Crooked Bough News Round-up

— Alex Gorrion - We Want to Be Great Like Our Crime

 

at 7/26/24 11:46am

Author: Alex GorrionTitle: We Want to Be Great Like Our CrimeSubtitle: The Criminal Ego and the Struggle in SocietyDate: June 20, 2010Source: The Anvil Review On Isabelle Eberhardt's “Criminal” and Renzo Novatore's “Toward the Creative Nothing” Quotes refer to the Eberhardt Press edition and the Venomous Butterfly Publications edition, respectively. Crime In “Criminal,” Isabelle Eberhardt's memoir of land colonization in Algeria written around the turn of the last century, the farmer Mohammed Achouri cuts an interesting figure. A “tall thin old man with the face of an ascetic, his hard features set in an expression of constant preoccupation”, a quiet character who stands “a bit apart from the others”, he is not a likely hero. Though he stands out, and in fact his inability to fit in singles him out for downfall, his unheroic resistance fits well within the unheroic reality of the story; the French have colonized Algeria, and they force the people of Bou Achour to give their prime land to colonists, a double theft because in the collective society of that region they had never even had to buy and sell land among themselves or “resort to the system of inheritance.” They get mere pennies for their land, their complaints are rebuffed, and they have no choice but to work under the new landlords. At harvest time they watch the riches of their toil and their earth taken from them, but that night, the new barn burns down, and the harvest with it. Nonetheless, a suspect is arrested, nothing changes, and the power of colonialism continues its cruel exercises, unfazed. It was not until I read the story the second time that I noticed it was Mohammed Achouri who played the instigating role in getting the other Arabs of Bou Achour to protest the low prices they were given for their land by the French colonizers. The author mentions no rousing speech on his part, or natural charisma. He simply cannot stomach the indignity, and suggests they protest. The gesture is unsuccessful, the colonial administrator is powerless to change the decision that has come down from Algiers, and many of them, including Achouri, must go to work for their new landlord. Achouri alone is described as “openly sullen.” At the outset Mohammed Achouri had placed a great distance between himself and the Frenchman, to whose good-natured sallies he remained wholly impervious. When the barn was burned down, suspicion pointed to Mohammed Achouri[...] They found him guilty. He was a simple, unyielding man who had been robbed and betrayed in the name of laws he did not understand. And he had directed all his hatred and rancor against the usurping colonist. “Crime, particularly among the poor and downtrodden,” concludes Eberhardt, “is often a last gesture of liberty.” The Human Frogs In his poetic rant “Toward the Creative Nothing,” Renzo Novatore, an Italian individualist anarchist active from 1908 to his death in 1922, addresses another social tragedy, World War I, with much more heroic terms. He glorifies those who resisted, those “who died with stars in their eyes,” with a Nietzschean exuberance, while saving extreme contempt for his fellow proletarians who heeded the lies and marched off to war. “The human frogs knew neither how to distinguish their own enemy nor how to fight for their own ideas [...] They fought against each other for their enemy.” In Novatore's writing, one finds a clear contempt for the masses, not out of any aristocratic notions of inherent worth, but because they have behaved despicably and idiotically, going even against their own interests to participate in their own meaningless slaughter. Novatore will not excuse anyone who is less than great, and he certainly will not romanticize them simply for belonging to a mass. His judgments are harsh, and he could be accused of insensitivity to the many complex reasons members of that mass had for going off to war, but also in the interests of sensitivity one must imagine the horror of his generation and understand that at bottom there was no good excuse for obedience to that degree. Populism only becomes a form of justification. Yet some people cite this antisocial contempt, this Nietzschean adulation of those few who do not follow the herd, to argue that the individualist anarchists were counterrevolutionary elitists, or even fascists. Eberhardt, very much a kindred spirit, evinces a similarly antisocial attitude. She writes of the need “To be alone, to be poor in needs, to be ignored, to be an outsider who is at home everywhere, and to walk, great and by oneself, toward the conquest of the world.” She tersely dismisses “the slavery that comes of contact with others,” and it is precisely in such phrases that she can be written off as dangerously impractical. Useless. How could solitude possibly be applied as a social program? The conclusion is that there is nothing revolutionary in hers or similar writings. It is precisely the hidden totalitarianism of this line of reasoning that I want to unmask. Against What Does the Antisocial Direct Its Attack? I'll start with the disingenuous claim of a connection between individualist anarchism and fascism. Novatore, one of Italian fascism's most zealous enemies and earliest victims (he was shot down by police in 1922), had some bold thoughts on the matter. In talking about how socialism functioned to control the revolt of the proletariat by promising a base material equality while stifling talk of true freedom, he writes: ...

[Link to media]

— Sophia Nachalo and Yarostan Vochek - Letters of Insurgents

 

at 7/22/24 7:35am

Author: Sophia Nachalo and Yarostan VochekTitle: Letters of InsurgentsDate: 1976Notes: Published by Black and Red Press, Detroit, 1976. Yarostan’s first letter Dear Sophia, Forgive me for addressing you familiarly, as a friend; I have no way of knowing if you’re still the person I once knew. I can’t remember the sound of your voice, the shape of your face or the feel of your hand. I vaguely remember admiring the energy and intelligence in someone so young, but I regret that you didn’t leave a lasting mark, you didn’t become my guide in my journey through hell. I wouldn’t even remember your name if you hadn’t written me twelve years ago. My wife Mirna memorized the name and address on the envelope because she attributed a strange power to your letter. Unfortunately I never saw that letter and never learned its contents. Part of my reason for writing you now is that the activities of our omnipotent and omniscient police have been blocked. Letters aren’t being read by the eagle-eyed censors and letter-writers aren’t being escorted out of their homes by middle-of-the-night visitors. So I’m told. I want to believe it. Rebellious words and even gestures are becoming frequent and I haven’t seen or heard of the arrest of the rebels. Something is changing in this city, in the entire land; I don’t know if the change is permanent. This change is reviving my interest in my surroundings, in my fellow beings, in myself, in you. If there is no change, if this is another illusion, if I’m not writing to Sophia but to a benevolent protector of the people’s real interests, a censor, then I’d rather be back in prison than “free.” There’s no joy in such freedom. Such a life is filled with dread and the only ones free of that dread are those already in prison. If the change taking place around me is an illusion or a trap, then I no longer care if I’m arrested again. Even in solitary confinement a prisoner tortured by dampness and rats is comforted by the thought that others survived it, that they weren’t crushed by moving walls or descending ceilings. But the policed “free citizen” can’t ever get rid of the fear that he may be dragged off at any time, wherever he is, whoever he’s with; that all his friendships and all his projects can suddenly end; that the front door of his house can crash open at midnight; that the ceiling of his bedroom might start descending on him while he’s asleep. In a context where any word or gesture can lead to the dreaded arrest there’s no freedom. In such a context, beings vibrant with the will to live are transformed into beings for whom death is no worse than a life marked by the dread of death. The prisons and camps don’t contain only those inside them but also those outside them. All human beings are transformed into prisoners and prison guards. I don’t put the blame on prison guards. They’re only workers. They’re not inanimate things, cement walls that can neither see nor hear nor think. Most of them didn’t choose their jobs; they ended up there because they thought they had no other choice. I’ve spent a total of twelve years inside walls, behind bars and fences, and I’ve never met a prison guard in whom I saw no trace of myself. I never met a guard who had dreamed that patrolling a convict yard would be the daily content of his life. Very few of those I’ve met admitted to never having dreamed, never having imagined themselves proud of projects undertaken with one or several genuine friends. Was our point of departure the same, and were we at some point interchangeable? How much has each of us contributed to what each has undergone? If a guard ever dreamed, was it of prisons and camps that he dreamed, and was he my jailer-to-be already then? I can’t say I failed to write you sooner because there were censors. I could have found ways to reach you without sending a letter through their hands. I could also have devised simple ways to camouflage the letter’s origin, destination and content and sent it gliding unseen past the censor’s omniscient gaze. It’s now three years since my release. During the first two years I wasn’t able to remain in one place long enough to write a letter. This is apparently an illness that affects many individuals released after a long imprisonment. When the day of my release was so distant that I thought I wouldn’t live to experience it, I was able to formulate clear and distinct ideas ordered with an impeccable logic. In conversations with inmates and in my imagination I composed one after another book unveiling the inverted practice that seized a field intended for a garden and built a concentration camp. I thought all I needed was a table in a small room, a pen and paper and an occasional meal; I thought the ideas would flow by themselves. When I’d been home for only half an hour after my release I rushed out of the house and spent the remainder of the day walking aimlessly. It wasn’t because I wanted to see what had changed during my eight-year absence. I avoided studying the changes and gazed at the pavement. I was too familiar with the spirit in which those changes were created. Nor did I want to see or communicate with people who weren’t convicts. They were altogether unfamiliar to me, almost a different type of creature, and I avoided them. I longed for the comrades I had left inside. We had shared insights and hardships, we had shared a common world, a common enemy and common hopes. I could no longer imagine myself becoming a self-policed imbecile who voluntarily put an end to his sleep so as to voluntarily reach a workshop at eight in the morning only to spend the day voluntarily turning out the number of parts which planners and managers had assigned to “his” machine. In prison such idiocy had only characterized newcomers; if they weren’t quickly cured by fellow convicts, they became tools of the prison administration or else their stupidity was so abused by sadistic guards that they went insane or died of overwork. ...

[Link to media]

— Ameed Faleh - I Don’t Want a State, and I Never Did

 

at 7/21/24 5:55pm

Author: Ameed FalehTitle: I Don’t Want a State, and I Never DidDate: July 16, 2024Source: Retrieved on July 21, 2024 from https://hello.goodshepherdcollective.org/sendy/w/v763892xRCuLgGPl4ovANruMOA/wcJf7Kvgs9eSy6JDl2qKuQ/9Be3XcAljVwc892eDWMhTjUQ It was the early spring of 2017, and I stood in line for the daily school routine. We did the usual routine of standing up for the Palestinian anthem and the obligatory start-of-the-week fingernail check. The inspector will hit your hands with a wooden stick if you do not cut your fingernails every week. After the morning routine, we saw our sports teacher make an announcement: “On behalf of the school administration, we would like to present our condolences to Kareem and his entire family for the martyrdom of Kareem’s cousin, Ahmad, by the Israeli Occupation Forces. We will take this moment of silence to grieve and recite Fatiha upon Ahmad’s soul.” I was confused and shook. I looked around for Kareem to no avail; he didn’t attend school that day. Nevertheless, I recited the Fatiha upon Ahmad’s soul. The sports teacher continued: “Despite this great loss and sadness, we are rooted in the land. Despite everything, we will have a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital and Abu Mazen as its president.” I heard the students chuckling in the concoction of confusion and sadness. A teacher suddenly laughed. Amidst his laughter, he said, “Abu Mazen and his state are going to outlive us all!” The grieving atmosphere of martyrdom was suddenly uprooted and supplanted by the chuckles of the students and the low-whisper comments by the teacher — all because of one sentence relating to a Palestinian state headed by Mahmoud Abbas. “A Palestinian state with [East] Jerusalem as its capital” is a statement we’ve heard so many times: from corrupt Arab comprador regimes directly complicit in Gaza’s genocide, from the leadership of the Palestinian Authority, from European countries, and even from the United States. Variations exist, with some saying “a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders,” and some replacing East Jerusalem with Jerusalem to imbue ambiguity on the political processes of the Oslo period that strip the Palestinians of their right to the entirety of Palestine. Ever since Arafat’s proclamation of statehood on November 15th, 1988 — considered an official holiday by the Palestinian Authority and an annual laughing stock for Palestinians in the West Bank — the “symbolic” has replaced the decolonial. Statehood has replaced national liberation. We have a “quest” for statehood, a passport, ministries, embassies, a police force — overlook the fact it arrests and kills fighters for the sake of optimism — and even our very own seat in the United Nations as an observer state, just like the Vatican! We also have settlements cleaving the West Bank, checkpoints whose purpose is to lessen Palestinian productivity via arrests and long-waiting times, daily raids emptying Palestinian towns of their most politically active people, martyrs every day, and a genocidal campaign being waged on Gaza. Statehood here comes crashing down with reality. What we’re left with, essentially, is a proxy lessening Israel’s obligations vis-a-vis directly ruling the population of the West Bank. It gets money from donor countries and (sometimes belatedly) gets VAT taxes ostensibly collected on its behalf by Israel. It could build a school or two with some of that money! It may even renovate a road! The majority of this money, however, will go towards purchasing bullets, tear gas, and new fancy anti-riot gear from Israel. What happened to settlement building, refugees, and the land? They’re pending future status negotiations. The symbolic replacing the material is vital to emphasize; Spain has finally recognized us as a state! Colombia is going to build an embassy in Ramallah! It only took an ambitious military operation on October 7th, and an entire genocide of Gaza thereafter, for those two countries to do their symbolic moves. Does recognition of a Palestinian state — wrested from the majority of its rightful territory, with its refugees disregarded, under the PLO’s “historic compromise” — imply a stop to settlement-building? Do they affect the material reality on the ground? What benefits do Palestinians get from these moves? In essence, we’re closer than ever to being an official state, but also paradoxically so far away from being so. Do we need so many offices? So many businessmen with BMC permits (permits issued by the Zionist entity to extremely wealthy assholes, allowing them to travel to the territories colonized in 1948 with their Palestinian car) and so many politicians? Do we need that non-member observer status in the United Nations? What has all of the above brought us on the ground? Ghassan Kanafani’s early warnings about the bureaucratization of the Palestinian Revolution in assessing the PLO’s conduct in Jordan after the events in Black September are important mental notes to take into account when articulating why speeches replaced the gun. This discourse of statehood has morphed the fighter into an official, and the munadel (Arabic for the person who struggles, literally a struggler, usually reserved for fighters and prisoners) into an “activist.” The significance of October 7th lies in the fact that it broke this taboo, which reclaimed the Palestinian lexicon from an imperialist world order that seeks to confine the Palestinians into the discourse of “state-building.” ...

