Crooked Bough News Round-up

— Various Authors - Don’t Just Do Nothing to Counter Fascism

 

at 11/21/24 8:51pm

Author: Various AuthorsTitle: Don’t Just Do Nothing to Counter FascismSubtitle: 20 Things You Can Do to Counter Fascism — Yes, You! Yes, NowDate: November 2024Source: Retrieved on 22 November 2024 from <mafwdistro.noblogs.org/dont-just-do-nothing-to-counter-fascism> Note This zine is a communal effort, with advice gleaned from the following Jewish anarchists: alice, asher, cat, chanaleh, cindy, cindy barukh, hannah, jhaavo, lilli, mazel, scarab, simcha, and vicky. “Don’t Just Do Nothing: 20 Things You Can Do to Counter Fascism — Yes, You! Yes, Now” is intended as inspiration for everyone who is striving toward a world without fascism — whether or not they’re Jewish or an anarchist. Please share this zine freely and widely. November 2024   You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it. — Pirkei Avot (2:21). As Christofascism takes the reins of US power, thereby impacting the whole of this continent and the globe, it should be abundantly clear at this point that appealing to the state — any state — is a losing strategy. The world had already lost when the “choice” this November was between two versions of fascism. We offer up this sampler of ideas, encouraging you to think and act for yourselves, with each other, as precisely the only winning strategy. If each idea here seems not enough on its own — well, it isn’t. The Pirkei Avot quote, perhaps the most widely known and cited teaching from Jewish text, was penned some two thousand years ago. So many forms of despotism — empires, monarchies, and states — have risen and fallen in that time. We are not alone, as anarchists and Jews, in our ethical imperative to wrestle with every type of authority. Ancestors throughout human history — people of all colors, genders, and cultures of this earth — have struggled together to resist the imposition of coercive, hierarchical violence. Crucially, people have autonomously organized, defended, and practiced myriad forms of mutual aid, collective care, and self-governance for millennia — what is often called “prefigurative politics.” They haven’t put off the worlds they want to see but instead have directly acted as if they were already free. As diasporic rebels, our Jewishness teaches us to rely on solidarity beyond all borders. Our teachings compel us to lean on the community of others to live lives worth living, whether we are mourning or celebrating, or grappling time and again with what liberation should and could look like. When we start Shabbat each week — twenty-five hours of practicing “the world to come” — and end it with Havdalah — when we ease ourselves back into this brutal “world as it is” — we do so with braided offerings (bread and a candle, respectively). Such braids, in these times, underscore the imperative for interwovenness, for interrelationality, between each and every one of us, from all walks of life, who want to destroy fascism and bring about liberatory social transformations. May all freedom-seeking peoples journey side by side toward those aspirations by better loving and caring for each other. Here are twenty things you can do to counter fascism — yes, you! yes, now! Dream up and put into motion many, many more things too. This is only a beginning. 1 Do doikayt (hereness) within your one-on-one relationships. What would it look like to check in with each of your beloveds based on your current conditions and communicate with love to each other what you envision for the world you want to build? Identify the soil amendments necessary in thought, word, and deed for those seeds to flourish. 2 Make people soup and do not stop inviting them over for soup! Be a reason for living. 3 Build a support network. Join with like-minded people and organize for quality over quantity; a few devoted comrades can go further than a large and dispassionate group. Make art about it. Your support network, the love of your friends and family, can always be broader; build it bigger, with care and intentionality. Make more art about it. Try out new actions: talk to people and ask how they’re feeling, distribute literature, organize a study group, or put up stickers or disperse seed bombs together. With every loving bond we forge, and all the new art we make, we divorce ourselves a little more from the demons that haunt us — hopelessness, irony, and complacency — and find sparks of possibility. Try, fail, and try again and again. 4 Buy, accumulate, or otherwise procure Plan B, and save it for yourself and others in case it’s needed later. Set up a Plan B distro in your community. Do the same with other, potentially soon-hard-to-access supplies related to bodily autonomy. 5 Write letters to people in prison and detention, send them books, and/or do jail support and solidarity for those facing state repression in your communities. Act in ways that thwart carceral logics in your responses to conflict and harm as well as your day-to-day relations with others. Remember, there are no prisons or cops in olam ha-ba (the world to come). 6 Make art and display it in public. Draw, paint, or write a colorful sign about your dreams, your hopes for a better world, or to celebrate something that you love about this one. It doesn’t matter if you don’t think of yourself as an artsy type. If you can, get together with others to do this; share art materials, space, and ideas. Wheat paste (or wallpaper paste or glue) your finished work in public — somewhere you and others will see it when going about your daily lives. You’ve now made a material change to your surroundings. It will make people smile. It will make people feel less alone. It will make visible your resistance as well as visions. It also won’t last forever. Nothing does. You can always make more. ...

