Protester at an anti-government protest in Bogotá, Colombia – May 12, 2021. Photo: Jc.roll99 / Shutterstock.com
From Roarmag (13/05/2021), a reflection on the recent uprising in colombia by José Antonio Gutiérrez D..
The state’s brutal response to a one-day general strike has sparked weeks of protests in Colombia, resulting in dozens of deaths. The time for dialogue is over.
April 28 has quickly turned into a historic date in Colombia. On this day, a broad coalition of social organizations and trade unions called a strike against the tax reform proposed by the far-right government of president Iván Duque. A skillful mix of government incompetence and state terror turned what would have been just one day of protests, into one of the most serious political crises in Colombia’s recent history. Each passing day, each new death, added an extra reason for protesters to remain on the streets and radicalise their tactics and demands against an elite that is out of touch with the daily hardships of ordinary Colombians, and whose actions exacerbate their sufferings.
We are all dead, and we spoiled the world before we died. There is nothing left. Nothing but dreams.
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
Spain’s 15M was a dream, it was the feeling that the world could be changed, it was the spaces and the times of assemblies, in which new worlds were created and imagined by an untameable many, the many who awoke to their voices and bodies; it was enthusiastic friendship, joy, and dedicated work.
It is not from melancholy nostalgia or illusion that these words are written, but from the experience – past, yes, but still engraved on the flesh – of gathering and creating autonomously.
There were many 15Ms and they would move often in very different directions. Some of these would die, others would become unrecognisable – e.g. Podemos -, but what still remains, and not only in memory, is the awareness (cognitive, affective, physical) that autonomy is a permanent possibility.
Although I expected more from 15-M, I believe that its legacy is not negligible, since it has allowed to reopen debates that were closed and in that sense it has invited a questioning of the nature of the system – capitalism, exploitation, alienation, surplus value, patriarchal society, imperial wars, ecological crisis, collapse – while giving limited prominence to disputes relating to the regime that are of such interest to, for example, Podemos. It has also given an undeniable impulse to the construction of autonomous, self-managed, de-commodified and, hopefully, de-patriarchalised spaces. I am sure that, far from elections, institutions and separations, new 15-Ms will arrive.
In this sense, the event does not die (contrary to the words – desire? – of Íñigo Galván of the political party, Más País, yet another “political” mutation of 15M), but continues as a “moment” in which History stopped, breaking through linear time as an “eternity” which may always be lived anew. (Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History)
We share below film-interventions in the 15M, along with links to reflections on the event, in spanish. The voices are plural, they offer no single or closed view of the event. We share them so that others may see in it a possible present.
What is the point of remembering 15M if it is not to disorder the present as it did?
What is the strength of the weak? … the strength of the weak passes through the activation of bodies and the interweaving of ties, through the autonomous choice about times and spaces, for the value of equality and plurality. It is from here that the weak have always been capable of challenging the strong: to fight for their own and from their own, to animate networks of complicities, to deploy their own temporality and merge with the territories of life, to trust the intelligence of anyone and the multiplicity of initiatives articulated without a directing center.
The ten years that separate us from the year of 2011, the rebellious year of city square and street occupations, beginning with the “Arab Spring” and moving through cities in Spain, Greece, the UK, and then onto the United States, and elsewhere, seems ever more distant, consequence of the illusion created by media silence, political co-optation and/or repression and the erasure of history and time in the eternal present of life under Capital.
The amnesia though also haunts those on the “left”, whether it be intentional – the “movements” were ineffective, possessed no overarching ideology with which to confront capitalism, failed to take root in the working classes, lacked purpose, organisation, leadership, in sum, they collapsed into reformism or irrelevance -, or not.
So much of the left – of whatever kind – remains trapped in an illusion of perspective, the illusion of ideological hegemony and totality (read retrospectively into past “revolutions”): that the movement must be all and know who it is and where it is going. And yet, if anything could be learned from the rebellions of 2011 – perhaps already since the long May of 1968, or perhaps, always – is that there were never any such movements, and that it is the very concept of “movement” (as something with a coherent beginning and end) that must be abandoned.
The rebellions and revolts that we remember today are not to be commemorated as failed revolutions to be taken up anew with greater foresight and fortitude, but examples of unpredictable and radical social creativity whose power of contagion and opposition could never be mastered or anticipated, as with all “revolutions”.
The spanish 15M was one such moment, which we stubbornly and insistently remember here.
We share below a text published in the spanish anarchist newspaper, Todo por hacer; a text that both chronicles the events and poses questions which remain pressing.
In the early hours of the 28th of April, French police descended upon the residences of 10 exiled Italian political militants of the 1970s. Seven were immediately arrested, an eighth would later turn himself in, and the whereabouts of two others remain unknown.
All were exiled in France and protected under what came to be known as the “Mitterrand doctrine” of 1985. Never accepted by successive italian governments, recent french governments, and now Macron’s government, have ceded to the italian demands for extradition. (Le Monde, The Guardian, la Repubblica)
Those arrested now face life imprisonment in italy, in an active politics – on both sides of the border – of political-historical erasure: to expunge the memory of the “long May of 1968“.
We share below a text by Alessandro Stella, in translation, published by the lundi matin (04/05/2021) collective.