[Link to media]

— Various Authors - Towards an Especifista Feminism in North America

 

at 7/17/24 4:06am

Author: Various AuthorsTitle: Towards an Especifista Feminism in North AmericaDate: 2022Source: Scanned from a zine. Introduction TO BEGIN... “We recognize that the feminist camp has made great efforts, by revealing the mechanisms that oppress women and dissidence, and by naming issues that used to be invisible. However, this does not mean that the concepts and categories, and therefore the theoretical frameworks, are all equally valid. As especifist anarchists we task ourselves with taking from these theoretical productions, the concepts and categories that are consistent with our own ideology. Referring to the guiding principles of other currents will not only lead us down a different ideological path but also have concrete effects on the militancy, on the political level as on the social level.”[1] (Federación Anarquista de Rosario, “Hacia un feminismo especifista. Elementos para el debate sobre la militancia feminista del anarquismo organizado”, June 2021) STILL... “[...] non-mixed spaces are an imperfect solution in an imperfect world. This is not, however, a reason to abandon them as a tactic.”[2] (Les dérailleuses, “On the importance of non-mixed spaces”, in Londonderry: A cyclo-feminist zine) THEREFORE... “[In] the search for our own feminism, in accordance with our current of organized anarchism and its comprehensive strategy, we always have the obligation to always reflect on which tools and practices are — and which are not — the most effective and pertinent, in this particular context in order to contribute to the construction of popular power from a feminist perspective.”[3] (FAR) FOR THIS REASON... “[We] believe that it is necessary to find a balance between coalition building and specificity, in such a way that the feminist perspective crosses the rest of the issues in addition to the organizational practices, but without erasing or backing down from the demands, which still need to be addressed in a particular way.”[4] (FAR) WITHOUT THIS... “The result is an outward-facing media presence that relies heavily on the contributions of individual militants and re-shares of material featuring broad anti-institutional critiques.” (Thistle Writing Collective, “Every Rose Has Its Thorn”[5]) Part 1 TAKE FOR EXAMPLE... “[...]non-mixed spaces are an immediate solution to a systemic problem. By eliminating one of the sources of sexism — men — and by making it explicit that no one wants to exclude anyone, the atmosphere changes immediately.”[6] (Les dérailleuses) AND ANOTHER EXAMPLE... “It was not until we began sharing our experiences that so many more of us realized that this was more than administrative protocols, study groups, and consciousness raising could cure and it wasn’t something that only individuals should be held accountable for. This was an organizational crisis and the entire membership needed to respond. Our shared analysis revealed that our efforts were never sustained for more than a few months and rarely went beyond a “discussion” of the issues.” (TWC) STRATEGICALLY SPEAKING... “For many, non-mixed spaces are a jumping off point helping to acquire knowledge and self-confidence to then (re)insert themselves into mixed spaces. Non-mixed spaces should not be seen as a goal in themselves, but rather a way of raising important questions to the shop as a whole, allowing the practice of not mixing to potentially become a relic of the past.” (Les dérailleuses) ASK FOR EXAMPLE... “Are you engaging with new political ideas and demands emerging from these movements or are you comfortable with confining your discussions with others in your cocoon?” (TWC) FROM AN ESPECIFISTA PERSPECTIVE... “In this sense, we believe that each tool and space (such as women’s committees, protocols, conventions) should be thought of according to the sphere (level) -political or social-, the participation of the compañeras and the degree to which they appropriate feminism as their own. They cannot be used as neutral formulas. If we do not contextualize them and believe that they can be used independently of the rest of the ideological and material apects of the organization, we would be feeding an idea of homogeneous feminism, not dissimilar from those which we clearly oppose.”[7] (FAR) AND YET... “Feminism never became an official area of political work [...]” (TWC) AND STILL... “Building strategy should not be a controversial aim for a political organization. The inability to tackle strategy and the organizational defeatism we perpetually confronted is all too common.” (TWC) BUT AT LEAST... “[We] want to warn about the directions it can take and the detrimental effects it can have on our strategy social construction. This does not mean that we should abandon it, but on the contrary, we should be there attempting to be influential with our construction of a feminism from below, from the women at bottom.”[8] (FAR) Part 2 SPECIFICALLY... “[We] see trends that arise from the women’s and feminist movement that permeate our militancy and that we believe can hinder the development of the methodology that we are proposing with organized anarchism.”[9] (FAR) SIMILAR TO... “[...] there were points of contention about feminism within the organization.” (TWC) AND... “This was not interpersonal conflict. It was a difference in politics.” (TWC) SUMMIZING THAT... “On the Left, there is an unspoken belief that finding solutions for intra-movement violence (especially of a sexual or gendered variety) is “women’s work,” meaning that the burden is placed on those most likely to have already experienced abuse rather than those most likely to perpetuate it.” (TWC) TO CRITIQUE... “The order of things were designed to reproduce women and non-binary comrades as the unpaid social, administrative, physical, and emotional laborers not the strategists.” (TWC) TO DESCRIBE... ““women’s auxiliary” and dutifully produced attractive content while avoiding internal conflict” (TWC) TO CONCLUDE... “a culture that depoliticized care and glorified masculinized “productive” work to the extent that a feminist analysis of the political moment wasn’t even audible to the culture let alone understood as urgent. If the social relations within the organization were designed to reward individualized clout chasing as the productive form of militant praxis, any feminist who made a demand for more rigorous and collective political analysis was in violation of the patriarchal order of things.” (TWC) SIMILAR TO... “[...] political practices where women and dissidents appear as the only voices authorized to give debates on gender issues. As especifist anarchists, we must seek to participate in all the issues of the organization, especially including those that are usually masculinized. So, while we think that the gender perspective must enter into all of our analyses, at the same time, we also believe that feminism and anti-patriarchy cannot be the center of all readings,”[10] (FAR) WHICH MAY BE DIFFERENT FROM... “[...] efforts to center feminism within the organization.” (TWC) SINCE... “We believe open organizational debate on political differences informed by work in our communities is crucial to building the knowledge, experience, and trust necessary to topple hetero-patriarchy and colonialism.” (TWC) STILL... “[An] individual’s, or an organization’s, carefully crafted political positions do not mean they know how to discuss, debate, or live them in their daily activism. We raise this point because it did not only contribute to the stifling internal culture that pushed us to leave BRRN, but we believe it is a trend in many anarchist spaces that deserves more analysis and critical reflection.” (TWC) AND ALSO TO CRITIQUE FROM A DIFFERENT ANGLE... “[Many] times, in the name of women’s struggle, a programmatic agenda is carried out that ignores the reality of the social sectors where we are organized. This vindictive agenda, often without a class character or a clear intention of generating popular participation — sometimes, on the contrary, even appealing to individual and spontaneous participation — ends up promoting actions that are removed from the daily reality of social organizations, only reaching a militant minority.”[11] (FAR) STILL... “Our comrades heard our personal testimonies of patriarchy in the organization and saw no political importance in them. While we, through diligent and rigorous study and exchange, knew that they formed a pattern of patriarchal dominance and subordination. We argued that the only remedy to a political crisis is political action.” (TWC) HENCE THE REASON FOR WRITING... “[...] to expose these dynamics outside our small corner of the Left. We believe we are not alone in this experience, and know that we cannot create change alone.” (TWC) ...

[Link to media]

— Leo Tolstoy - Three Deaths

 

at 7/17/24 1:58am

Author: Leo TolstoyTitle: Three DeathsDate: 1859Notes: Translated by Robert Nisbet Bain and published in 1902.Source: <revoltlib.com/anarchism/three-deaths-bain-translation-tolstoy-leo> I. It was Autumn. A carriage and a calesche were proceeding at a sharp trot along the high-road. In the carriage sat two women. One of them was the mistress, thin and pale. The other was the maid, smug, florid, and buxom. Her short dry tresses peeped forth from under her faded bonnet, her pretty hand in her torn glove readjusted them from time to time; her swelling bosom, covered by a rug, was full of the breath of health; her quick black eyes glanced at one moment out of the window at the scurrying fields, at another stared boldly at her mistress, or glanced uneasily at the corners of the carriage. Before the very nose of the waiting-maid the bonnet of her mistress, attached to the netting of the carriage, rocked to and fro; on her knees lay a lap-dog, her legs were hunched up, the hand-box standing on the floor of the carriage and the drumming of her feet upon it was just audible amid the creaking of the carriage-springs and the clattering of the window-glasses. With her hands on her knees, and closed eyes, the mistress rocked softly on the pillows piled up behind her, and kept on coughing an internal cough, ​at the same time slightly wrinkling her brows. On her head was a white night-cap, and a blue handkerchief was fastened round her fresh, white neck. The straight parting, continuing beneath the night-cap, divided the reddish, extraordinarily flat, well-preserved hair, and there was something dry and death-like in the whiteness of the skin of this broad parting. The withered, somewhat yellowish skin hung somewhat loosely on the delicate and pretty face, and the cheeks and jaws had a pinkish hue. Her lips were dry and restless, her traveling cloth dress lay in straight folds over her shrunken bosom. Notwithstanding that her eyes were closed, the face of the mistress expressed weariness, irritation, and suffering. The lackey, perched upon the box-seat, was dozing; the post-driver, shouting vigorously, whipped up his sturdy, sweating team of four, glancing around occasionally at the other post-driver behind him in the calesche, who was bawling out just as lustily. The broad, double traces of the rapidly revolving tires extended evenly along in the chalky mud of the road. The sky was gray and cold—a cold mist enveloped the plain and the road It was stuffy in the carriage, which smelt of eau de cologne and dust. The sick woman stretched back her head and gradually opened her eyes. Her large eyes were sparkling and of a very pretty dark color. “There it is again,” she said, irritably shoving aside with her pretty, wasted hand the corner of the crinoline of her maid, which had barely touched her leg, and her mouth pouted peevishly. The maid ​grasped her crinoline with both hands, rose for a moment on her sturdy legs, and sat a little further off. Her fresh face had a bright flush upon it. The beautiful dark eyes of the invalid greedily followed every movement of the maid. Presently the mistress rested both arms on the seat of the carriage, and also tried to raise herself in order to sit up a little higher, but her strength failed her. Her mouth pouted, and her whole face wore an expression of impotent, angry scorn. “Help me, would you! It is really quite unnecessary. I can do it myself, only don’t load me with your—what shall I call them—your sacks then—have a little mercy! Better not touch me at all if you can’t do better than that!” The mistress closed her eyes—presently she quickly raised her eyelids again and glanced at her maid. The maid, as she returned her gaze, nibbled at her pretty lower lip. A deep sigh arose from the invalid’s breast, but the sigh ended in a cough. She turned aside, puckered her brow, and grasped her bosom with both hands. When the cough ceased she closed her eyes again and continued to sit motionless. The carriage and the calesche entered a village. The maid drew her plump hand from beneath her jacket and crossed herself. “What is it?” asked her mistress. “A posting-station, my lady.” “Why did you cross yourself? I ask.” “We passed the church, my lady.” The invalid turned to the window, and began slowly to cross herself, looking with all her big eyes at the ​large village church, round which the invalid’s carriage was just then passing. The carriage and calesche stopped together at the posting-station. Out of the calesche stepped the sick woman’s husband and the doctor, who came up to the carriage. “How are you now?” asked the doctor, taking her hand and feeling her pulse. “Are you not a little tired, my friend?” inquired her husband in French, “Don’t you want to get out?” The maid, looking after her wraps, squeezed herself into a corner, so as to be as much out of the way of the conversation as possible. “Pretty much the same as before, but it doesn’t matter,” replied the invalid. “I won’t get out.” The husband, after pausing a short time, went into the post-station. The maid, skipping out of the carriage, tripped lightly on the tips of her toes over the mud into the open door. ...

