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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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
(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.)
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
(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
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?
… 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.
Solidarity with Gabriel Pombo da Silva and all anarchist prisoners
‘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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