Red Shadows
Is it a lapse in the police unconscious or a perverse joke of the representatives of an Italian State that will never stop demanding payment for the fear that part of its population made it feel at the end of the post-war period? The joint operation of the French and transalpine police forces, which targeted ten Italian political refugees, was codenamed: “Red Shadows”. Or, in the plural, the exact title in French of Cesare Battisti’s second thriller, published in 1994 (1), which had as a backdrop the situation of these survivors of the latent civil war of the 1960s and 1970s. To the need for “anti-terrorist” posturing inherent in a French state incapable of tackling the systemic reasons for individual jihadist terrorism has been added, as Alessandro Stella explains below, the ever-renewed need for the Italian state to erase the red mark of the most extensive and lasting social movement of the post-war period in the West. The war of memory is never more than an episode of the social war. As shown by the beautifully combative and applauded demonstration in Paris on the 1st of May, the fight for the freedom of our comrades has only just begun.
A Nationwide Uprising Continues in the Face of State Violence
After decades of armed conflict and paramilitary violence, Colombia has seen protest movements return in strength over the past year and a half. The forceful demonstrations of the past week exceed even the high points of the nationwide uprising of November and December 2019. In response, the most heavily armed government in Latin America has carried out a brutal crackdown.
The COVID-19 pandemic and its social and economic consequences have hit Colombia hard. The country is reaching a breaking point as the ruling class attempts to squeeze the last drops of profit out of an already suffering populace kept in line via intense police violence. Although these conditions are especially extreme, they are not unique to Colombia—they resemble similar situations in Greece, Brazil, and elsewhere around the world. These are not coincidences, but parallel manifestations of global phenomena. Everywhere, the pandemic has intensified disparities in wealth, power, and access to the means of survival, while serving as an excuse for increasing state repression. In learning from and extending solidarity to those who face state and paramilitary violence in Latin America—much of which is supported and directed by the United States and other governments and capitalist institutions—we are confronting the same global forces that threaten our own freedom and well-being.
Since the following text was written, President Ivan Duque of Colombia made a statement on Sunday, May 2 asking Colombia’s congress to withdraw the tax reform bill that had sparked protests across the country. This is reminiscent of the victory that a similar social movement achieved in Ecuador in October 2019, inspiring uprisings in Chile and elsewhere. However, as of today, the protests in Colombia continue—especially in the city of Cali, arguably the epicenter of the demonstrations—because that failed law is only the most visible measure in a package of reforms that also includes healthcare privatization.
Here, we present a translation of a report by Medios Libres Cali, an independent media organization in Cali. An adapted version of the original text was published inthreeparts by Avispa Midia. For more on the situation in Colombia, we recommend our report on the context of the mass uprising against police violence that took place last September.
All photos save the first one by Medios Libres Cali.
It seems that in the new planetary order that is gaining form two things, apparently unrelated to each other, are destined to be completely removed: the face and death. We will endeavour to inquire if they are not somehow connected and what the meaning of their elimination is.
We do not know how to stop the planetary destruction caused by capital — but by asking the right questions we can find our way forward together.
We live in a failed system. It is becoming clearer every day that the present organization of society is a disaster, that capitalism is unable to secure an acceptable way of living. The COVID-19 pandemic is not a natural phenomenon but the result of the social destruction of biodiversity and other pandemics are likely to follow. The global warming that is a threat to both human and many forms of non-human life is the result of the capitalist destruction of established equilibria. The acceptance of money as the dominant measure of social value forces a large part of the world’s population to live in miserable and precarious conditions.
The destruction caused by capitalism is accelerating. Growing inequality, a rise in racist violence, the spread of fascism, increasing tensions between states and the accumulation of power by police and military. Moreover, the survival of capitalism is built on an ever-expanding debt that is doomed to collapse at some point.
The situation is urgent, we humans are now faced with the real possibility of our own extinction.
Utopia lies at the horizon. When I draw nearer by two steps, it retreats two steps. If I proceed ten steps forward, it swiftly slips ten steps ahead. No matter how far I go, I can never reach it. What, then, is the purpose of utopia? It is to cause us to advance.
Fernando Birri quoted by Eduardo Galeano
There can be no radical political project – in the broadest sense of “political” -, without myth. And myth projected into the future is utopian.
This is not to abandon the critique of ideology, of hegemonic ideology and its monstrous children: social and/or political vanguards,power as a monolith to be taken or lost, homogeneous space and linear time as the frame of history, moral utilitarianism and instrumental reason, and so on.
Utopia as freedom or freedom as utopia exists in continuous and ever possible tension within itself, defying all homogeneity and fixity. It is condemned to plurality, multiplicity, metamorphoses, collapse, destruction and creation. It is anarchy, the anarchy that sustains anarchism(s) as ideolog(y/ies). And so argues Amedeo Bertolo in the essay that we share below.
With this post, we close our collection of essays by Amedeo Bertolo, part of our series grouped under the title, “writers of May 68”, within which we have included Jaime Semprun, Miguel Amorós, Eduardo Colombo and Amedeo Bertolo. The reference to “May 68” is a political metaphor in this instance, for aside from Semprun, the other three writers were in their respective countries of origin at the time (Amorós was in spain, Bertolo in italy, and Colombo in argentina), but all four writers would be profoundly marked by the events of May and would endeavour to rethink anarchism in the wake of those events.
Three of the essays that we have shared in English translation were passed onto us by others. They are: “Authority, Power and Domination”, “Fanatics of Freedom”, “Democracy and Beyond”. We have made changes to the translations only when we believed it was necessary
Our modest effort is dedicated to the memory of Amedeo.
For this May Day, we turn to a page of working class and anarcho-syndicalist history, that of the Industrial Workers of the World Union; not however as a dead past, but as a permanent possibility for thinking revolt and revolution in the present.
The Wobblies (1979), by Stewart Bird and Deborah Shaffer
The occupier and the occupied
Understanding demands words, even before the obscene.
We share an essay by Ghassan Salhab, originally published in french with lundi matin (#288, 17/05/2021)
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