[Link to media]

— Anonymous - Words and History Mean Things

 

at 7/16/24 3:21pm

Author: AnonymousTitle: Words and History Mean ThingsSubtitle: A Response to “Addicted to Losing”Date: 2024-05-02Source: Retrieved on 2024-07-16 from https://bbnews.noblogs.org/post/2024/05/02/words-and-history-mean-things-a-response-to-addicted-to-losing/ Most of what comes out in the text “Addicted to Losing” is not new. Black anarchists and anti-authoritarians have been critiquing black non-profits, Black academics, Black activists and black authoritarians for years before the 2020 uprising. Black anarchists who have been active PRIOR to 2020 have been deeply aware of these critiques, mainly based on their experiences. We are unsure how connected the author is to Black anti-authoritarians but, best believe Black anarchists been having these conversations. There has been so much talk over the past four years about Black counter insurgency. It is important to recognize that Black revolutionaries have been theorizing about these formations long before it became popular or deemed important to do in the anarchist scene. We think it’s also important to recognize that most Black anarchists have been too busy doing anarchy to write articles on the cracker anarchist-baiting websites. We’ve included two critiques of the Black Counter-Insurgency written by Black revolutionaries prior to 2020. We don’t agree with everything in the texts; however, we think it is important to acknowledge that there is a history of Black radicals making our own critiques separate from the white, ill will editions and crimethinc milieus who continue to trail us politically. https://archive.iww.org/content/4th-precinct-black-anarchist%E2%80%99s-perspective-struggle-minneapolis%E2%80%99-northside-streets/ https://libcom.org/article/why-black-lives-matter-cincinnati-changing-its-name While there are actually parts of “Addicted to Losing” that we agree with, we struggle with a variety of parts within it as anarchists. We imagine the author(s) would consider us and our comrades as the people who hold “ressentiment” because we are critical of “efforts of radicals to increase their power of acting.” But what exactly does this mean? For us, as anarchists, we have a certain set of political values that we operate from. That doesn’t mean we are “addicted to losing”, it means we have standards when it comes to our ethics. For instance, many Black male revolutionaries within the 60s and 70s engaged in misogynistic behavior towards Black women while simultaneously facing serious political repression. But because these men were engaged in revolutionary activity and faced repression, misogynistic violence was often covered up or excused. Assata Shakur talks about this in her autobiography and how detrimental the culture of protecting abuse was to the struggle. Were Black revolutionaries who critiqued misogynistic violence “addicted to losing” or “violating security culture” or “engaging in horizontal repression?” As Kuwasi Balagoon said, those unwilling to critique racism, authoritarianism and misogyny when it rears it’s head are ROBOTS. The argument on the necessity of revolutionary strength and castigating those who are critical as “nihilists enemies” or “resentful” is essentially the same as those who ignored the gender based violence back in the 60s/70s. This is a serious backpedal from the 60s and 70s in terms of gender politics in particular. But this can be applied to anything that is viewed as a revolutionary “strategy.” It is politically convenient to call anyone who is critical of a tactic, strategy or behavior as “ressentiment.” We think it is strange that the text focuses upon “ressentiment politics” as “police attempts at freedom that lie outside of their preferred grammar of conflict.” It is extremely valid and necessary for political formations/groups to reflect and critique themselves and others. We were again confused on how buying property, which the text mentions is a very standard and correct thing to do in racial capitalist society, is somehow an attempt at freedom not a continuation and investment in white, western, and bourgeois lifestylism. Perhaps in the text, there is an underlying right wing association of property with freedom (unsurprisingly considering the appelist flirtation with right wing politics). However, we desire property to be destroyed. “Efforts of radicals to increase their power of acting, whether through acquiring spaces like houses and social centers, money for bail funds and projects, or even forming larger strategies about how to defeat the police in the streets are treated as a violation of an implicit set of values that venerates the experience of being trapped.” This part of the text is so convenient as it speaks of radicals as if we do not exist within a racial and gendered society. “Increasing our power to act” is not something that happens outside of racial, class and gender confines. As the author suggests, these contradictions have to be moved through and addressed rather than derided as “ressentiment”. But again, it’s easier to defame your critics as do nothing nihilists who are “addicted to losing” while you gentrify Black neighborhoods to build your isolated “community.” The whole text becomes even more strange and contradictory when the author references widespread rape culture and segregation of revolutionary formations. The question is why the author chooses to acknowledge these problems while contributing to them by writing what essentially reads as an upset screed conflating anarchists who critique with the black counter-insurgency. This is why it is hard to take the text seriously especially since it’s been published on ill will (a well known appelist project). To read a deeper critique of the appelist tendency and why they love property (whitey loves property), go check out Against the Party of Insurrection. ...

[Link to media]

— The Anarchist Library

 

at 7/16/24 11:27am

Are you in and/or from South Asia and literate in a South Asian language? Check out the Initiative for a South Asian Anarchist Library and contact us in our chatrooms. Also check out our guide on how to add a new language library. There are also initiatives for an Arabic, Farsi, and Hungarian anarchist libraries. Please contact us to get in touch with these initiatives.

[Link to media]

— Tony Parker, Jane E Ferrie - Health and welfare

 

at 7/16/24 12:45am

Author: Tony Parker, Jane E FerrieTitle: Health and welfareSubtitle: rejecting the state in the status quo — examples of an Anarchist approachDate: December 2016Source: International Journal of Epidemiology, Volume 45, Issue 6, December 2016, Pages 1754–1758, DOI: 10.1093/ije/dyx001 For most of the 20th century, all mainstream political parties in Western Europe coalesced around the idea that, ultimately, the state should be the chief provider of social welfare and instrument of social reform. Although Feminist, Anti-Racist, Neo-Marxist, Green and other left-leaning critiques were put forward, particularly in the 1970s,[1] criticism of the welfare state has come predominantly from the free-market right. This has culminated in attacks on the direct provision of welfare by the state in many European countries, and indeed across the world. As a consequence, as attention increasingly focused on defending rapidly shrinking services, criticism of state provision from the radical left has rarely been articulated in more recent years. Even Anarchists, for whom anti-statism, non-hierarchical voluntary cooperation and mutual aid are central to their political philosophy, have mostly held back: possibly through fear of being associated with the free-market attack on what is widely regarded as a general good, possibly because calls for fundamental changes to the status quo-sensationalized by conceptions of terms like ‘social revolution’seem to present a utopian and highly impracticable alternative.[2] In this Diversion we attempt to counterbalance these views, using examples mostly from the UK. The origins of the modern welfare state can be dated back to the 1880s and the social programmes implemented in Germany by Bismarck. Explicitly designed to forge a bond between citizens and the state and to form a bulwark against socialism,[3] these programmes inspired the UK’s 1911 National Insurance Act, following an admiring visit to Germany by Lloyd George in 1908.[4] Before its more modern incarnation, institutional welfare provision in many European countries had been via Poor Laws, which provided limited funds for the relief of the destitute and were aimed more at preserving law and order than providing well-being.[1] In Britain this provision was increasingly augmented over the course of the 19th century, arguably prompted by the Factory Inquiry Commission Report of 1833. The Report formed the basis of legislation regulating working conditions, particularly the employment of children and its effects on their moral and physical health. Employment in mills of children under the age of nine was prohibited and working hours for those under [18] limited to [12] a day.[5] Other measures included regulations regarding the quality of housing, public health, education and municipal responsibility for the provision of basic services.[1] The development of the welfare state in the UK in its current form can be dated from the discovery at the end of the 19th century of potentially catastrophic lack of fitness among Army recruits for the Boer War.[6] Implementation of a series of reforms in the first decade of the 20th century, culminated in the National Insurance Act of 1911. This provided free medical treatment for male workers and a permanent increase in the role of the state in British society. World War I again brought the issue of low levels of fitness among recruits into focus. However, effectively nothing was done,[7] and the period between the World Wars, including the Depression of the 1930s, saw increasing documentation of extensive ill health, poverty, malnutrition and bad housing.5,7–[9] During World War II (WW2) the government became further involved in the lives of citizens via the rationing of basic goods, and committed itself to further social provision covering employment, education and benefits. The Beveridge Report of 1942 recommended that health care, unemployment and retirement benefits should be provided via a national, compulsory, flat rate insurance scheme;[10] and, following victory in the 1945 election, the Labour Party developed and implemented Beveridge’s recommendations via a series of Acts that in 1948 brought a National Health Service (NHS) and comprehensive system of social security benefits to all British citizens. Since 1948, universal state provision of health and welfare has become a given, with the NHS a particularly sacred cow. At the same time, the provision of such services by the state has had its detractors, as exemplified by Friedrich von Hayek who described the welfare state as ‘the road to serfdom’.[11] However, the basic tenets of what is now known as the ‘free market’ critique has arguably not changed significantly since Victorian times. As summed up by one of the foremost proponents of the free market school, Milton Friedman: ‘The scope of government must be limited. Its main function must be to protect our freedom both from the enemies outside and from our fellow citizens, to preserve law and order, to enforce private contracts, to foster competitive markets’,[12] a view which resulted in the involvement of many free market economists from the Friedmanite ‘Chicago School’ in the privatization programme of the military dictatorship in Chile (see Box 1). Various free marketeers built on this with their version of Public Choice theory (that public choice is dictated by individual self-interest) which, in common with the New Right critique, promoted the view that collective choices, like state provision of welfare, are fiscally irresponsible as well as inefficient, uneconomic and ineffective.[1] ...

[Link to media]

— Anonymous - Stop Block Cop City!

