From the Inhabit Territories collective, stories of mutual aid and rebellion (yes, they are not opposed) in chile …
The People Don’t Need Permission to Feed Each Other
Santiago de Chile’s community kitchens amid the pandemic and uprising
(27/09/2020)
Benito Brava
Archival photos from Archivo Fortín Mapocho
As a result of the October 2019 uprising, millions of Chileans have reconceptualized what it means to live and to fight. A new generation of frontliners has emerged as protesters learn to carve out territories for unauthorized public activities and defend them against the police.
As a compliment to the previous post, we share an excellent article by Vanessa Taylor, published with Mic (30/07/2020).
How Black anarchists are keeping the protest movement alive
With a series of uprisings gripping the United States, President Trump has not hidden his disdain for protesters. Beyond his threats to Minneapolis protesters and questionable executive orders, Trump has timeandtimeagain directed his ire at one particular group: “anarchists.” Trump’s constant invoking of anarchists to describe all protesters generally is a calculated attempt to delegitimize ongoing struggles — that much can clearly be seen in one of Trump’s tweets from earlier this week, where he wrote that protesters in Portland and Seattle were “actually … sick and deranged anarchists and agitators.”
Judging from what comes from the mouths of the Donald Trump government and its servile media, the united states of america is seemingly on the brink of a nation wide “anarchist insurrection”. From “anarchist led” protests against racist police violence, to “professional anarchist agitators”, to major urban “anarchist jurisdictions” – with “antifa” thrown into the mix -, and only heavily militarised and right-wing militia intervention, so the tall tale goes, will bring the country back from chaos.
“Red scares” are not new to american politics and however preposterous the language is coming from this government, it should not be forgotten or ignored that such politics of fear and paranoia quickly translate (as they did in the past) into broadening surveillance, control, persecution, exile, incarceration, and death, and not only of the “reds”; they have always served to target people judged to be “dissident populations”.
Varese, November 21, 1962: the trial for the kidnapping of the Spanish vice consul, which began on November 13th, ends positively for the accused, who are sentenced to a minimum sentence. This shot, taken from “L’Agitazione del Sud”, attests to the favorable outcome for the young anti-fascists, who are immediately released (correction: Gianfranco Pedron and not Giancarlo). “After the death sentence of this Spanish comrade and the lack of reaction of other young anti-fascists whom we had addressed, it was decided rather hastily, also because times did not allow for procrastination, to take the Spanish consul of Milan hostage. We organized this action fairly amateurishly, and yet it worked anyway.” (Carmilla)
A central thesis animates the following essay by Amedeo Bertolo: for anarchism, freedom is inconceivable independently of equality, diversity and solidarity.
Fanatics of freedom
Amedeo Bertolo
(This essay was presented at the seminar “La libertà, le libertà, i libertari”, in Milan, 2-3 of December, 1989, later revised and published in Volontà, n. 3-4, 1996. An abridged English translation of a previous version of this writing was published as “Fanatics of Freedom” in Our Generation, vol. 23, n. 2 (1992), pp. 50-66. (An Our Generation Magazine archive is available online). What we share below, as part of our “writers of May 68” series, is a translation of Bertolo’s full text that was generously passed onto us, with changes, changes sometimes borrowed from the translation by A. Retter for Our Generation.)
I am a fanatical lover of freedom.
Michail Bakunin
Anarchism is an exaggeration of the idea of freedom.
Karl Popper
My title and the epigraphic quotations must already show very clearly which way my argument is to head. I hope that this will allow us to avoid losing our way in the labyrinth of the more than two hundred recognized meanings of the word “freedom”.(1) This “porous”, “proteiform”, constantly appearing word is probably the most used word in the world of politics, whether in its doctrine, its practice or in political news.(2) With the events in Eastern Europe over the past few months, the inflation in the use of the word freedom is in danger of reaching monstrous levels. And, as we all know, with inflation money loses value. With the current inflation in the use of the word freedom, too, its semantic value is in danger of plummeting with the speed of some South American currencies … Even the fascists feel themselves to have the right to speak of freedom, in one of its many aberrations, called “positive” freedom (to which we will return later). As indeed had Stalin, as had Wojtyla. Or, somewhat more nobly, as had Plotinus or Montesquieu. In Plotinus’ words: “Man becomes free when he moves towards the Good.”(3) Or from Montesquieu: “Freedom consists in being able to do what one must want” (italics mine) …(4)
“Why, how can you ask such a question? You are a republican.” A republican! Yes; but that word specifies nothing. Res publica; that is, the public thing. Now, whoever is interested in public affairs — no matter under what form of government — may call himself a republican. Even kings are republicans.” “Well! You are a democrat?” No. “What!, you would have a monarchy?” No. “A Constitutionalist?” God forbid. “Then you are an aristocrat?” Not at all! “You want a mixed form of government?” Even less. “Then what are you?” I am an anarchist.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What is property?
