In the interview which we share below (William C. Anderson and published by the Black Rose Anarchist Federation, 11/08/2020), there is a lucidity and wisdom in the words Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin, words born of struggles, words that cannot be ignored.
For some, and for some anarchists, take of “dual power”, “transitional economies and politics”, “power to the people”, engender all manner of ghosts that should have been buried and forgotten with the failed “revolutions” of the past. And this critique is not without justification.
Others (or the same) will have difficulty with any talk of “black anarchism“.
And yet a politics of “pure protest” without the construction of parallel economies of needs, political forms of self-government, transitions and institutionalisations, mass mobilisations for the overthrow of the State and Capital, lead at best to “reformism”, and worst to the repeated tragedy-farce of more of the same.
The words of Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin, to engage with and reflect upon (and in solidarity) …
It has been said before, but it is worth repeating, that an okupied social centre is not defined by the physicalspaceoccupied (appropriated from the circuits of capital accumulation) but by those who animate it and those to which the “occupiers” can reach out towards, and make feel that the space is equally a point of passage for them.
An okupied social centre is a threshold for new forms of life – however fragile and ephemeral -, a place and time where/when affects and relations of freedom and equality are created, where/when new subjectivities are engendered, and whose resilience rests on the force of the resonances that it creates.
Since coming to power in July of 2019, the “New Democracy” government of Kyriakos Mitsotakis has openly targeted okupied social centres in a drive to domesticate the country’s social life, most notably in the Exarchia neighbourhood of Athens, but in Thessaloniki as well.
The story that we share below is of the struggle for the Libertatia Squat, a struggle of occupations and evictions, of destruction and rebuilding, that echoes the struggle around the Can Vies Self-Managed Social Centre of Barcelona in 2014. And in both cases, we have testimonies of what can be described as militant or direct-action mutual aid can accomplish.
Julien Coupat was one of the accused of the so-called “Tarnac” group. He is the author, along with others, of this text on “things seen” of May and August 2020. It was published simultaneously in Reporterre and Terrestres (04/09/2020) and is presented here in translation.
What have we seen in the last six months, since the emergence of the virus, since the avalanche of transformations it has produced? How to prevent the weight of habit and the force of amnesia from accustoming us to what was then new, unthinkable, terrifying? While it undoubtedly calls for other observations, other records and other re-considerations, this text offers a journey through the times in order to avoid, with the passage of time, that the extraordinary molt into the ordinary and that the fearsome becomes legal.
From Roarmag (08/09/2020), a reflection on “anarcho-blackness” …
The primordial mutiny of anarcho-Blackness
Marquis Bey
Anarcho-Blackness is a qualitative shift of what anarchism is and does, describing the insurgency that defines the abolition of hierarchy and the state.
Anarchism has long caught a bad rap, being likened to chaos and a negatively connoted devolution into pandemonium — “Things were pure anarchy!” we often hear. But anarchism, in fact, names a mode of relating to the world in non-statist, non-authoritative and directly participatory ways. That is, anarchism commits to engendering a world in which the state — understood as the primary progenitor of violence and not only an institution (or many institutions) but a way of relating to others as well — is abolished; no one has “authority” over others, which is to say that we are all in non-hierarchized relation to one another; and any and all rules or ethics that might affect someone ought to be decided upon in conversation with that person.
Black anarchism, then, is not simply Black people who agree with the aforementioned. Rather, Black anarchism refers to a qualitative shift in what anarchism is and does. This shift is what I have deemed “Anarcho-Blackness.”
Anarcho-Blackness is the analytic I use to think through Black anarchism. Someone like Carl Levy focuses on the “-ism” of anarchism, which defines anarchism as a social movement that arose in a specific time and location and is identifiable as a social movement with members and the like. For me to focus on the anarcho- is to emphasize the spirit of anarchic tendencies and modes of relation. It is a focus on a world-making sensibility rather than a particular political cadre of writing and movements.
A transcription (in translation) of a talk by Amador Fernández-Savaterat a colloquium held in Madrid at Espacio La Atenea, “To Inhabit and to govern uncertainty. Reflecting together in confusing times ”. Wednesday, July 15. Published by the online magazine Ají.