 

at 7/16/24 12:08am

Author: AnonymousTitle: Stop Block Cop City!Date: 10/25/23Source: https://berkmananarchy.noblogs.org/post/2023/10/26/stop-block-cop-city/ Tire fire barricade at the AirBnBs! Throw a molotov at the PowerPoint Presentations! Dump a smelly bucket of shrimp on the peaceful protest! We’re going to Stop Block Cop City!! Why? Because I’m mad that they wasted my time with their awful presentation/book-report/thinly-veiled-business-management-double-speak that tried to sell me and a bunch of other anarchists a program of non-violent civil disobedience to stop the police training facility from being constructed in the Old Prison Farm. I had to sit through: Being told about the history of the movement in a few awful slides …know your fucking audience. Being told not only about affinity groups (again, know your audience), but also to FORM an affinity group with the randos sitting around me. Not only is this fucking dangerous (are the people around me feds? I don’t fucking know), but it is a COMPLETE MISUNDERSTANDING of what an affinity group is, which is a tightly knit group of people who are basically an extended family willing to do shit together. Being told that the way forward is civil disobedience because it is going to cause a “political crisis” for Andre Dickens. First of all, anarchists don’t want political solutions. We want to destroy the political. Second, this ignores the fact that the Atlanta liberals, along with the conservative governor Kemp, as well as the feds, all get a political win by beating up on people who are against the police. We are not on the verge of a “political crisis”. Even if you believe in the oxymoron of “political win”, this political approach failed miserably with the Beg the City Council movement and its 17 hours of testimony to not approve a couple more million for construction, and will fail miserably with the referendum. Being told that people won’t get arrested. The whole fucking purpose of NVDA is to get arrested and become part of the spectacle. Participating in spectacularization and representational politics can only undermine desire and initiative. Even if this NVDA completely shuts down construction, the means and methods used to “win” are a loss, because they legitimize existing government processes, and government more broadly. Being told to imagine a strategy for invading the forest as if there were no cops there, from people who have probably never been to the forest. How can an “affinity group”, formed in 1 minute, of people who have never been to the forest, come up with a strategy for invading the forest? They absolutely can’t. This is just an idiotic story-telling device that treats anarchists like children who get excited by play-imagining that they are generals of a fucking army. Being told that decisions will be made by a spokescouncil of affinity groups and ALSO that there’s a detailed plan with contingencies. Aside from the fact that anarchists are very familiar with the shortcomings of spokescouncils (Why don’t affinity groups just self-organize? What if they don’t agree with the other affinity groups? Is there going to be some top-down process for resolution?), it is IMPOSSIBLE for the spokescouncil to have any initiative and ALSO for the organizers to have a detailed plan with contingencies. As was the case during the forest occupation, the “organizers” have a plan and want people to agree to it, and they are using their business-management tactics from their work lives to get “buy-in” from all the “stakeholders” (anarchists conjoined with liberals, non-profits, christ-cucks, etc.). They are masters of charisma, making everyone in their “compositional” structure, all the groups of people who fundamentally disagree, play nice by making them feel like they’ve contributed to the planning and execution of a fait accompli, when really the decisions were made behind closed doors by the business-managementites in their nights-and-weekends off time from being on Zoom calls for their business-management jobs or running their pizza shops or maintaining their “commune” mortgages or taking credit for the work of others as long as it doesn’t tarnish their reputation. There is a double duplicity, of not giving a shit about anyone’s input on the NVDA, but also hoping for some VDA from the anarchist shock troops. Fuck that! Being told to imagine that there will be re-enactments of this glorious action in the future and how amazing it would be to say “I was there.” First of all, the only corny-ass-motherfuckers who do reenactments are Confederate sympathizers who want to replay the Civil War THAT THEY LOST. Nobody else does that corny shit, not even MLK NVDA cucks. Second, this asks anarchists to act as if there’s some clear cut victory that can happen, after which we can go back to our jobs and Netflix and feel good about ourselves. No way. We’re always walking toward anarchy, it is a method not a destination, and we celebrate life and adventure, not false victories that are just veiled collaboration with the government. Third, I can’t imagine a better way of destroying initiative and desire than to have anarchists prospectively wax nostalgic about a false victory organized from on high. The anticipation of the dopamine hit is meant to get people addicted to such tasty morsels of easy wins and easy living. It’s a fundamentally salvationist psychology, trying to bring to mind a heaven on earth, a holy land, a rapture if one only participates. But that’s the populist organizer’s way: if you can sneak in some satisfaction of religious desires to motivate people toward your aims, why not? ...

[Link to media]

— Nim Thorn - Traveler’s Guide to the Acronym Wasteland

 

at 7/15/24 11:57pm

Author: Nim ThornTitle: Traveler’s Guide to the Acronym WastelandSubtitle: Tankies and Authoritarian Entryist Groups in PhiladelphiaDate: July 10, 2024Notes: From the original post: A general, group-by-group overview of some tankie and authoritarian entryist Left orgs in Philly (though partly relevant to other contexts; many are national groups), to help more autonomous, uncontrollable rebels better understand and defend against their manipulations. Includes some reflections and propositions at the end (‘Anti-Social Social War?’). pdf for reading pdf for printingSource: Retrieved on July 15, 2024 from Reeking Thickets Press Freedom from money, jobs, and education! PSL (Party for Socialism and Liberation) and WWP (Workers World Party) and ANSWER Coalition (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) These groups are electoral and mass-struggle based authoritarian vanguardists, somewhat ‘new communist’ in style, but nominally Trotskyist. Regardless, they still support all communist states, and many other non-communist authoritarian and imperialist states. These are seen as righteous opponents of the US and Western imperialist camp under PSL and WWP’s ‘Global Class War’ doctrine. Classic examples of ‘tankies’ or ‘campists’, highly authoritarian and exploitative groups toward their members and movements, with extremely crude and simplistic ‘anti-imperialist’ dogma, which in reality is anything but. Among the states, groups, and people they’ve expressed support for are: North Korea (to which multiple official WWP delegations have traveled), the USSR and contemporary Russia, China under Mao as well as after (they initially denied the Tiananmen Square massacre, later justifying it), the genocidal Khmer Rouge (WWP supported them until 2000; many historians believe the US government also at least tacitly supported the Khmer Rouge diplomatically, and potentially materially), Cuba, Iran, Saddam Hussein (another overlap with US support, albeit at different points), what they referred to as the ‘Iraqi resistance’ during the 2003 invasion (unlike the Iraqi revolutionary socialists they condemned, and like the US did with the Afghan anti-Soviet mujahideen, they didn’t distinguish their support between the many diverging elements of the insurgency, which included Al-Qaeda in Iraq, the predecessors of ISIL, and other authoritarian theocratic and/or nationalist groups), Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, Syrian dictator Bashar Al-Assad (elements of whose regime the US also has tacitly supported), Libyan dictator Muammar Al-Gaddafi, Romanian communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, and Serbian perpetrators of the Bosnian genocide such as Slobodan Milošević and Ratko Mladić. PSL is the result of a 2004 split from WWP, (itself a 1958 split from the Trotskyist Socialist Worker’s Party, aka SWP, due to the nascent WWP’s support for Mao’s China and the USSR’s brutal crushing of the 1956 Hungarian revolution) however their politics are practically identical and they still frequently organize together, (including in ANSWER, a coalition they effectively control, which played a major role in the massive but ineffective protests against the Iraq War) which fits their pattern of dividing into numerous obfuscatory front groups (Philly Liberation Center is a prominent PSL project locally for example). PSL has a horrible record of sexual assault and retaliation against outspoken survivors (including here in Philadelphia) systematically enabled within the party. They engage in cult-like recruitment practices and financial and labor exploitation by a high-control leadership with an instrumental view of members and participants. They have cooperated with the police, themselves acted as highly aggressive peace-police, and led protesters into police kettles. They continuously and successfully work to co-opt movements and protests into highly photographed, contained, and peaceful rallies (nevertheless dangerous for participants) where megaphone identity-politicians and class-reductionists spout empty revolutionary rhetoric and plug the party and affiliated electoral candidates. In 2020, leaders of an anti-war rally in Denver jointly organized by PSL and the DSA refused to kick out over a dozen nazis who arrived to rally with them, including members of the Traditionalist Workers Party aka TWP, and Patriot Front. This was after they’d been warned by anti-fascists ahead of time that they would show up. The organizers allowed them to hold PSL signs, let them take photos, and protected them from the black bloc while they menaced people of color. One of the few more militant anti-fascists willing to break ranks to combat the nazis was arrested as a result. In an empty apology, PSL euphemistically referred to them as simply ‘far-right’ (as opposed to explicitly fascist nazis) and justified their collaboration and peace-policing on the basis of “wanting to avoid a physical confrontation that would put the whole demonstration at risk”. This is the same justification PSL gave in 2020 in Philly for leading a massive anti-racist crowd away from the Columbus statue and the racist crowd protecting it. The couple dozen that marched back to the statue to confront the colonial vigilantes were dangerously isolated. Several hours of pointlessly marching for miles and listening to speeches in a heatwave further depleted the group’s capacity. These anti-racists, many of whom were young black teenagers, visibly queer or ‘alternative’, or unprepared for a physical fight, were heavily outnumbered and mostly surrounded by a crowd of hulking fascists armed with steel pipes and baseball bats, alongside riot police also focused on combatting the anti-fascists and at least one police helicopter. It was very lucky that more people weren’t injured or arrested in the clashes that broke out, or while dispersing afterwards in the generally white, hostile neighborhood. In 2018, PSL Los Angeles similarly allowed the well-known fascist ‘Baked Alaska’ to remain at their protest against US war with Syria. ...

[Link to media]

— Zoe Baker - What is the Proletariat?

 

at 7/15/24 8:51pm

Author: Zoe BakerTitle: What is the Proletariat?Date: 2024/05/10Source: Retrieved on 2024-07-16 from <anarchopac.com/2024/05/10/what-is-the-proletariat> In 1848 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published the Manifesto of the Communist Party. It famously ends by declaring, “let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. Proletarians have nothing to lose in it but their chains. They have a world to win. Proletarians of all countries unite!” (Marx and Engels 1996, 30). The word proletariat continues to be used by socialists and communists today. This does not mean that the word is widely understood. Some people use it as a meaningless adjective whereby their ideas, attitudes, and activities are proletarian. Those of people they dislike are bourgeois. Others equate the proletariat with particular kinds of work such that the ideal proletarian is a male factory worker on an assembly line. It is often wrongly claimed in mainstream discourse that only blue collar workers who do manual labour are working class proletarians. White collar office workers are apparently middle class. In this essay I shall explain the history of the word proletariat, how 19th century socialists and communists ended up using this word, and the various ways that they defined it. Doing so shall reveal that Marx and Engels’ proletariat was not the only proletariat that existed in the minds of revolutionaries. From Ancient Rome to the French Revolution The word proletariat derives from the Latin ‘proletarii’ and ‘proletarius’, which literally means producers of offspring. The Oxford Latin dictionary defines proletarius as “belonging to the lowest class of citizens” in Roman society (Glare 2012, 1631). References to this class appear in several early histories of Rome, which were written in the first century BC. These allege that in the 6th century BC the king of Rome Servius Tullius carried out a series of reforms that laid the political and military foundations of the later Roman republic. These accounts are flawed in so far as they project certain features of the Roman republic onto an earlier time period and depict complex social changes, which must have occurred gradually over an extended period of time, as happening all at once due to the actions of a great man. One of the main reforms ascribed to Servius is the division of Roman citizens into six classes based on how much property they owned according to a census. The class a citizen belonged to determined their voting rights within an assembly called the comitia centuriata and what military duties they had. The wealthiest citizens had to equip themselves with the most expensive military equipment but also had the most votes and so political power (Cornell 1996, 173–197, 288–89; Lintott 1999, 55–61). Cicero defines the lowest sixth class as “those who brought to the census no more than eleven hundred asses or altogether nothing except their own persons”. Servius named them “child-givers” [proletarius], as from them, so to speak, a child [proles], that is, an offspring of the city, seemed to be expected” (Cicero 2014, 76 [Cic. Rep. 2. 40). Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus both claim that the lowest class were exempt from military service (Livy 1919, 151 [Livy 1. 43]; Dionysius 1937, 327 [Dion. Hal. AR 4. 18]). Unlike Cicero, they do not refer to this group as the proletarius. A similar account to Cicero is given in Aulus Gellius’ The Attic Nights, which was written in the second century AD. During the dialogue Julius Paulus is asked what proletarius meant. Paulus, who is described as being very knowledgable, replies, Those of the Roman commons who were humblest and of smallest means, and who reported no more than fifteen hundred asses at the census, were called proletarii, but those who were rated as having no property at all, or next to none, were termed capite censi, or ‘counted by head.’ And the lowest rating of the capite censi was three hundred and seventy-five asses. But since property and money were regarded as a hostage and pledge of loyalty to the State, and since there was in them a kind of guarantee and assurance of patriotism, neither the proletarii nor the capite censi were enrolled as soldiers except in some time of extraordinary disorder, because they had little or no property and money. However, the class of proletarii was somewhat more honourable in fact and in name than that of the capite censi; for in times of danger to the State, when there was a scarcity of men of military age, they were enrolled for hasty service, and arms were furnished them at public expense. And they were called, not capite censi, but by a more auspicious name derived from their duty and function of producing offspring, for although they could not greatly aid the State with what small property they had, yet they added to the population of their country by their power of begetting children (Gellius 1927, 169, 171 [Gellius. 16. 10. 10–13). Other sources use the terms proletarii and capite censi as synonyms. Gellius’ belief that the two groups were distinct appears to be an error (Gargola 1989). Although this account is less reliable than earlier ones, it does repeat the point that the proletarii are citizens who were so poor that their primary contribution to the Roman state was having children. The fact that they are having a discussion about what the word meant is evidence that the word had fallen out of use some time after the end of the Roman republic. ...

