The dead live on, and with them, the dreams they carried.
Gustav Landauer
We share below the announcement and obituary of the death of the anarchist militant and historian, Alexandre Skirda, originally published with Freedom News (30/12/2020). This is followed by a short article published in 1989 dedicated to Nestor Makhno.
The influential French historian and translator, best known for his research on revolutionary Ukraine in the early 20th century, died on Wednesday December 23rd.
Alongside his extensive series of works on Russian radicalism, the Makhnovtchina and Krondstadt, Skirda published Facing the Enemy: A History of Anarchist Organisation (Autonomie Individuelle et Force Collective: Les Anarchistes et l’Organisation de Proudhon a nos Jours), the as yet untranslated biography of Jan Vaclav MakhajskiLe Socialisme des Intellectuels and a number of highly critical works on Leninism, listed (in French) here.
He founded the Groupe d’Etudes et Action Anarchiste (Anarchist Studies and Action Group) with fellow anarchist historian Roland Biard when they were both 19, taking an active role in the wave of demonstration which took place against France’s war in Algeria. A number of his works are available at the Kate Sharpley Library.
It was in Spain that [my generation] learned that one can be right and yet be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, that there are times when courage is not its own recompense. It is this, doubtless, which explains why so many, the world over, feel the Spanish drama as a personal tragedy.
Albert Camus
The political accountants – political scientists, sociologists, media commentators, politicians -submitted their balance sheets some years ago, so that by now, ten years on, it sounds like a tired refrain: the “Arab spring” ended in a tragic winter, a political Thermidor, a series of failed revolutions for which the people of the “Arab world” are only worse off today for their effort.
We would object to the use of the Lenin’s expression “dual power” to characterise the creation of autonomous, free spaces; an always relative autonomy and taking multiple forms. For Lenin, the expression captured a transitional moment in the Russian revolution between bourgeois parliamentary-dictatorship and worker-peasant soviet-dictatorship, the moment of uncertainty and struggle for hegemony between the two state forms, however “bottom-up” the latter was conceived to be. (Lenin, The Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution)
In both forms, the goal is power, class based state power. “The basic question of every revolution is that of state power. Unless this question is understood, there can be no intelligent participation in the revolution, not to speak of guidance of the revolution.” (Lenin, The Dual Power)
The creation of “free spaces”, if however understood as the creation of forms of life that simultaneously withdraw or retreat from capitalist social relations, seek not to take power, hierarchical and authoritarian power, but to destroy it. Otherwise, “free spaces” become a means to something which they are not. In other words, it would be to destroy them.
A class based politics – if such a thing is even imaginable and/or feasible, today or yesterday – aspiring to social-political hegemony is not a vision of autonomy that we could embrace.
With this cautionary note, we share an article by Dennis Shep entitled “Freeing space: building worlds outside of state and capital”, published with Roarmag (23/12/2020).
A body’s persistence in letting a single form-of-life affect it, despite the diversity of situations it passes through, depends on its crack. The more a body cracks up—that is, the wider and deeper its crack becomes—the fewer the polarizations compatible with its survival there are, and the more it will tend to recreate situations in which it finds itself involved in its familiar polarizations. The bigger a body’s crack grows, the more its absence to the world increases and its penchants dwindle.
Tiqqun, Introduction to the civil war
We share a review-reading of Diego Sztulwark’s essay La ofensiva sensible (Caja Negra, 2019) by Amador Fernández-Savater, published with lobo suelto (04/12/2020).
According to his teacher Ignacio Lewkowicz, Diego Sztulwark practices a “dirty way” of reading and writing. What does it consist of? It is a way of saying what one wants to say through the words and thoughts of another, a smuggling of one’s own intuitions under the cloak of suitably distorted scholarly or erudite quotes. It is the “method” by which La ofensiva sensible has been written. The result is very rich, because it gives the reader a large number of powerful references -the “plebe” of Lefort/Machiavelli, the “way of life” of Pierre Hadot, the “knowledge of the body” of León Rozitchner, etc. – and at the same time an original thought is passed on without fanfare that productively wrings these same references in the desired direction.
Even so, for some reason that he does not reveal, Diego considers that this “method” is “surely unsatisfactory” to account for “the exigency that every singular event imposes”. While waiting for a new creative attempt in the order of thought and writing, we are going to review this book in a “dirty” way as well, but in reverse. If Diego passes his intuitions through the ideas of others, we will pass Diego’s ideas through some of our own words and images; an exercise in paraphrasing. But the goal is always the same: to keep ideas moving, translate them, and re-appropriate them without fetishism or veneration, something that we have learned in good measure from the author.
Reflections on the struggle against the need for energy and its production under capital, reflections on the illusions of “renewable or green energy sources”, reflections on the ZAD as a model of resistance-creation, … remembering the Amassada ZAD …
This is What Energy Transition Looks Like: L’Amassada Eviction One Year Later
On 8 October 2019, riot police and other armed security forces violently evicted what had come to be known as L’Amassada, a ZAD (Zone-to-Defend) occupation in Saint-Victor-et-Melvieu in southern France. The following, written a year after the eviction, outlines the goals, structure, and accomplishments of the occupation as well as the political and environmental context of ongoing ZAD struggles against the economic and ecological destruction required by “green” development.
