Reflecting on the potential of the “Floyd rebellion”: an article by Kali Akuno published with Roarmag (30/06/2020). The article was originally published on the Wire, a project of the Progressive International. …
The Floyd rebellion, if followed by a general strike and People’s Assemblies, can blossom into an instrument of dual power that could radically transform society.
Continue reading
Published with CrimethInc. Collective (28/06/2020) …
Stonewall Means Riot Right Now: What the Queer Uprisings of 1969 Share with the George Floyd Protests of 2020
“Stonewall was a riot.” In the 51 years since the uprising at the Stonewall Inn in New York City catapulted the movement for LGBTQ+ liberation into public consciousness, this phrase has become a cliché. Yes, it was a riot—but what kind of riot was it? On the anniversary of the iconic queer rebellion, many of us are reflecting on how today’s struggles against police and white supremacy connect to past uprisings. Let’s look at the resonances between Stonewall and the Justice for George Floyd rebellions and what these show us about how to catalyze resistance to oppression.
From lundi matin #249, 29/06/2020 …
In this text somewhere between poetry and politics, Cesare Battisti takes as a starting point Camus’ novel The Plague, to give us his contribution to the work barely started since the beginning of the Great Enclosure of half of humanity, to try to answer the question: “What is happening to us?” To which should be added, “What is happening to us that is still not finished?”
Albert Camus’s words are precious in the days of the coronavirus. They make us feel close at hand the anguish of the families separated by the “Plague” of Oran, in his Algeria of the immediate post-war period. It is, as we know, a never sufficiently celebrated metaphor for Nazism, which had just been defeated, but whose resilient germs will continue to threaten humanity, awaiting the next faux pas.
Continue reading
On dit que les révolutionnaires ne meurent jamais. Simplement, vers la fin, ils commencent à avoir mal aux genoux.
Maurice Rajsfus
The police have always been the essential element of a politics of rejection and exclusion, which hides economic and social difficulties. The police are, today, the best shield of a political and economic system among the most reactionary that France has known for fifty years.
… from the Manifesto of Observatoire des libertés publiques
Maurice Rajsfus was a writer, journalist, historian and militant. He was the author of numerous essays addressing themes such as the Jewish genocide in France, the police, and attacks on civil liberties. In a lifetime of seemingly inexhaustible activism, his political engagements would take him from the communist party to the Trotskyist 4th International, from the Socialisme ou barbarie group with Claude Lefort and Cornelius Castoriadis to solidarity work against the war in Algeria and later the anti-fascist/anti-National Front group, the Ras l’front. In 1994 he co-founded the “Observatory of Public Liberties” (“l’Observatoire des libertés publiques”), which he led. What bound them all was a passionate anti-authoritarianism and the conviction that not to resist was impossible.
Maurice Rajsfus died on Saturday, the 13th of June, at the age of 92. In remembrance and celebration of a way of life …
Continue reading
From Roarmag (27/06/2020), an essay by John Holloway …
We do not have the knee of a murderous policeman on our neck, but we, too, cannot breathe. We cannot breathe because capitalism is killing us.
Continue reading
To share, an article by María Galindo reflecting on the coronavirus pandemic from the “Ass of the World”. (lavaca.org 23/06/2020)
Continue reading
Further news and reflection on mutual aid, from the CrimethInc. Collective (26/06/2020), the first in a promised series covering mutual aid initiatives across the globe …
Finding the Thread that Binds Us: Three Mutual Aid Networks in New York City
Fundamental social change involves two intertwined processes. On the one hand, it means shutting down the mechanisms that impose disparities in power and access to resources; on the other hand, it involves creating infrastructures that distribute resources and power according to a different logic, weaving a new social fabric. While the movement for police abolition that burst into the public consciousness a month ago in Minneapolis has set new precedents for resistance, the mutual aid networks that have expanded around the world since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic point the way to a new model for social relations. The following report profiles three groups that coordinate mutual aid efforts in New York City—Woodbine, Take Back the Bronx, and Milk Crate Gardens—exploring their motivations and aspirations as well as the resources and forms of care they circulate.
This is the first installment in a series exploring mutual aid projects across the globe.
Continue reading
From the Correspondent, an article by Zoe Smith comparing mutual aid initiatives in Argentina and the experience in the United States. A further contribution to thinking through mutual aid and anarchist politics …
Continue reading
Every time a neighbor delivers loaves of homemade bread to each house in their block, each time someone provides a ride to a medical appointment, a toy to a child, or a grocery run, we learn who we can count on and why. Each time we get together and build a food distro, a community porch singalong, or an online gaming night, we learn both that we can organize ourselves non-hierarchically and that we care enough to do so. These actions teach us new ways of being—ways that capitalism and a capitalist health system systematically hide. In the immortal words of the Industrial Workers of the World, it is building a new world in the shell of the old.
Nathan Jun and Mark Lance
While the politics of States before the COVID-19 pandemic varies between surveillance and confinement, isolation and marginalisation, rationed medical attention and letting die, in the gaps and cracks of State-centred control, mutual aid initiatives and groups continue to play an essential role in seeing people and communities through the crises.
It is our conviction that evaluations and criticisms of the politics of mutual aid activity must remain close to the ground and avoid facile ideological dismissals or justifications. And it is also our contention that it is through such activity, among others, that anarchism becomes more than an idea, that it becomes something lived.
We share below an essay by Nathan Jun and Mark Lance that takes up this issue directly (and published with the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal – 17/06/2020).
Continue reading
Christian Jesús Ferrer: Anarchism, the antipodal star
A short and eloquent reflection on the meaning of “anarchism”, by Christian Jesús Ferrer (El Lokal) …
There is nothing more mysterious than the fate of anarchism, an ideal that might seem exaggerated if it were not so extremely sensible. Although the passage of time has diminished its brilliance, and it was even taken for dead, the “libertarian question” insistently continued to be posed, as anarchists seem to have the qualities of the phoenix, that of being reborn from themselves, as avatars that are reincarnated in diverse neighbouring and adjacent fields. The anarchist ideal, although it was politically and culturally noteworthy, is incomprehensible in our day unless we do not first turn the world on its head. In truth, anarchy always had a bad press – from the beginning -: a “utopia”. Called messianic, then, something wild, at times alive only in spirit, always sharp, caustic.
Continue reading →