[Link to media]

— anonymous - Train To Nowhere

 

at 7/15/24 3:24pm

Author: anonymousTitle: Train To NowhereSubtitle: Call for a week of world wide action and solidarity against the North Bothnia Line, August 11th to 17th, 2024!Date: 2024Source: https://de.indymedia.org/node/377193 1. THE NORTH BOTHNIA LINE Why aiming at this beast? This is a call to action against the North Bothnia Line, a railway just beginning to be built along the coast of Swedish-occupied Sápmi. This project is a continuation of several hundred years of brutal colonization of the peoples and lands in Sápmi. Extractive industries are thriving on the increased demand for raw materials following the so-called “green transition”. This makes them continually stress the importance and urgency of the train line. So do the Swedish State and the European Union. The track will be used for both passenger and freight trains. But the true reasons behind the project becomes quite obvious when reading the list of financiers, and also by reading the North Bothnia Line Group’s project leader Elisabeth Sinclair’s statement that ”[a]lthough the passenger traffic between the coastal cities is important, it is the goods that are the basis of the North Bothnia Line”. In the same fashion The Swedish Transport Administration proudly announced that “every day, steel equivalent to an Eiffel Tower is shipped from northern Sweden to Europe. With the North Bothnia Line, we will be able to transport more”. Thus, the “signal is clear”, as Tomas Eneroth, Swedish infrastructure minister says: “The North Bothnia Line is one of the country’s most important investments”. This last quote is not surprising at all, since LKAB, SSAB, Boliden and Sveaskog have jointly written a letter to the Swedish Transport Administration and the government in which the companies emphasize that “the creation of continued capacity and the construction of a modern coastal railway is urgent for their operations”. With these examples, we can clearly see that the North Bothnia Line is an essential and urgently needed component for accelerated extraction that the Swedish state and big companies are trying to implement in the north for the sake of “green” capitalism. This high-speed railway could provide a missing link to the colonial infrastructure in the North and therefore drastically increase the capacity to transport ever larger and heavier amounts of materials and goods at a faster pace towards Continental/Western Europe. Until now, the construction process has been slow and halted several times, among others because there have been difficulties to fully finance it. But if implemented, the North Bothnia Line could be an important facilitator for the wave of green colonialism happening in Sápmi and all around the globe. Therefore, any action aimed at this railway is an attack on the entire colonial green-washed machinery. Take action We believe that there is a possibility to win this fight if we broaden our ways of attack and internationalize the struggle. We do not want to define your means or your targets. Do whatever feels in line with your way of acting. Are you and your group confident in organizing sit-ins and blockades? There is plenty of corporate offices all around! How about banner drops, zine tables and solidarity photos to broaden the reach of our efforts? We welcome your creativity and experience, and hope to see many different approaches on all kinds of platforms. Of course, we also have to speak of attack. Simply taking actions for optics and making demands to the powerful to take ‘morally’ right decisions leaves us dependent on their institutions and lip service. We have come to see mass mobilizing in the same way, where a game of quantity aims to only reform a tiny piece of the machinery. Attack offers more: a qualitative approach undertaken by a few committed people that is able to have rippling effects. We invite you to entertain this idea and refer to links further along for inspiration. We send out our special solidarity and warmth towards the inspiring struggle against the Tren Maya — and all those who struggle against domination and colonization all over the planet! 2. GENERAL CONTEXT Green colonialism and accelerated exploitation in Swedish-occupied Sápmi The land through which this railway will penetrate is called by many names. One name is the colonial name “Norrland” which is claimed to be a part of the colonizing state Sweden. Another name is “Sápmi” used by the Sámi. The Sámi are the traditionally Sámi-speaking indigenous peoples that, together with other minorities, has been inhabiting the region of Sápmi for a long time. Today Sápmi encompasses large northern parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and of the Kola Peninsula in Russia. Over the past hundreds of years settlers have violently fought Sámi and other minorities’ traditional ways of life by way of religious indoctrination, forced settlements, child theft, enslavement, installing capitalist economies, inviting multinational cooperations, starting “democratic processes” and of course extracting material goods from the land. The oppression is multi-facetted and has many layers worth attention, but here we will mainly focus on the material aspect of the colonial structure and the accelerated exploitation that is about to unfold itself. ...

[Link to media]

— Anonymous - “Operation Scripta Manent” in Italy 2016-2019

 

at 7/15/24 9:03am

Author: AnonymousTitle: “Operation Scripta Manent” in Italy 2016-2019Subtitle: A collection of news, updates letters, texts and communiquesDate: 2019Notes: This pamphlet has been put together by Act for freedom now. Check actforfree.nostate.net for updates in English.Source: <actforfree.nostate.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/SCRIPTA-pdf-2019.pdf>. Retrieved on 03/07/2024 from lib.anarhija.net. Operation ‘Scripta Manent’ is one repressive operation among the many that have already occurred, and continue to occur, against comrades who dare to oppose the Italian State. The pretext here was of trying to find those who have taken part in Informal Anarchist Federation attacks since 2005, but it is also an attempt to destroy all insurrectional conflict in Italy and to cut off any solidarity. Just because comrades fall or are imprisoned does not mean they are not with us, neither will we be paralysed into passivity and ‘philanthropic solidarity’, the conflict against all authority continues. Call for International Solidarity. “Operation Scripta Manent” trial begins on November 16 2017 On November 16th, at 10 am, in front of the high security court in Turin, the first hearing of the trial Scripta Manent will take place. It will be a long-running case in which 22 anarchist comrades have been charged, and seven of them are still in prison. The repressive State apparatus accuses a part of the anarchist move- ment of attacking it with the practices of destructive direct action against its structures and agents, realization and distribution of anarchist publi- cations, and support for revolutionary prisoners. The theorem of prosecutor Sparagna is that the positions of accused comrades are isolated and distant from the general anarchist context. This is a blatant attempt to factionalise and confine anarchism to certain fenced enclosures, legal and interpretative. We are demolishing the attempt to isolate these comrades and affirm that the practices and positions they are accused of constitute a patrimony of all anarchists and revolutionaries, and we reaffirm our closeness and our solidarity with the defendants. We call to take part in the gathering on Thursday, November 16th, at 10 am, in front of the high security court in “le Vallette” Turin prison, and relaunch the call for international solidarity with all anarchist, rebel and revolutionary prisoners; in any place and in accordance with their own methods. Operation “Scripta Manent”: 30 raids and 5 arrests for the attacks of Informal Anarchist Organization (FAI) In the early hours of September 6, 2017 an operation coordinated by the Digos [political police] of Turin led the raids of 30 homes in various Italian regions (Piedmont, Liguria, Lazio, Umbria, Lombardy, Abruzzo, Campania, Sardinia and Emilia Romagna) and the arrest of five anarchist comrades accused of subversive association with terrorist intent: Anna, Marco, Sandrone, Danilo and Valentina; in addition, a notification in prison for Nicola and Alfredo. The operation, called “Scripta Manent” [from Latin proverb “verba volant, scripta manent” — spoken words fly away, written words remain], tries to attribute to a single direction a series of direct actions claimed by the Informal Anarchist Organization, reproducing in this way the same repressive strategies of some previous operations, such as Servantes and Boldness (“Ardire”), and trying to impose an associative and vertical structure on the expressions of anarchist conflictuality. In particular, the attacks inserted in this investigation include the parcelbombs sent to the CPT’s [detention centres for immigrants] director in Modena in May 2005, to the traffic-cops barracks in Torino-San Salvario and to the chief of police of Lecce (claimed by FAI/Narodnaja Volja), the explosive device against the RIS barracks [carabinieri forensics] in Parma (October 24, 2005, claimed by FAI/Cooperativa Artigiana Fuoco e Affini-occasionalmente spettacolare), the parcel-bomb sent to the Mayor of Bologna Sergio Cofferati (November 2, 2005, claimed by FAI/Cooperativa Artigiana Fuoco e Affini-occasionalmente spettacolare), the devices against the carabinieri cadets’ barracks in Fossano (June 2, 2006, claimed by FAI/RAT-Rivolta Anonima e Tremenda), the devices placed in the Turin neighbourhood, Crocetta (March 7, 2007, claimed by FAI/RAT); among the other actions also the wounding of Adinolfi (May 7, 2012), despite the fact that two comrades have already been convicted and have publicly claimed this attack, in order to corroborate the crime of association. It seems that the investigators, felt the need to structure their clues, used even linguistic and graphology experts, in addition to electronic and computer surveillance, and tailing. Naples – September carrion Operation “Scripta Manent” At about 5 o’clock this morning, September 6, 2017 almost like an anniversary or the tax due on the garbage, a pack of guard dogs materialized outside my door. They were not begging for nuggets, biscuits or bones but weapons, explosives, claims, Croce Nera Anarchica, Pagine in Rivolta and KNO3. With the arrogance typical of watchdogs, they pushed their way into the house and started rummaging, not before having delivered me the formal invitation signed, not by me of course, but a certain Roberto M. Sparagna who works as inquisitor on behalf of the Prosecutor of Turin. Apart from a few “Cobra” firecrackers and a smoke bomb they did not find anything else “dangerous” and gave vent to their hunger on newspapers, pamphlets and posters, especially from Greece and Mexico, the above Italian anarchist publications and others, posters with FAI / FRI symbols as well as a good amount of correspondence even from decades ago. ...