For the lovers of the “beautiful game”, the passing of Diego Maradona cannot leave one indifferent. It is not however for his footballing skills alone that we celebrate him – his game was without equals -, but for his capacity to express the passion of a game that was still lived by many as a sport of the people, and not quite yet the total commodity-spectacle of today.
A proposed law that extends the powers of municipal police (e.g., permitting them to participate in the control of public demonstrations, intervene to control infractions in public space), private security services (e.g., they may be allowed to participate in public security operations and the surveillance of suspected terrorist activity), that generalises the use of cameras and drones for surveillance and police intervention in real time (e.g., in case of fear of public disorder), that weakens the limits on the carrying and use of service weapons by the police while penalties are increased for the sale to and use of pyrotechnical material by nonprofessionals, that prohibits and makes punishable the dissemination of images malveillant [with evil intent] of the police on active duty (Article 24: “Disseminating, by any means whatsoever and by whatever the medium, with the aim of harming their physical or psychological integrity, the image of the face or any other element of identification of an agent of the national police or the national gendarmerie other than their individual identification number when acting within the framework of a police operation is punishable by one year of imprisonment and a fine of 45,000 euros.”) are part of a package of measures aptly called the “Law of global security” by the french government. (paris-luttes info)
What is happening on a planetary scale today is certainly the end of a world. But not – such as for those who seek to govern it according to their interests – in the sense of a transition to a world more suited to the new needs of the human consortium. It is the end of the era of bourgeois democracies, with its rights, its constitutions and its parliaments; but, beyond juridical appearances, certainly not insignificant, the world that began with the industrial revolution and grew up to the two – or three – world wars and totalitarianisms – tyrannical or democratic – that accompanied them, ends.
From the autonomous media collective, Bruxelles Dévie (and also posted on lundi matin), a reflection on the COVID-19 pandemic through the words of Michel Foucault. The english language translation follows.
This enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point, in which the individuals are inserted in a fixed place, in which the slightest movements are supervised, in which all events are recorded, in which an uninterrupted work of writing links the centre and periphery, in which power is exercised without division, according to a continuous hierarchical figure, in which each individual is constantly located, examined and distributed among the living beings, the sick and the dead – all this constitutes a compact model of the disciplinary mechanism. The plague is met by order; its function is to sort out every possible confusion: that of the disease, which is transmitted when bodies are mixed together; that of the evil, which is increased when fear and death overcome prohibitions. It lays down for each individual his place, his body, his disease and his death, his well-being, by means of an omnipresent and omniscient power that subdivides itself in a regular, uninterrupted way even to the ultimate determination of the individual, of what characterizes him, of what belongs to him, of what happens to him. Against the plague, which is a mixture, discipline brings into play its power, which is one of analysis. A whole literary fiction of the festival grew up around the plague suspended laws, lifted prohibitions, the frenzy of passing time, bodies mingling together without respect, individuals unmasked, abandoning their statutory identity and the figure under which they had been recognized, allowing a quite different truth to appear. But there was also a political dream of the plague, which was exactly its reverse: not the collective festival, but strict divisions; not laws transgressed, but the penetration of regulation into even the smallest details of everyday life through the mediation of the complete hierarchy that assured the capillary functioning of power; not masks that were put on and taken off, but the assignment to each individual of his ‘true’ name, his ‘true’ place, his ‘true’ body, his ‘true’ disease. The plague as a form, at once real and imaginary, of disorder had as its medical and political correlative discipline. Behind the disciplinary mechanisms can be read the haunting memory of ‘contagions’, of the plague, of rebellions, crimes, vagabondage, desertions, people who appear and disappear, live and die in disorder.
…
The plague-stricken town, traversed throughout with hierarchy, surveillance, observation, writing; the town immobilized by the functioning of an extensive power that bears in a distinct way over all individual bodies – this is the utopia of the perfectly governed city. The plague (envisaged as a possibility at least) is the trial in the course of which one may define ideally the exercise of disciplinary power. In order to make rights and laws function according to pure theory, the jurists place themselves in imagination in the state of nature; in order to see perfect disciplines functioning, rulers dreamt of the state of plague.
In memoriam: Alexandre Skirda (1942-2020)
The dead live on, and with them, the dreams they carried.
Gustav Landauer
We share below the announcement and obituary of the death of the anarchist militant and historian, Alexandre Skirda, originally published with Freedom News (30/12/2020). This is followed by a short article published in 1989 dedicated to Nestor Makhno.
The influential French historian and translator, best known for his research on revolutionary Ukraine in the early 20th century, died on Wednesday December 23rd.
Alongside his extensive series of works on Russian radicalism, the Makhnovtchina and Krondstadt, Skirda published Facing the Enemy: A History of Anarchist Organisation (Autonomie Individuelle et Force Collective: Les Anarchistes et l’Organisation de Proudhon a nos Jours), the as yet untranslated biography of Jan Vaclav Makhajski Le Socialisme des Intellectuels and a number of highly critical works on Leninism, listed (in French) here.
He founded the Groupe d’Etudes et Action Anarchiste (Anarchist Studies and Action Group) with fellow anarchist historian Roland Biard when they were both 19, taking an active role in the wave of demonstration which took place against France’s war in Algeria. A number of his works are available at the Kate Sharpley Library.
The following tribute has been adapted from Le Monde Libertaire.
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