadblocks we’ve set up, but they steal from the people every day. We’re showing them what that feels like. Maybe when they stop we can talk about how our roadblocks are hurting their pockets. This is a revolution, and we won’t go away until Duque is gone.
‘This is a revolution’: the faces of Colombia’s protests, The Guardian, 09/06/2021
From lundi matin #291 (10/06/2021) …
In Cali, the epicenter of the protest against Iván Duque’s right-wing government and the Uribist narco-state, the authority of the State is being questioned, while a collective conscience and real popular power are built. Indigenous peasants converge at places or points of resistance in the neighborhoods and the oppressed multitude appears, reclaims its territory. The foundations of a revolution are laid. Young people neglected by the State find recognition on the front lines. They are stepping up and risking their lives to defend the dreams of a more just Colombia, while the repression of State and parastatal forces intensifies. Every night, new cases of assassinations are reported and several NGOs have denounced the discovery of mass graves.
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There are those whose lives are testimonies to anarchism. Marc Tomsin’s was one such life. We share below a translation of an entry in the Dictionnaire des anarchistes dedicated to him, a letter of remembrance by Raoul Vaneigem, and links to two interviews with him, in french.
We want to thank the not bored collective for sharing their translations with us.
(Since the original post, the not bored collective passed on to us a translation of an interview with Marc Tomsin, which we have added below).
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For Samuel Luiz; with all LGBTQI people
In the early hours of the 3rd of July, 24 year old Samuel Luiz was beaten to death outside a nightclub by a dozen people in La Coruña, Galicia. The motivation would appear to be that he was gay. (The Guardian)
The discrimination, incarceration, beating, torture and killing of LGBTQI people is statistically shameful and ethically abominable, a testimony to the violence of patriarchy and heteronormativity; a daily violence expressed in a disturbing multiplicity of ways, all meant to serve the moral hierarchies white-male-capitalist-state forms of power.
If it seems exaggerated to state matters in this manner, it only does so because of the blindness to the pedagogies of cruelty that structure contemporary societies, pedagogies comprised of acts and practices that teach, habituate and programme subjects to transform the living and its vitality into things. The pedagogy of cruelty, borrowing the expression from Rita Segato, “is the capture of something that is errant and unpredictable, like life, so as to make of it a thing, inert and sterile, measurable, sellable, buyable and obsolescent, as suits consumption in this apocalyptic phase of capital.” (Rita Segato, Contra-Pedagogías de la Crueldad) Patriarchal sexism, racism, homophobia, xenophobia are but the names we give to the generalised violence of capital. And in its most radical form, LGBTQI politics is part of the struggle against this violence. The Act Up Queer Nation Manifesto of 1990, which we share below, is but one example, from a not so distant past, of this vision.
Samuel Luiz’s death sparked demonstrations and protests throughout spain. (el Salto Diario) And the country’s, in Madrid, could find no better response than to attack the protesters. (el Salto Diario)
This post is in memory of Samuel Luiz, and in all of those who have died for attempting to free themselves from the prisons of our joys.
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