[Link to media]

— Anonymous - Putting into practice

 

at 7/15/24 7:54am

Author: AnonymousTitle: Putting into practiceSubtitle: Adding to the conversation on anarchist activity in MontrealDate: March 21, 2017Source: <actforfree.nostate.net/?p=26705>. Retrieved on 03/07/2024 from lib.anarhija.net. We’d like to respond with our thoughts to a text “Mise en Commun” (Putting in Common) that has been circulated critiquing insurrectionary projects and perspectives in Montreal. We appreciate that the authors of Mise en Common want to elaborate similarities and clarify differences, and move past bad faith. We’re taking this as an occasion to respond and to clarify ideas that we’ve been reflecting on for a few years now. We’ll try to use points of difference with Mise en Commun as an opportunity to delve further into ideas and how they inform practices, rather than limiting the scope of our text to simply addressing the critiques. We recognize that the length of this text might not facilitate a simple back-and-forth with the original authors, but our goal is to contribute to a larger discussion about these questions. We hope others will feel compelled to participate in this process of clarifying ideas and directions. “Mise en Commun” makes reference to and responds to several dozen actions, attacks and small demos that were carried out in the neighborhoods of Hochelaga and St. Henri by anarchists over the last year (which have a continuity going back several years now). These actions which we’ll reference herein mostly involved destroying the facades or merchandise of businesses and apparatuses that contribute to gentrification: yuppie businesses, police, the offices of developers, luxury cars and surveillance cameras. Most of the actions we’re referencing were claimed with a communique that was published on the internet or printed and distributed in paper form (sometimes scattered in leaflet form at the site of the action) explaining the action, how it was carried out, and situating it within the particular context it occurred in. As far as claimed actions go, there was a spike in the frequency of these types of actions in 2016. We’re going to look at how these actions are placed in the context of neighbourhoods with tensions around gentrification, what this means for anarchists who want to intervene here, and what we think this has contributed to. Through this grounding, we’ll engage the questions of communication and intelligibility, mass movements, anarchist intervention, strategy, isolation and specialization, individual freedom, and repression. We’ll then make several proposals for a multiform and combative struggle against gentrification, along with other struggles that the Montreal anarchist space could pursue. Intelligible to whom? “To have resonance, our actions must be communicable, to make sense for others, they must be intelligible.” – Mise en Commun We certainly agree with elements of this. In acting, one of our primary considerations is how our actions will be understood, both by comrades and anyone else who encounters them. However, we want to be clear about to whom we are intelligible. We want to communicate with potential accomplices, people who, when they see or hear about the actions, resonate with the need to undermine that which grinds them down and makes their lives miserable, those who want to fight back. We want to be unintelligible to authority – we don’t speak their language and don’t want to, because we don’t want to fit in their paradigm so as to enter a dialogue. We want to destroy them. Even when actions speak for themselves (and certainly some actions speak more clearly for themselves than others; this is ok) we can’t rely on the leftist or corporate media to diffuse our ideas – the goal of those projects isn’t to communicate ideas, but rather to reinforce their own worldview by incorporating our ideas or actions into their narratives. It’s necessary that we develop and utilize our own channels of communication in order to be clear about what we’re doing and what we want, and to avoid censorship. Accompanying an action with a communique can help clarify the actors’ intentions, to demystify the means by which it was carried out and to situate the action within a broader struggle or strategic line. Claims for many of the actions we’re referencing were published online on Montreal Counter-information, a local infrastructure project of autonomous communication for our struggles in the Montreal anarchist space. Of course, this often comes up against the limit of only being engaged with by other anarchists. One way the project appears to address this limit is to make printable versions of the communiques that can be posted up in the streets, and circulated through distro tables and among apartments. This attempts to open lines of communication with people who don’t exist in the same limited channels of the internet that we do. The language of war & the spectacle “Mise en Commun” criticizes the authors of an anonymous communique for “speaking of an act of war while claiming the vandalism of five businesses”, accusing the actors of fetishization of terminology, pretension, and dramatization of their own power. Generally, when we speak of war (at least one that we ourselves might be engaged in), we tend to be referring to social war – the expansion of conflict to every aspect of life, just as domination and capitalism extend beyond the real subsumption of the workplace. This social conflict is necessarily open-ended, chaotic, and contains within it an exponential growth in possible complicities. This war is an underlying reality, one which we seek to make visible through our actions and propaganda, though we must note that our own engagement with this war constitutes but a small fraction of it. The actors also explained their ‘act of war’ in writing “We will not let these boutiques install themselves here peacefully. This facade of peace is nothing more than an attempt to make invisible the war in progress against poor and marginalized people.” However, we should be conscious that ‘war’ is also the language the State uses to describe conflict, and wars often have truces and standardized logics, whereas the war we want to wage is permanent, and outside militaristic conceptions of struggle. ...

[Link to media]

— Anonymous - Rain & Fire

 

at 7/15/24 7:50am

Author: AnonymousTitle: Rain & FireSubtitle: Statement from a UK FAI sectorDate: September 13, 2011Source: <actforfree.nostate.net/?p=6304>. Retrieved on 03/07/2024 from lib.anarhija.net. This text was written during the course of the growing European social war, and our attempts to situate ourselves in the context of that, whilst in the midst of rising fascism, complicity from most of the society and a fractured and divisive anti-capitalist ‘movement’. These scant few pages cannot express the complexity of the various situations being described in any great depth, but we write so that other rebels at the edges can know how it is for us here. As we were putting the final touches to the text, cities in the UK exploded and remain volatile. However this is not an analysis of the riots – this is a text from inside the social conditions which gave rise to the insurrection. This text has been collaboratively written by many individuals in our network over a period of discussion, planning and attack. We have been brief in our communiques so far, but we felt it was time to write something longer. “Why are we writing?” Because we know how important it has been for us to hear the knocks on the wall from other renegades in other cells, and because we would like to reach out beyond the people we already know, beyond the realities we have lived in, created, abandoned or remain tied to. As revolutionaries, we are highly critical of these realities and of ourselves, and we write because just, as individuals, we strive to be ‘better’ than we are, we also desire for this world to be better than it is. We are open to the fallacy of our opinions and wish to surpass our expectations, such as they are. We also try to communicate with those outside our circles, and we attempt to staunch the tendency towards self-referentialism which is endemic to many forms of communication. In the end, we have to accept that this text is written to persons unknown and that wherever it is read and whoever it reaches, there will be those who will have an understanding of what is written here – and this is for them. There is no longer any sure statement that can be made about this changing world, which catches fire more and more, everyday. The present day United Kingdom is a controlled theme-park, covered in surveillance cameras, vehicle tracking, identical housing estates, post-industrial zones and sprawling road and train networks. There is virtually no wilderness left, the powerful and rich control the ‘countryside’, as much as, or even more than the cities, and there is little freedom beyond the mainstream, unless you take it – the same as anywhere else. The prison of everyday life is so total here that the only choice remaining is its complete destruction. We welcomed the renewed call by the Conspiracy of Cells of Fire / Informal Anarchist Federation for a world-wide informal anarchist structure based on revolutionary solidarity and direct action: the International Revolutionary Front. As we continue to develop our own project of revolutionary organisation, we affirm the global informal ‘network’ or ‘federation’ of revolutionary groups in existence who are developing, encouraging and participating in uncontrollable confrontation against State and Capital, whilst organising and developing their own initiatives of attack: this is our signal of collaboration. There has been a significant upsurge in attacks against prison, financial, police and communications targets in the UK, but the obvious truth is that these attacks are few in relation to the task to be undertaken, and the level of engagement with the enemy is still in the early stages of its development. Over the last two years we have begun a newly co-ordinated revolutionary project. It is our way of starting something new. Something that won’t just disappear like words against the wind. We are some of those who think that the possibility of a conscious, cohesive social revolution involving a critical mass from the general population of the UK is frankly remote. However, we think – and have seen – that widespread chaos and social insurgency are inevitable, and from this, new and better forms of human values could emerge. If we were to reflect on human life experience – both individual and collective – we would perhaps understand the wisdom that sometimes it takes a total breakdown for things to change. Of course, some people are scared of change, of the unknown. People limp along miserably in all sorts of dysfunctional conditions for years – relationships, jobs, towns etc. – rather than face the necessary and radical alteration of those conditions into a future they cannot yet imagine. And because society is made up of individual human beings, then society is no different. People lap up the distractions being offered – TV, consumables, mainstream cultures, drugs, subcultures, actions, gatherings, spiritual panaceas, anything… so long as they can put off confronting the essential emptiness of everyday life. We are living in the midst of a culture where endemic use of anti-depressants, for example – as Aldous Huxley predicted in Brave New World – keep people from changing what is making them unhappy and instead make them accept what it is that is making them unhappy. When the individuals in a society are struggling just to get up in the morning because the system exploits them every minute, these people have no energy to revolt against the system. They are caught in its claws. They don’t even seem to recognise this. The totality of this techno-industrial society enslaves them into patterns of repetition, damaging themselves and each other, oppressed on the outside and repressed on the inside. The fundamental distinction between inside and outside prison does not seem to exist in the same way any more: daily life attempts to subject us to a regime of control and routine in every aspect. ...

[Link to media]

— Dan Fischer - An Essay on Total Liberation

 

at 7/15/24 7:37am

Author: Dan FischerTitle: An Essay on Total LiberationSubtitle: Marcusean Insights for Catalyzing TransformationDate: 2024Source: Building Multispecies Resistance Against Exploitation: Stories from the Frontlines of Labor and Animal Rights, edited by Zane McNeill (New York: Peter Lang, 2024) A 2021 study found that 56% of young people across ten countries believed “humanity is doomed.” The researchers rightly warned against narratives of “individualizing ‘the problem’ of climate anxiety, with suggestions that the best response is for the individual to ‘take action.’” However, they followed with the equally misguided suggestion that “such action needs to be particularly taken by those in power.”[1] Those of us influenced by Frankfurt School theorist Herbert Marcuse’s analysis consider it unwise to rely on “those in power.” The world capitalist system’s so-called solutions—from nuclear power and geo-engineering to “regenerative ranching” and even industrial-scale renewables—not only fail to resolve the climate crisis but bring their own comparable existential threats to humanity, animals and the planet.[2] Animal liberation campaigners have all the more reason to feel hopelessness, given the overwhelming human supremacism pervading global civilization. This is especially true in affluent countries such as the United States where only 6% of humans are vegetarian (compared to 14% worldwide) and where per-capita meat consumption is about three times the global average. As Hailey Huget counsels in this volume, “you may feel as though there is no way out.” Josh Harper, formerly of Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty has elaborated on the overwhelming sense of despair experienced by animal liberationists: I mean, you reach this point when you’re an animal rights activist where you are such a statistically insignificant part of the population. You know, where everywhere you go, people are wrapped in the skins of creatures that you consider your equals. And you walk in the store, and it’s a fucking atrocity exhibit everywhere you turn. You reach this point where you feel like no one cares. You know? No one cares ... because there has never been a human holocaust in history that can compare to the number of animal lives taken in one year. I mean, there’s nothing. I mean, we kill more animals every year—every single year—than humans have ever walked on this planet. If you were to chain up and kill every person who ever lived—​every human who ever lived!—you would not equal the number of animals killed for food. In one, single, year.[3] Today’s situation resembles the bleak scenario Marcuse confronted in 1964’s One-Dimensional Man, where he argued that industrialized society’s masses have been so bought-off and brainwashed that their thought had become entirely “one-dimensional,” or uncritical. “The critical theory of society,” Marcuse dismally concluded, “possesses no concepts which could bridge the gap between the present and its future; holding no promise and showing no success, it remains negative.”[4] Marxist-humanist Raya Dunayevskaya aptly criticized Marcuse for analyzing only official labor leadership and ignoring the “powerful oppositional voice” at the rank-and-file level.[5] Going further, fellow critical theorist Erich Fromm described Marcuse’s view as non-revolutionary, since “revolution was never based on hopelessness, nor can it ever be.”[6] Fortunately, an explosion of anti- racist and anti- colonial uprisings, sweeping from the Global South to the North at the time of One-Dimensional Man’s publication, sent Marcuse in a far more hopeful trajectory. Had One-Dimensional Man focused more on the world’s unindustrialized areas, Marcuse might have already encountered greater possibilities for resistance, represented for example by Algeria’s struggle against French colonialism. Writing from Algeria, Martinique psychoanalyst Frantz Fanon in 1961 theorized a “total liberation” that, encompassing social and psychological decolonization, “involves every facet of the personality.”[7] When One-Dimensional Man was published, protests against white supremacism and the Vietnam War swept the United States where Marcuse lived. By 1968, many such liberatory struggles comprised a “worldwide eruption of new social movements.”[8] In 1969’s An Essay on Liberation, which had the working title “Beyond One-Dimensional Man,”[9] Marcuse described these movements as a “Great Refusal” of domination and correctly predicted their lasting impact.[10] According to Black feminist scholar Angela Davis, his former student, Marcuse welcomed the 1960s movements as “much needed fresh air when the world was suffocating.”[11] These struggles gave space to emerging anti-speciesist concerns, such as when French youths in May 1968 demanded the liberation of zoo animals.[12] During the subsequent decade, vegetarian lifestyles and philosophies spread substantially, and the formation of groups such as the United Kingdom’s Animal Liberation Front and the United States’ MOVE, spread militant tactics in order to sabotage animal exploitation.[13] Pessimistic accounts of the possibility for transformation continue to be undermined by the eruption of uprisings in our times. Soon after social scientists declared an “end of history” in the 1990s, the Zapatistas launched a global justice movement shattering the neoliberal consensus. Just as the 2011 anarcho-nihilist pamphlet Desert announced the impossibility of world revolution, the Arab Spring and Occupy movements emerged. In April 2020, Frank B Wilderson III’s acclaimed Afropessimism announced a ghastly choice between white supremacy and apocalypse.[14] One month later, Black youths and their accomplices launched the United States’ largest uprisings in decades and helped bring the idea of police abolition into the mainstream. Marcuse’s trajectory demonstrates that even as we recognize the possibility of annihilation and the urgency it brings, we can transcend despair by organizing toward revolutionary alternatives. ...