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— Max Stirner - Review of Bruno Bauer's Trumpet of the Last Judgment

 

at 11/21/24 5:18pm

Author: Max StirnerTitle: Review of Bruno Bauer's Trumpet of the Last JudgmentDate: January 1842Notes: German Source: Telegraph für Deutschland. Red. von Karl Gutzkow. No. 6-8. Julius Campe, Hamburg, Januar 1842, pp. 22-24, 25-28, 30-31; Kleinere Schriften hrs. John Henry Mackay (Berlin: Bernhard Zack, 1914), pp.11-25.Source: Stepelevich, Lawrence S. “Addenda: II C.” Translated Essay. In Max Stirner On the Path of Doubt, 188–197. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2020. See English original for translator's preface. All footnotes Stepelevich's. What should not be tolerated, equalized, and reconciled with everything else? We have endured this accommodation, this easy acceptance which, as it can be imagined, has brought us to a state of exhaustion, which has divided our inner hearts, and which only needed intelligence to let us know that we have spent our honorable time in useless attempts to bring about concord and unity. The accusers are right: “How can one reconcile Belial with Christ?” The devoted Zealot has never known any other goal than exterminating the spirit of the new age which is pregnant with threatening storms. He is just as the Emperor of the heavenly empire who thinks only of the “extermination” of his enemies, and as an Englishman he only wants to have no fight except the crucial one of a fight unto death. We allowed the Zealot to rant and to rave, and saw nothing in him but—a humorous fanatic. Did we do right with this? Insofar as the Zealot in the face of common sense always lost his case, and even if reasonable folk do not particularly rebuke him, we could then, in confidence, leave the affair to the sense of those who lay down the rules, and so be confident in following this sense. But this toleration has rocked us into a dangerous slumber. Admittedly, the complaining Zealot didn’t do us any harm; but still, the believer and the whole flock of the religious were behind the complainer, and—what is the worse and the oddest—we ourselves were also set behind him. Indeed, we were liberal philosophers and didn’t let anything impose upon thinking: thinking was the all in all. However, how stands it with belief? Should it somehow give way to thinking? Heaven forefend! There can be no enmity assumed between the freedom of thinking and belief! The content of belief and that of knowledge is one and the same content, and whoever would injure belief would not understand himself and would be no philosopher! Didn’t Hegel himself take the purpose of his lectures on the philosophy of religion to be the reconciliation of reason with religion? And would we, his disciples [seine Jünger] want to subtract anything from his belief? That would be far from us! Know, ye faithful hearts, that we are fully at one with you regarding the content of belief, and that we have only set ourselves upon the beautiful task, of which you have so misjudged us, of defending disputed beliefs. Or do you still more or less doubt this? Observe how we justify ourselves to you, and so read our conciliatory writings on “Belief and Knowledge,” and on the “Piety of Philosophy against Christian Religion,” and dozens of similar writings, and you won’t have any further malice against your best friends!— So then, the good-hearted, peaceful philosopher fell into the arms of belief. Now, who is so pure from this sin of belief that he would cast the first stone against the poor philosophical sinner? The period of sleep-walking was so universal, so full of self-deception and illusions, the press and urge after reconciliation so general, that only a few held themselves free of it, and these few perhaps without any support. It was the time of peaceful diplomacy. Just as the diplomacy of this time it was understood that there was nowhere any real enmity, but everywhere irritation and a seeking of advantage, a purposive incitation, with persuasion balanced by a sugary peacefulness and a friendly mistrust, an artificial sensibility, a serious and willful earnestness by means of superficial balancing and juggling acts, a thousand fold phenomena of driving self-deception and illusion in every area. “Peace at all costs” or better “agreement and accommodation at all costs,” that was the paltry heartfelt need of these diplomats. It might here be the place to sing a little song, if this would not be forbidden, of this diplomacy which has made our whole life so feeble, and which has by its skillful hypnosis lulled our reason to sleep in a drowsy trustfulness, and has left us staggering about— But beyond this, we are now prepared to announce a book, a book which has been anticipated by our previous remarks, and which is the final and definitive overthrow of the diplomacy here discussed: The Trumpet of the Last Judgment against Hegel the Atheist and Antichrist. An Ultimatum. —Under this title appears an small work of eleven Bogen, published by Wigand, whose author is not difficult to discover by anyone who knows his literary work and from it his scientific point of view—that which motivated him to address “His Brothers in Christ” and to say that “We would remain still concealed, so that it would not appear as if we sought any other honor than a Heavenly Crown. When the struggle, which we soon hope to see end, when the lies receive their punishment, then we will personally encounter him and warmly embrace his decision. This book is an excellent mystery! A man of the most devout fear of God, whose heart is filled with anger against the despicable pack of young Hegelians, turns back to their teacher, their origin, Hegel himself and finds—horrors! That the whole revolutionary wickedness, that is now bubbling forth from his depraved students had already been in this morose and hypocritical sinner, who had been long taken as a keeper and a protector of the Faith. The author, with righteous scorn, just the Clergy from Constance dealt with Huss, tears the priestly garments from him, and, painting him in flames as the devil, sets a paper hat upon his shaved head, and hounds this greatest of heretics through the streets of an astonished world. Such a confidant and versatile philosophical Jacobean has never been hunted down. It was the undeniably excellent and radical attack by this determined Servant of God that he has seized upon and bitten Hegel. This servant has served well, and out of the right instinct, has never lost sight of and never lost the smell of this Arch-Heretic, and the Anti-Christ of their Christ. Unlike those of “good intention” who hold a lightly-held belief, and neither with faith nor with knowledge would wish anyone harm, he, on the contrary, holds, with inquisitorial severity, the heretic in sight until he is caught. He does not allow himself to be deceived and duped—as dummies so often are—and can rightly claim that he be considered the best expert regarding the dangerous aspects of the Hegelian system. “You know what protective steps must be taken, don’t look for any other!” The wild beast knows quite well that he has most to fear from Man. ...