To inhabit and to govern uncertainty
To pass through the coming times, we will need a great effort of creation, because what was there before no longer serves, it no longer works. Or at least its meaning is canceled or put in parentheses.
At the moment at which we find ourselves, an effort of invention is necessary in the ways of relating, of being and of sharing; or, we are going to live in what I would call a diminished (or mutilated or trimmed) reality. In the sense that we are going to live the old normality from before, the old normality with its relationship of production, work, consumption, etc., but without the many encounters with the other, which will be absent or limited.
In loving memory of our friend, comrade, and mentor…David Graeber
Andrej Grubacic shares some thoughts on David’s sudden passing.
David Graeber was my mentor and my closest friend for the last twenty years. We have participated in dozens of political projects and wrote several things together. He was by far the most brilliant person I have ever met. We all have a good idea or two, but David was always able to come up with many, sometimes in the same sentence. I have no doubt that he was the most significant anarchist thinker of my generation.
The Shock Of Victory: An Essay by David Graeber—and a Short Eulogy for Him
Today, we mourn the passing of our friend and comrade, David Graeber, a tireless, insightful, and wide-ranging thinker. In his honor, we present his essay, “The Shock of Victory,” which he composed for the fifth issue of our journal, Rolling Thunder, exploring how anarchists can set long-term goals so as not to be caught off guard by our victories.
David’s unexpected passing takes us by surprise. Only days ago, we were corresponding with him about Facebook’s decision to ban anarchist pages to placate the Trump administration. David was among the first to respond with a support statement, charging that “Nothing could conceivably be more violent than to tell us—and particularly our young people—we are forbidden to even dream of a peaceful, caring, world.”
This was in character for David. He was not just an intellectual—he was always eager to take a stand, putting himself in the thick of things. He participated in the Direct Action Network in New York City leading up to the massive demonstrations against the Free Trade Area of the Americas ministerial in Quebec City in April 2001 at the high point of the so-called “anti-globalization” movement. He was an instrumental participant in the founding of Occupy Wall Street and engaged in the debates about “violence” that followed, confronting the same self-righteous pundits that other anarchists did. He was one of the first to direct international attention to the revolutionary experiment in Rojava when it was threatened by the Islamic State, and joined us a year ago in calling for solidarity when Turkey invaded.
He put his body on the line along with his reputation, braving tear gas as well as academic retaliation. After Yale forced him out for his political beliefs, David was compelled to move overseas to find a university position commensurate with his abilities. He got a corporate publishing deal, yes, but he got it by refusing to compromise, not by watering down his politics.
David wrote—and thought, and said, and did—more than we could possibly summarize here. We hope that others will compose a proper eulogy to him, recounting all of his activities and contributions across a wide range of fields. Even when we disagreed—our analysis of democracy is in part a response to David’s account of democracy in essays such as “There Never Was a West“—we always learned from him. He was a stalwart friend and a worthy adversary.
In Graeber’s most transcendent work, such as the essay “What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun?”, he grapples with the basic ontological questions about freedom and the cosmos. This is how we remember him, weaving together different threads to present a vision of self-determination that extends from subatomic particles to entire societies and ecosystems:
“Is it meaningful to say an electron ‘chooses’ to jump the way it does? Obviously, there’s no way to prove it. The only evidence we could have (that we can’t predict what it’s going to do), we do have. But it’s hardly decisive. Still, if one wants a consistently materialist explanation of the world—that is, if one does not wish to treat the mind as some supernatural entity imposed on the material world, but rather as simply a more complex organization of processes that are already going on, at every level of material reality—then it makes sense that something at least a little like intentionality, something at least a little like experience, something at least a little like freedom, would have to exist on every level of physical reality as well.”
He passed away at the young age of 59. Our hearts go out to everyone who survives him. We mourn his passing and grieve for all the things that David had yet to share with us.
The essay we share here emerged from a discussion about the legacy of anti-capitalist struggles at the turn of the century, during the protests against the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and proposed “free” trade initiatives such as the Free Trade Area of the Americas. Anarchists and other anti-capitalist protesters played a major role in delegitimizing the WTO and World Bank and even succeeded in blocking the passing of the FTAA agreement—yet afterwards, many of the participants in the movement were dejected, dismayed that we had not succeeded in abolishing capitalism entirely.
