From one country to another, the pretense of democratic constitutional rule, respect for citizens’ rights, the presumed worth and dignity of everyone, is stripped away as quickly as the crises multiply and rain down upon us. Increasingly, the one obvious function of the State shows itself: to maintain order – however violent it be -, and repress dissidence. If the “wretched of the earth” have always known this truth in the flesh, it now unveils itself to all. What remains to those condemned, in one way or another, is to refuse this power, to walk away from it, to resist it, to sabotage it.
From the Crimethinc. Collective, news from the military-police intervention in Portland, Oregon.
Posted with the CrimethInc. Collective (15/07/2020) …
Looming Recession, the Ban on Freedom of Assembly, and the Death of Vassilis Maggos
Since coming to power last summer, Greece’s far-right New Democracy party has waged an all-out war against immigrants, anarchists, and rebels, attempting to evict the entire network of occupied social centers that animates the country’s ungovernable movements and to crush other spaces of autonomy such as universities. The COVID-19 pandemic has offered New Democracy additional pretexts as they attempt to replace this rich history of rebellion with a police state suitable for international investment. Yet the looming economic crisis promises to render this effort moot. In this tense context, the past month has seen conflicts escalate all around the country, with the government attempting to ban freedom of assembly, police beating countless demonstrators—one of whom later apparently died of his injuries—and determined anarchists giving battle to the forces of oppression on every front.
This update is adapted from RadioFragmata’s forthcoming monthly contribution to the “Bad News Report” podcast. You can read last month’s report here.
To be obliged to work will always be to die a little. To enrich others, to obey disgusting bosses, to run so as not to be late, to pretend to smile, to receive starvation wages: everything kills. To lose moments of love and pleasure, of leisure and creativity, and to forget the capacity to imagine totally different mornings is the sentence to which we are condemned by the masters of all times and colours. To be an exemplary worker and to endure without saying a word will never be a sign of pride. We will not be happy slaves. We want to win ourselves back, we demand Life. And if something has to die, let it be the order of exploitation that oppresses us.
Well-being and freedom!
Anarchists in Temuco(Chile)
May 1st, 2014
___
I know few texts – none? – that better portray the condition of our daily life. … What do I see behind these lines? I see, above all, a frank response to one of the inumerable expressions of voluntary servitude. We end up believing in the incredible, and we think, at the same time, and against all reason, that working gives us unlimited pleasure. As if a subsistence wage or, in some cases, the income that allows us to acquire what we do not need, filled us with happiness. In between, as is well known, something far greater is felt, that the former opens onto and makes possible: compliance with hierarchy and exploitation, understood as two innate features of the human species. And we can perceive how the memory of life that at some point – presumably – made us happy has disappeared. Good for the Temuco anarchists.
Life, or the memory of peoples, cannot be measured by the number of years lived, but by life’s moments of intensity.
We won the revolution, what we lost was the war. The revolution consisted in the fact that the workers became masters of the instruments of labor and did not falter in their management of the means of production. The revolution did not fail, it was defeated militarily. Perhaps with the passage of time it would have developed a paralyzing bureaucracy but we will never know. There are victories that are defeats and there are defeats that are victories. If the Russian revolution was a victory, who won? The workers? No. On the other hand, the Commune of Paris was a great working class victory. Ours, too. It was a revolutionary victory although it ended with a military defeat. We pushed the revolution as far as we could.
Abel Paz
A translation of Raoul Vaneigem’s Preface to the French translation Abel Paz’s/Diego Camacho Escámez’ Memoirs, shared with us recently by the notbored collective, is the occasion to return to this anarchist who participated in the Spanish Revolution (1936-9), the anti-Franco resistance and the post-Franco transition period, and who would also become one of the movement’s historians.
The latter work remains essential for any understanding of the anarchist movement in the country, and beyond. But perhaps above all what we learn from Paz’s life and chronicles is that anarchism is a form of life, and ethical and political engagement to live revolution and all that it demands.
Below, we share Vaneigem’s Preface, an interview with Paz published originally in a Spanish newspaper, and two video records dedicated to him.
The Cop-Free Zone: Reflections from Experiments in Autonomy around the US
The cop-free zone is not the particular block or traffic circle or park. It is the shared commitment to defending a space and eliminating the dynamics of policing and white supremacy. In the following collection, we explore some people’s experiences attempting to create police-free autonomous zones in different parts of the United States.
Yesterday, Seattle police evicted the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ), also known as the Capitol Hill Organized Protest (CHOP), ending an experiment in autonomy that had extended over three weeks of inspiring creativity and heartbreaking tragedies. Yet the legend of this space has spread around the world, inspiring solidarity actions as far away as Tokyo and attempts to emulate it from Portland to New York City and Washington, DC. For an overview of the story of the occupation in Seattle, you could start here.
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.
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.
NEW YORK, NY – JUNE 25: Participants hold a flag that reads “there are no queer friendly cops” in the annual New York Gay Pride Parade, one of the oldest and largest in the world, make their way down 5th Avenue in Manhattan on June 25, 2017 in New York City. Thouands cheered as members of LGBT community danced and marched under a bright summer sun. Many participants carried political themed signs as President Trump’s adminstration has angered some in the LGBT community. (Photo by William Volcov/Brazil Photo Press/LatinContent/Getty Images)
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.
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.
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 Socialismeou 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 …
Morir un poco/To die a little
To be obliged to work will always be to die a little. To enrich others, to obey disgusting bosses, to run so as not to be late, to pretend to smile, to receive starvation wages: everything kills. To lose moments of love and pleasure, of leisure and creativity, and to forget the capacity to imagine totally different mornings is the sentence to which we are condemned by the masters of all times and colours. To be an exemplary worker and to endure without saying a word will never be a sign of pride. We will not be happy slaves. We want to win ourselves back, we demand Life. And if something has to die, let it be the order of exploitation that oppresses us.
Well-being and freedom!
Anarchists in Temuco (Chile)
May 1st, 2014
___
I know few texts – none? – that better portray the condition of our daily life. … What do I see behind these lines? I see, above all, a frank response to one of the inumerable expressions of voluntary servitude. We end up believing in the incredible, and we think, at the same time, and against all reason, that working gives us unlimited pleasure. As if a subsistence wage or, in some cases, the income that allows us to acquire what we do not need, filled us with happiness. In between, as is well known, something far greater is felt, that the former opens onto and makes possible: compliance with hierarchy and exploitation, understood as two innate features of the human species. And we can perceive how the memory of life that at some point – presumably – made us happy has disappeared. Good for the Temuco anarchists.
Carlos Taibo, Nuevo Desorden