[Link to media]

— Antonis Pastellopoulos - The Beginnings and Early Ideology of Cypriot Anarchism

 

at 7/15/24 7:30am

Author: Antonis PastellopoulosTitle: The Beginnings and Early Ideology of Cypriot AnarchismSubtitle: 'Federation or Death'Date: 2022Notes: Anarchist Studies 30.1Source: https://archive.org/details/05-anarchist-studies-30.1-pastellopoulos Abstract: The article presents a first overview of the emergence and early development of anarchism in the Republic of Cyprus, utilising archival material. It contextualises Cypriot anarchism within the broader wave of political ideas making their appearance after the island’s de-facto partition in 1974, tracing the formation of the first anarchist groups and the circulation of early Cypriot anarchist publications. It moves on to briefly discuss three key historical moments of anarchist political expression, followed by an examination of early Cypriot anarchist political ideology, noting the general commitment towards social and political autonomy, as well as the influence of radical feminism, anti-authoritarianism and postcolonial thought. It then moves on to examine the issue of grand narration in early anarchist representations of Cypriot history, concluding with Cypriot anarchist perspectives on the federal reunification of Cyprus. Academic interest in Cypriot anarchist politics has seen an increase in recent years, mainly due to the intersection of Cypriot anarchism[1] with grassroots political mobilisation (Siammas 2013, Iliopoulou & Karathanasis 2014, Ioannou 2019). Little focus has however been placed on its early development. This article aims to fill this gap by offering a first presentation of early Cypriot anarchist politics and ideology, focusing on the 1980s and early 1990s, the first decade of their development, utilising anarchist magazines, brochures, leaflets and other publications located in private archives. By employing qualitative in-depth thematic analysis and an interpretivist epistemological position, I argue that early Cypriot anarchism has been influenced by radical feminism, anti-authoritarianism and postcolonial thought, while maintaining a general commitment towards social and political autonomy, upon which its own particular grand narration over the historical development of Cyprus is founded. The article begins with a presentation of the collected documents, followed by a discussion of methodology and a subsequent brief historical contextualisation. It continues with a reconstruction of the beginnings of anarchism in Cyprus, documenting the first anarchist political groups and publications, further highlighting three historical moments in the development of anarchist politics, before moving on to discuss the particular ideology of early Cypriot anarchism. Accessing and Collecting Documents A well-established approach to researching radical politics has been militant ethnography, a ‘deliberately politicised approach to qualitative research that helps activist-researchers engage with the cultural logic and practices underpinning contemporary anti-authoritarian social movements’ (Apoifis 2016: 3). As noted by anthropologist Jeffrey Juris, ‘[m]ilitant ethnography generates practical, embodied understanding’ (2007: 166), aiming to ‘facilitate ongoing activist (self-)reflection regarding movement goals, tactics, strategies and organizational forms’ (Ibid: 165). While the present article does not follow an explicitly ethnographic methodology, the thinking behind its writing, as well as the ways through which its analysed data have been collected, situate it within this militant tradition of research, with the collected documents located primarily through the extra-parliamentary radical political networks of Nicosia, within which I have been an active participant during the last 10 years. Due to my long association with this political sphere, I have acquired a certain esoteric knowledge of the discursive terrain characterising it, as well as gaining a reputation as a collector of political texts from extra-parliamentary sources, a practice that initially began as a pastime interest, only to evolve into a serious effort at building my own archival collection. This positionality has given me the advantage of ease of access to the necessary physical archives, through my relationship to key groups and individuals. The main collected data consisted of leaflets, brochures and magazines located through archival research that was carried out in the physical archives of political groups and politicised individuals, all of which were located in the city of Nicosia, on the side under the control of the Republic of Cyprus. All documents were written in either Modern Greek or the Greek Cypriot dialect, languages in which I am both a fluent reader and speaker. For the purposes of analysis, digital and physical copies were created of all collected documents, in order to minimise potential wear to the original texts, while allowing for the writing of notes on the physical copies of the texts during the coding process. The majority of these documents were located in the archive of Kaymakkin[2], a social space which was originally opened in 2015 by Syspirosi Atakton, a contemporary Cypriot anarchist collective. The collection consisted of anarchist, anti-authoritarian and leftist material organised by country of origin (specific countries included France, Greece and the U.K.), while in the case of Cypriot material, the documents were organised by political group and/or publishing group. Overlooking the expected minor deterioration caused by time, the material was well preserved and could thus be easily read. This archive can be traced at least as back as 2008, a year that saw the initiative of setting up an open-access political library in the walled city of Nicosia, then an area of numerous political initiatives (Ioannou 2019: 223), come into fruition. The library was named Agrammata (literally meaning illiteracy) and was set up through the buying and donating of used books by visitors and members of the managing collective (Nekatomata 2018). During its existence, Agrammata served also as a meeting space for a number of anarchist and leftist organisations, the last of which was Syspirosi Atakton, which transferred the books and archival material from Agrammata to Kaymakkin, with the closure of the library and the parallel opening of the social space in 2015. ...

[Link to media]

— Antonis Pastellopoulos - Cypriot Anarchist Ideology in the Post-Partitioned Republic of Cyprus (1985 to 1994)

 

at 7/15/24 7:26am

Author: Antonis PastellopoulosTitle: Cypriot Anarchist Ideology in the Post-Partitioned Republic of Cyprus (1985 to 1994)Subtitle: “Cyprus Belongs to its Mouflons”Date: 2017Source: Retrieved on 23rd March 2022 from www.grin.com Abstract This dissertation examines the structure of Cypriot anarchist ideology and the way it challenges Greek Cypriot ethnic nationalism, as it developed in the first decade following the partition of the island of Cyprus. It aims to contribute to the understanding of grass root political activity in Cyprus, by examining the early expressions of anarchism in the island. Ideology has been argued to function around the use of key discursive signifiers, through which the mediation of a fixed meaning is structured and social reality is experienced. This research confirms this position, but explores this function within a non-hegemonic ideological structure, in the context of a post-conflict society. The primary data consists of Cypriot anarchist magazines and brochures published in the Republic of Cyprus from 1985 to 1994, with an emphasis on the magazine Train in the City. It employs qualitative thematic content analysis to analyse Cypriot anarchist ideological public discourse in the period studied. The dissertation argues that Cypriot anarchist discourse is structured around two key signifiers, that of “Authority” and of “Autonomy”, through which Cypriot anarchist ideology organizes and mediates its fixed set of meanings. It further argues that Cypriot anarchist ideology challenges Greek Cypriot ethnic nationalism, based on its support for social difference. This is expressed predominantly by the new signifiers of identity formulated in the discourse, that of the “Native” and of “Cypriot Identity”. The dissertation concludes with a theoretical interpretation of Cypriot anarchist ideology in the context of the post-partitioned Republic of Cyprus. Acknowledgements I would like to thank the group Syspirosi Atakton (Συσπείρωση Ατάκτων), for making their archive at social space Kaymakkin available, as part of my data collection. This dissertation would not had been possible without the group’s generous help and co-operation. I would also like to thank Dr Dominic Pasura, who served as my dissertation supervisor during the research and writing period. His critical comments and informative suggestions have greatly enriched the quality and content of the dissertation. I would also like to thank here my parents, for the continuous support they have given me during the duration of my studies at the University of Glasgow. Finally, I would like to offer my appreciation to my friends Alexis Ioannidis and Nikos Moushouttas. Their friendship, theoretical concerns, critical readings and our shared discussions have been, and continue to be central in my self-development, as well as in shaping, expanding and challenging my understanding of social, economic and cultural theory. 1. Introduction This dissertation examines the structure of ideology of Cypriot anarchism, as it presented itself through its public discourse from 1985 to 1994 in the Republic of Cyprus. While there is a continuous, anarchist-influenced grass root political activity in the island, there is no research on the ideological content of Cypriot anarchism, or in its emergence and early development. This dissertation sets out to fill this empirical gap, by answering the following primary question: ‘What is the structure of ideology of Cypriot anarchism in the period from 1985 to 1994?’, and the question ‘How does Cypriot anarchism challenge Greek Cypriot ethnic nationalism within the discourse?’, as a sub-question to the primary one. The dissertation begins with a brief modern history of Cyprus in order to contextualize its object of research. It follows with the discussion and outline of the theoretical frameworks utilized, followed by a discussion of the general methodology, as well as the methods of data collection and analysis employed in the research. It continues with a preliminary contextual analysis of the structure of ideology of Greek Cypriot society in the period studied, followed by the presentation and analysis of the key findings. It concludes with a summary of the findings and recommendations regarding future research. The Cypriot population consists of multiple ethnic and religious communities, of which the Greek Cypriot is the majority, and the Turkish Cypriot the largest minority (Hannay 2004: 35). The island of Cyprus, an ex-British colony located in the eastern Mediterranean Sea, became an independent state in 1960 under a bi-communal constitution, where the Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot communities held an equal share in political representation and the decision-making process under the new state mechanism (Dodd 1993: 5). Contrary to other colonial people, the Cypriot anti-colonial struggles did not focus on demands for independence (Varnava 2012: 159). The ideologies of ethnic nationalism that emerged on the island, along with Marxist-Leninist communism, focused on the one hand, on the annexation of the island by the Greek state, and on the other, on the division of the island on ethnic grounds[1] (Hatay & Papadakis 2012: 28). The first was the demand of Greek Cypriot nationalism for Enosis, union with Greece, the later was the demand of Turkish Cypriot nationalism for Taksim, the division of the island on ethnic lines (ibid). The two contesting nationalisms symbolized Greece and Turkey respectively as their motherlands and Cyprus as their child (Bryant 2002: 509). Both nationalisms reached the point of hegemony within each community by the 1950s. Their contestation after the independence of Cyprus became aggressive, resulting in inter-communal violence in the 1960s, with civilian deaths, the enclosure of the Turkish Cypriot population in enclaves and their loss of political representation, as well as the interference of the states of Greece and Turkey in the internal affairs of the newly founded island-state (Dodd 1993: 7). ...