Following this discussion, we invited David to expand his thoughts in an essay for Rolling Thunder, and the result was the following essay, “The Shock of Victory.”
If anything, David’s argument that anarchists are often unprepared for our victories is more timely today than it was when it appeared at the beginning of 2008. In the past few years, anarchists and other proponents of the abolition of police, prisons, and the existing criminal justice system have succeeded in popularizing the notion that all of these are unjust institutions with no legitimacy to govern our lives. Unsurprisingly, authoritarians and police have lashed out with tremendous violence. Caught in a war of attrition involving nightly clashes, it’s easy for demonstrators to feel that we are losing—when on a historic level, we have already achieved some goals that seemed unthinkable only a few years ago. The question—in 2008 as today—is how we can strategize on a long enough timeframe to make the most of our victories, rather than collapsing in despair in the face of the desperate blows of the reaction.
We urge everyone to read David’s work and take up whichever of David’s projects resonate with you. He should be with us in our movements, speaking to us, continuing to live in the actions we take and the visions we share.
The greatest homage that we can be pay to David Graeber – even if this language is probably not one that he would appreciate – is to learn from his work and his life (which were never separate), and to take these lessons into the struggle that was his, that of freedom and equality, or what he understood as democracy.
Graeber’s anarchism was always generous, and it was his historical sensitivity and openness to different forms of militancy, whether ostensibly anarchist or not, that sustained his contagious enthusiasm for rebellion.
David Graeber died yesterday, September 2nd. With his passing, his writings will remain a source for thinking through our world.
In memoriam, we share one short piece by Graeber, among the so many that we could …
Historicity is not forgetfulness, but deviation. It is recollection, but not submission. … More than a homage to a past time, we endeavour to recover, to redeem, the moment of truth of those crushed rebellions, the possibles never realised, condemned to oblivion.
Diego Sztulwark, La ofensiva sensible
This is the M.V. Louise Michel, An independent high speed lifeboat that patrols the Mediterranean
It might seem incredible there is need for a homemade emergency vehicle in one of Europe’s busiest waterways, but there is. The migrant crisis means that European states are instructing their Coastguard not to answer distress calls from ‘non-Europeans’ leaving desperate people to drift helplessly at sea. To make matters worse authorities prevent other boats from providing assistance, arresting crews and impounding boats that do.
The Louise Michel is a former French Navy boat we’ve customised to perform search and rescue. She is as agile as she is pink. Measuring 30 meters in length and capable of over 28 knots, she was bought with proceeds from the sale of Banksy artwork – who then decorated her with a fire extinguisher. She is captained and crewed by a team of rescue professionals drawn from across Europe. She runs on a flat hierarchy and a vegan diet.
Today 26.8.20 marks one year since the armed hooded men of Chrysochoidis invaded the refugee squat of Spyrou Trikoupi 17 and the neighboring Transito squat. It was early in the morning when they forcibly pulled out families with young children from their beds–people who after much hardship and suffering had found a place to grow roots again in these buildings. They took them from their home and distributed them in miserable camps to live in the dirt and with indifference in canvas tents. Since then, a barrage of state terrorist attacks on refugee and political squats has led to evacuations, snatching of people, beatings, and arrests.
Ungovernable: An Interview with Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin
In the interview which we share below (William C. Anderson and published by the Black Rose Anarchist Federation, 11/08/2020), there is a lucidity and wisdom in the words Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin, words born of struggles, words that cannot be ignored.
For some, and for some anarchists, take of “dual power”, “transitional economies and politics”, “power to the people”, engender all manner of ghosts that should have been buried and forgotten with the failed “revolutions” of the past. And this critique is not without justification.
Others (or the same) will have difficulty with any talk of “black anarchism“.
And yet a politics of “pure protest” without the construction of parallel economies of needs, political forms of self-government, transitions and institutionalisations, mass mobilisations for the overthrow of the State and Capital, lead at best to “reformism”, and worst to the repeated tragedy-farce of more of the same.
The words of Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin, to engage with and reflect upon (and in solidarity) …
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