What if freedom were the ability to make up our minds about what it was we wished to pursue, with whom we wished to pursue it, and what sort of commitments we wish to make to them in the process? Equality, then, would simply be a matter of guaranteeing equal access to those resources needed in the pursuit of an endless variety of forms of value. Democracy in that case would simply be our capacity to come together as reasonable human beings and work out the resulting common problems—since problems there will always be—a capacity that can only truly be realized once the bureaucracies of coercion that hold existing structures of power together collapse or fade away.
David Graeber, The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement
In this essay, Amedeo Bartolo mantains the apparent paradox that anarchy (as seen by anarchists) and democracy (in its most radical forms) are irreducibly different but at the same time mutually compatible. Democracy, even in its direct, participatory interpretations, cannot exhaust all the philosophical, ethical, “utopian” dimension of anarchism. But a “libertarian democracy” could be the political form of a feasible anarchy.
The essay we share below (part of our “writers of May 68” series), a third by Bartolo, is available online in an an English language translation by April Retter. We have made only minor changes.
Democracy and beyond
(This text was originally presented at the conference, “El anarquismo ante la crisis de las ideologias”, Barcelona, 1-3 of October, 1993, and subsequently published in Volontà, nº 4, 1994)
If understood to the letter, a democracy must be a stateless society … Power belongs to the people insofar as the people truly exercise it themselves.
Giovanni Sartori
The concern in this essay is with democracy from an anarchist point of view and – secondarily – with anarchism from a democratic point of view. In the course of this reflection, I will occupy myself above all with those aspects of the two political and philosophical categories which are relevant to a confrontation between them, that is to say the essential differences and similarities between democracy and anarchism.
Amedeo Bertolo’s essay, “Power, authority and domination: a proposal of definition” is perhaps one of the most important that he wrote, for its rigour and for its theoretical and potential practical implications.
It is undoubtedly one of the clearest examples of his “method”, his insistence on conceptual clarification for the purpose of exploring and clarifying anarchism.
This is not to say that Bertolo has the last word on the subject, but the essay is undoubtedly a rich point of departure for any anarchist reflection (and beyond) on power and domination, and as a result, on freedom.
In this way, an iridescent and multiform anarchism is invented in which the militant but also the poet is recognised, which includes struggle, struggle but also life.
Amedeo Bertolo
[Anarchy is] neither a means, nor an end … it is rather a method. Anarchy can be understood as a principle which institutes a non-hierarchical society, in the same way that the State is the principle which institutes modern, hierarchical society. However I prefer to see it as an ethical ensemble of values, a constellation of values that can be synthesised with the words freedom, equality, solidarity, diversity. Therefore, it is an anarchy that is not a model of society, or rather, a not very interesting, abstract, utopian model, that can be useful, as the concept of a perfect circle may also be. But it is more useful to see anarchy as a constellation of values which should influence our daily action, individual and collective, personal and social.
Amedeo Bertolo, The Eulogy of Cider
We return to 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.
To read Bertolo’s work is to engage with one of the most important anarchist writers of the second half of the 20th century (a writing that was never separable from his active militancy in the movement). If we speak in these terms, it is not however to defend an ideologue – one among others and if that were all, deserving only to be forgotten -, but one of the most careful and penetrating anarchist writers of the period.
In a collection of finely elaborated essays, Bertolo takes up a series of concepts of central importance to anarchist thought. In each case, the concept is examined, turned over, experimented upon, pushed to its limits, until what remains is a clarity of understanding that can continue to animate anarchist thought and practice, or should the concept fail the test, then justifiably re-thought or abandoned.
In the etymology of the term “method”, we find “a traveling, a journey”, literally “a path, track, road,”. Reading Bertolo is very much like setting out on a journey, a journey along paths that led to others, still yet unexplored ways. Bertolo calls to mind a botanical artist who begins with the flower, continues on to the leaves, the branches, the trunk, sinking then deep into the roots, to then better comprehend the flower, and all in great detail. It is a slow, meticulous writing that always reveals something new in what we thought was already understood, in what we took for granted and therefore in fact did not understand.
Our choice of essays is taken from the Italian language collection of Bertolo’s writings, published by Elèutera (a publishing house which he helped to found in 1986) under the title Anarchici e orgogliosi di esserlo (2017) and available online here.
There are French, Spanish and Portuguese language collections of the same, though not necessarily selecting all of the writings that appear in the Elèutera collection. We in turn will make a selection, to be published in different posts, following the pace of translation. Our hope is that the selection will offer an English language public a window onto Bertolo’s life in anarchy.
Acknowledgements
Three of the essays that we will share 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.