[Link to media]

— Anonymous - The only possible administration

 

at 7/14/24 3:13pm

Author: AnonymousTitle: The only possible administrationSubtitle: The question of citiesDate: October 4, 2018Notes: “L’unica amministrazione possibile. La questione delle città”, “Vetriolo” #1, 2017Source: <actforfree.nostate.net/?p=31586>. Retrieved on 03/07/2024 from lib.anarhija.net. These are times when it seems there are big discussions about the issue of cities, urban areas, about the possibilities of revolt inside them (even of living), of their reformability. Big discussions frequently focused on various topics relating to struggles carried out by many opponents, antagonists, often reformists, sometimes even by enemies of every order and authority; among these issues there is gentrification, a word not so unusual anymore, a word we now want to express some thoughts about. We have a very clear idea about the issue of the cities: the cities have to be destroyed. We believe the development of civilization and the establishment of authoritarian societies stem precisely from the urban coexistence. Along with the human concentration in urban agglomeration, the oppression by the human species against nature and by humans against other animal species became improved and systematic. These tendencies, which actually precede the birth of the cities, along with the emergence of urban civilizations made a qualitative leap forward: the exploitation of a part of human beings by others was born. The city, as a concentration of human beings, has indeed two immediate and inevitable consequences: the first is the division of labour, therefore the birth of class oppression; the second is the need to administer the complex urban society, therefore the birth and the establishment of the State. Consequently, the existence of exploitation (at least, of man by man) and of the State would be impossible without cities. And vice-versa, any form of coexistence liberated from State domination and Capital is not possible in the cities. This is even more evident if we observe the capitalist development of urban areas. The city is the cradle of capitalism: merchants, usury and banks were born in the city even before the industrial capitalism. Our language still preserves the memory: “bourgeoisie” is literally the population of “burg” (town). Even the analysis of language suggests that burg, a city, without bourgeoisie would be inconceivable. But this belief is not based just on a wordplay. At first, the industrial development kept the manufacturing production within the cities, which in the meantime became metropolises. The agricultural production had already been relegated outside the city, or on the contrary, the new cities were build around the factories. Like in a Dickens’ classic. This has influenced the liberation ideologies and theories adopted by the oppressed around the 1850s. Actually, more Marxism than anarchism. Today we live in a completely different phase. Capitalism banished from the cities even the industrial production. In Italy there are cities like Cassino (30.000 inhabitants) that has more workers than Rome (3 million inhabitants). Even if we wanted to be the defenders of factory (which we are not at all), the cities and especially the metropolises appear more and more like parasitical organisms, as tumours that suck and consume what is produced elsewhere. The electricity, the steel on which the public transport runs, the cars, not to mention the food, are all produced outside them. This makes an urban revolution objectively impossible: an insurgent fairytale city would starve and freeze to death after a few weeks, unable and helpless to handle its complexity in a different way than the State does. And so dies the socialist utopia of expropriation of cities by the hand of working class or whichever urban sub-proletariat. Therefore, we are surprised by the attempt made even by many truly revolutionary comrades to replace this socialist utopia with a libertarian utopia of city life. What is theorized, constructed, applied by authority, can in no way be taken as an example and used differently from the reason why it was designed. For the anarchists there cannot exists a presumed “other” possibility to administrate, even in an intermediate way. Capitalist development puts us in front of objective non-reformability and impossibility of a self-managed projectuality of the cities. The only possible administration is the one made by the State, which increasingly concentrates the informative brain, offices, barracks, symbols, institutions, logistic and administrative heart in the big urban complexes. Cities, before the metropolises, due to their “nature” are the applied theory of ruling power. They are the phenomenology itself of capitalism. Suffice it to say that, for example, in France the Gendarmerie is actively involved in urban planning, indicating how the cities should be build and modified according to their control requirements. To this so-called “mass” and economy discourse, we have to add the individual one. Technological pervasiveness and the more and more robotic and virtual life to which the city dwellers are forced (most of them without raising any objection, besides the merely reformist ones) are producing increasingly alienated individuals, similar to those machines we surround ourselves with, day by day. An alienation – of nowadays – qualitatively different from the one of the early capitalism. In the past people were alienated because of exploitation; but at least to be exploited it could provide that awareness of wanting to brake one’s own exploitation, to free oneself of one’s own alienation. Today the “classic” exploited, those who “produce things”, do not live in western metropolises. The residents of big urban complexes are alienated by pointlessness, by boredom and by misery of their city life. ...

[Link to media]

— ‘Long live Ilya Romanov’ Cell - Explosive/incendiary device against the premises of an electoral committee

 

at 7/14/24 2:18pm

Author: ‘Long live Ilya Romanov’ CellTitle: Explosive/incendiary device against the premises of an electoral committeeSubtitle: In solidarity with Monica Caballero and Francisco SolarDate: November 20, 2013Source: <actforfree.nostate.net/?p=15603>. Retrieved on 03/07/2024 from lib.anarhija.net. We Are not Spectators but Enemies of all Forms of Dominion Today we wanted to give vent to a small anarchist impulse by brandishing the weapons of life and the ideas of rebellion. As we are convinced that the status quo is being maintained not only by those who hold power but also by the servile attitude of those who tacitly support it, toady we decided to attack polling station 98a in the town of La Reina with an explosive/incendiary device. The electoral committee is a piece of the democratic machine because of their role of organizing logistically the elections on a local level. In simple terms they appoint the members of the management electoral committee, the members of the polling station and the agents of the electoral offices. They also decide the sites for the polls. We Don't Hide our Dark Intentions Why to go on the attack? Anarchy must not waste energy hampering the citizens’ democratic rite of the elections but rather it must try to demonstrate that the dialogue between the rebels and the authority is impossible. It must seek conflict, not make hopeful appeals for taking the right way. To abstain from voting, to build People Power, to write Constituent Assembly on the voting paper, not to write anything at all, to vote for the ‘less evil’: this is to manifest one’s refusal using the language of the citizen without disturbing the authoritarian government. The one and only valid response to this misery is antiauthoritarian attack in its multiple faces and forms. It is the spreading of the fire with any means. It is the fire itself, the idea that animates it and the hands of those who set it, the unbreakable will of the fighters until their last breath and with the means they have. Against Democracy, Against the Misery of some Anarchists It seems we are witnessing the sanctification of democracy, of what everybody says. Citizens and would-be revolutionaries look at democracy as if it were the ideal future. It seems that the big goal of the political fauna is either to make democracy better or to realize a new and perfect one. Those who believe in elections and those who refuse electoral strategies agree on this point: the problem is not democracy but its management. An anarchist position emphasizes the refusal of all forms of dominion, it doesn’t make any problem of management: democracy can never be a means of liberation considering its history and social dynamics. To struggle for a better democracy is like to struggle for the construction of a social system hiding the conflict which emerges in democracy and on which democracy is based. On a local level it seems that nobody remembers that some ghosts who claim to be anarchists and libertarians have made impolite invitation to democracy. Perhaps someone remembers such a thing was made by members of the Communist Organization through the Electoral Pact ‘United we can’ here in Santiago a few years ago? ‘Anarchists’, communists, humanists and demases, all holding hands, it’s just ridiculous. Critical support? Mere platformist insolence. Separate mention has to be made of a Red Libertaria, which is supporting one of the current candidates to the presidency of the parliamentarian left without problems. What anarchist could ever support a possible president? It is like spitting in the face of all the comrades who have decided to affirm anarchy through the assassination of these figures. The Corriente Revolución Anarquista doesn’t content themselves with falsifying the recent history of anarchist struggle in this country. They are even trying to protest against the elections system by waving the flag of their organization. Anarchist action must be the propaganda of the struggle and not that of an organization with anarchist leaders. Those who are involved in the electoral circus should have the honesty not to hide the intentions motivating them. They don’t deserve our respect, they are not comrades, those who superficially criticize dominion through the rhetoric of opposition. It is not surprising that electoral tactics reproduce themselves in other political spheres where voting or raising one’s hand impose themselves as methods for affirming students’ organizations, leftist organizations, autonomous groups and collectives. A pertinent and disgusting example is that of the recent election of a young libertarian as president of the Federation of the Students of Chile, who has stated that anarchism is a historical movement ‘profoundly democratic’. Those who are trying to climb the stage of the political market for the sake of their organization become part of the game they so much refuse. And as this is the general situation, parliamentarians, leftist extra-parliamentarians and ‘libertarian anarchists’ agree on a strategy: the fight for a share of power. Anti-state Active Minorities and the Antiauthoritarian Struggle Uncontrollable anarchy is not submitted to democracy and its values. It doesn’t speak of majorities, consensus or basic rights. It doesn’t lower its head for a share of power, nor does it wait for the right time to experiment the struggle. Today we are waging an irregular war against dominion all over the world. ...

[Link to media]

— Margaret Killjoy - On Socialism, Communism, and Anarchism

 

at 7/14/24 10:13am

Author: Margaret KilljoyTitle: On Socialism, Communism, and AnarchismSubtitle: or: an imprecise definition of termsDate: July 3, 2024Source: Retrieved on 4th July 2024 from margaretkilljoy.substack.com One time, maybe ten years back, I was on the DC metro with my family. My brother and I were happily talking about the feminist implications of GI Joe, because my brother is cool as hell, when a stranger looked over at my father (not knowing we were related) to complain about how I spoke. “They really don’t teach people how to speak English anymore,” the stranger complained. I’m not the world’s fighty-est person, but I’ve also never been the world’s least fighty person, so I confronted him immediately. “Oh?!” I asked. “What’s wrong with the way we’re talking?!” He went on a tirade about how I used the word “like” too much when I talked and how kids these days have no respect for proper grammar and speech. I… may or may not have started yelling at him on a crowded train, shouting things like “English isn’t a formally codified language, motherfucker” and “I’m a fucking professional editor I think I know how the fucking English language works.” He argued back. I danced circles around the man’s terrible logic and eventually he fled the train while an angry dirty punk screamed at him. This wasn’t my proudest moment. Later, my father kindly reminded me that it’s impolite to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed man. But I think about this moment often, because the world is full of pedants, and those pedants are convinced, incorrectly, that there is such a thing as “right” and “wrong” in spoken or written language. This pedantry leads to all kinds of classism and racism, turning everyone into little grammar police. The irony is that those grammar police are just… wrong. By thinking they know the rules of English, they prove themselves ignorant. Every professional editor knows the only list of rules you follow are the rules of your publication. English is a language of guidelines, not laws. Which is, frankly, one of the finest things about it. The imprecision of language is liberating—there are no walls around our words and therefore our ideas—but it can also be confusing. Quite regularly, people argue about something (like socialism or anarchism or capitalism or fascism, as examples) without ever realizing that each person is arguing about a different concept while still using the same terms. So then, I’d like to offer a bit of a definition of terms. It’s going to be an imprecise set of definitions, though. I am not attempting to lay out what’s known as a prescriptive set of definitions, but instead a descriptive set. That is to say, this is not “the rules about what these words mean,” but instead “what I have observed these words to mean throughout my years of engaging in politics and reading about the history of politics.” We’ll start with three big ones: socialism, communism, and anarchism, as well as some related terms like “democratic socialism,” “authoritarian socialism,” and “libertarian socialism.” All of which, funnily enough, have different meanings depending on the context of time and place. The point of understanding these terms is not to reify the differences between us, nor to suggest that existing frameworks developed in the 19th century are what we should use here in the 21st, but instead so that we can better understand where various people might be coming from and better understand history. Socialism Socialism is, broadly understood, the largest umbrella term here. Socialism is the belief that we would be better off if our economic system encouraged economic equality. It’s “what if we learned how to share, though” applied to entire economies. Specifically, socialists tend to believe that the “means of production” (factories, farms, etc) ought to be “socially owned” rather than “privately owned.” Basically, this means that a factory ought to be owned and operated either by the workers themselves or the state, rather than by shareholders and private business interests. Of course, it’s easy to look at even that definition and realize that “factories ought to be owned by the workers” is an entirely different idea than “factories ought to be owned by the state,” so obviously there are many different types of socialists. And there are many more ideas within socialism as well: in some instances, people have gone for hybrid models where, for example, a food store might be operated both by the workers and the customers—basically, everyone who is directly affected by the policies of that store. Socialism is, fundamentally, in opposition to capitalism. Because of a hundred years of cold war and post-cold war propaganda, capitalism itself is wildly misunderstood. Capitalism is not, as it is commonly misunderstood, “an economic system in which you work for money and then use that money to buy the things that you want and need.” Capitalism is better understood as “an economic system in which some people leverage their capital (the things they already own) to make money, while everyone else has to work for their money.” What socialism is fundamentally opposed to is the leveraging of capital for personal gain, not the existence of money. Some socialists desire a society with money, some don’t. ...

[Link to media]

As of 7/26/24 11:28pm. Last new 7/26/24 11:46am.