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.
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Alert and call for support before the trial of October 13, 2021!
(From Yannis Youlountas’s blog)
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.
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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).
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Refuser de parvenir, ce n’est ni refuser d’agir ni refuser de vivre : c’est refuser de vivre et d’agir pour soi et aux fins de soi.
Albert Thierry
Tant que notre triomphe ne sera pas en même temps celui de tous, ayons la chance de ne jamais réussir!
Élisée Reclus
From lundi matin #304, 13/09/2021 …
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.
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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 imaginatively possible 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.
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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.
To directly support autonomous relief efforts in and around New Orleans, you can donate to New Orleans Mutual Aid Group and Lobelia Commons via Venmo: @NolaMutualAid and @LobeliaCommons.
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Societies change from daily local practice, in defined autonomous spaces, because autonomy is the perimeter that protects counterhegemonic practices. Autonomy is the means by which other worlds can exist, worlds that need protection by virtue of being different. When and how these practices and ways of life might expand is impossible to predict, much less determine and direct.
Raúl Zibechi, “Mexico: Challenges and Difficulties of Urban Territories in Resistance”
There is perhaps no ethical-political concept more complex and difficult to conceptualise and practice than that of autonomy, and yet none more central to anarchist thought and practice (and to other “autonomist” politics). Without pretending to exhaust the notion here, we share a recent piece on the “autonomous” community of Acapatzingo, of the metropolitan area of Mexico City and an excellent essay by Raúl Zibechi, “Mexico: Challenges and Difficulties of Urban Territories in Resistance”, that contextualises the experience.
It is perhaps pointless to add that it is from rich experiences that we learn to think through the meaning of “autonomy”. But without such experiences, our ideas remain blind.
Acapatzingo: the other world in the middle of Mexico City
(From desinformemonos.org, 13/07/2021, text by Camila Pizaña and Erika Lozano)
The police do not come in here; neither the coronavirus nor the narco are allowed to enter the Acapatzingo Housing Cooperative, where, at the foot of the Cerro Yuhualixqui, two immense black metal walls delimit access to a small world in which high crime rates have no place, nor infections by Covid-19, which official figures confirm in the Iztapalapa municipality, where this neighbourhood is located and in which, according to its residents, they daily construct the reality in which they want to live in.
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Même le chaos n’est pas entièrement chaotique ;
même le compact laisse passer la lumière ;
même l’individu contient encore une part de nuit
Frédéric Neyrat, Le communisme existentiel de Jean-Luc Nancy, éditions Lignes.
From Lundi matin (#302, 30/08/2021, in translation), a reflection on Jean-Luc Nancy’s communism, by Emmanuel Moreira, inspired by the essay quoted above, by Frédéric Neyrat.
Without an outside, there is no communism
It was necessary to fight against two fronts. Transcendence with its hinter worlds, its essences and its Gods. Immanence with its desire for absolutism, its determinism, its in itself and its humanism. It was necessary to fight against two exhaustions, the exhaustion of ontology, the exhaustion of politics. We had to find a force, an impulse. Something had to take place, that the nothing be open onto itself so that nothing exists.
It was necessary to fight against equivalence, the generalised interconnection of everything with everything. It was necessary to ward off the transformation of the singular into the particular and the transformation of relationships into networks. It was necessary to foil the oppositions between philosophy and anti-philosophy. It was necessary to start again, to find an outside.
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We close our overly brief and modest sharing of the work of Jean-Luc Nancy with an interview (in translation) that he gave to Carole Dely, for the journal Sens publique on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of france’s May 68.
68, without end. Exchanges with Jean-Luc Nancy
Carole Dely – May 68 is often presented as one of the most important social movements in French history, which was both a students and workers movement, accompanied by a frenzy of discussions and debates in universities, factories, theatres, the street, in reaction against the power in place, traditional society, the capitalist economy, and with the desire for a radical transformation of life and the world … Is that how you would summarise things? Did you take part in the events of 1968?
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Who are “we”, who rebel?
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.
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