Last Wednesday, Franco “Bifo” Berardi affirmed in a public Zoom organised by the Untref [Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero] that politics had died. He was referring to politics as the belief that the will can create new collective projects and transform structures (extant between Machiavelli and Lenin). We are witnessing, he said, the collapse of the aggressive and long dominant white, male, colonial, capitalist mind (and politics seems to die with that culture). According to him, then, it is time to start from another place: from the poetic, the erotic and the right to defend new ways of life, to depart from the rotten corpse of capitalism. This is beautiful: the beauty of Bifo as the somatic luminous prophet of darkness shines in this reasoning with particular force. As he writes in a recent book: as the old people of the north die (and the fascism that beset us), we must create spaces for the new lives in danger, that of the young people of the south.
Among those who reject this prophetic discourse because they see it as lacking in “strategic thought”, there are optimists – who sustain the belief in politics on the basis of a crude diagnosis -, and there are pessimists – as there is no alternative to capitalist rot, the best thing would be to stick to politics as an activity without any strong conviction.
While Bifo spoke, the police of the province of Buenos Aires held a public protest, in which their demands for wages and working conditions gave way to a visible political threat (a growing reactionary threat in the region and in the country, where the police are a very important actor in this process). It is impossible to limit the reading of this episode to the precariousness of police work, without adding a word about the fact that the police continue to be an instrument (itself precarious) of regulation for a broader social precariousness (it would have been quite another thing, at least, to hear the police saying: “we no longer want to be the controllers of the precariousness of our communities”). When the media said that the armed police surrounded Olivos [official residence of the president of Argentina], it was inevitable for those of us of a certain age to remember the mobilisation in the streets and squares to avoid the military-carapintada coup, during the second half of the 1980s. Is Bifo right in saying that really existing politics is no longer capable of posing real problems (the problem of precariousness and exploitation with its burden of violence, the role of the police in that system), or that it is no longer capable of recreating new collective projects, or of proposing deep transformations?
If we accept that every conjuncture is defined by the coexistence of more than one simultaneous time, perhaps we can try to think that, if on the one hand conventional politics has lost its relationship with strategy (in a strong, critical, transforming sense) without the appearance of an alternative revolutionary politics to replace it; on the reverse side of the political – there where Bifo’s zoom counts – the invention of strategies is continually reborn, on new grounds, in new ways of conceiving perhaps the “will”, in new ways of feeling and thinking. In every formation of a new will, the problem of strategy is raised again, and perhaps a new concept of the “political” is proposed.
The Uprising in Colombia: “An Example of What Is to Come”
A Report and Interview on the Background of the Revolt
The streets of several Colombian cities have erupted into conflict in the last two days in response to the brutal police murder of 43-year-old Javier Ordóñez, a lawyer and father of two in Bogotá, the nation’s capital. Ordóñez was peaceably drinking in the street in front of his friends’ apartment when police arrived and, without provocation, beat him and tased him 11 times. By the time he arrived at the hospital, after a further beating at the police station, he was already dead.
Video captured by Ordóñez’s friends and shared widely on social media sparked widespread protests in Bogotá, Cali, Medellín, Bucaramanga, Popayán, Ibagué, Barranquilla, Neiva, Tunja, and Duitama. In Bogotá alone, 56 police substations, called CAIs (Comandos de Atención Inmediata) were damaged, most of them burned. Although mainstream news is reporting eight people killed by police or paramilitaries on the first night, images circulating in Colombia on Thursday claimed 10, all but one of whom have been identified. The numbers of wounded vary by source. The New York Times claimed that a further 66 had suffered bullet wounds the night of September 9, with over 400 wounded in total.
Colombia has an intense history of violent state and paramilitary repression, which has only intensified during the pandemic. Under current president Ivan Duque, widely seen as a continuation of former president Álvaro Uribe’s corrupt narco-administration, the Colombian government has failed to uphold its side of the peace accords with demobilized guerrilla forces, and murders and disappearances of activists, dissidents, and revolutionaries have increased significantly.
In the following report and interview, we explore the background and implications of the latest chapter in a global wave of revolts against police and state repression. For more information on social struggles in Colombia and other parts of Latin America, consult Avispa Midia and PASC, the Colombia Solidarity Accompaniment Project, both of which contributed to this article.
Chile: Militant mutual aid
From the Inhabit Territories collective, stories of mutual aid and rebellion (yes, they are not opposed) in chile …
The People Don’t Need Permission to Feed Each Other
Santiago de Chile’s community kitchens amid the pandemic and uprising
(27/09/2020)
Benito Brava
Archival photos from Archivo Fortín Mapocho
As a result of the October 2019 uprising, millions of Chileans have reconceptualized what it means to live and to fight. A new generation of frontliners has emerged as protesters learn to carve out territories for unauthorized public activities and defend them against the police.
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