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— Adi Callai - The Gaza Ghetto Uprising

 

at 11/16/24 3:36am

Author: Adi CallaiTitle: The Gaza Ghetto UprisingDate: May 2024Source: <brooklynrail.org/2024/05/field-notes/The-Gaza-Ghetto-Uprising> TO THE HEART OF IT: Gaza has been a free kill zone and a “concentration camp” (to quote Israel’s National Security Director Giora Eiland in 2004), long before October 7. In light of this, the most radical position comes directly from the simplest question: are Palestinians human beings? If your answer is emphatically yes, unambiguously and without reservations, then you are a lost cause to Zionism. Because if Palestinians are human beings, then their self-defense is legitimate, and the defense of their continued existence is necessary. Gaza, this black box, this holding pen for refugees from the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine—can we think of its people as we think about ourselves, imagining being enclosed, imprisoned, in a small stretch of land forever, for no reason other than being born into a specific ethnicity? A place that has been cut off from the world to varying degrees since 1948. And a place that since at least 2003 has experienced multiple devastating large-scale military operations. Gazans had survived twelve of these since 2003, with a death toll of over 8,000 people, before October 7. Since then, that number has grown by over 34,000. And every minute there’s a new update of more deaths from Gaza from Israeli fire, but now also from starvation. No fuel, no food, no water, no medicine. Whatever is coming in is like “a drop in the sea,” to quote UN officials, in a place that these officials had already, in 2018, predicted would soon be “unlivable,” unfit for human life—a place that was experiencing what Ilan Pappé called “an incremental genocide” already in 2006. This is the context that we need to have in mind when thinking about the attack on October 7. And then we need to ask ourselves, what would we do in that situation? Do you acquiesce and die? Or do you fight? And if you fight, then how? George Orwell wrote about Gandhi being asked this question about the Jews in Europe in 1938, before the Holocaust. Gandhi said that the Jews should stage a kind of collective mass suicide to show the world the brutality of the Nazis, and then the world would have to intervene.[1] Orwell thought this was unhinged. But the Palestinians, in fact, kind of did this in 2018–19, during the period of the Great March of Return, the Palestinian equivalent to the Salt March in India. On the first day, about thirty thousand Palestinians marched towards the fence, and this unarmed protest was gunned down by Israeli snipers. Over one thousand people were injured and at least seventeen people were killed, just on the first day. And the world did nothing. Liberal politicians extended some vague condemnations, often against violence on both sides. Imagine looking at that and condemning violence on both sides. So what would you do? Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak—the architect of the 2007 siege, considered a liberal Zionist—answered this question himself in 1998, saying he would have joined armed Palestinian resistance had he been born on the other side. We think of Gaza, “we Israelis,” think of Gaza as a place that warehouses violence. It contains the refugees who must hate us so badly for what we did to them. This is also how Americans think of prisons, as places that warehouse violence, contain it so that we don’t have to think about it. But actually, the prison produces violence, and it flows out of the prison and into our seemingly removed lives. That’s why moralistic questions on violence are beside the point. As for what happened on October 7, I’ll try as much as possible to stick to verifiable observations. It is very easy to fall into moralistic analysis, and we obviously can’t avoid it, but we should try to understand what actually occurred. And what happened, as far as we’re able to gather within the sea of misinformation and disinformation and whatever kind of psychological operations are happening? What happened, gathering from GoPros, surveillance footage, first person accounts, as well as reading everything I could put my hands on: military analysts, testimonies, media from both sides of the fence? What happened was that armed resistance factions in Gaza—not only Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya (the Islamic resistance movement, Hamas), most prominently, but also the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which is a Marxist-Leninist organization, and other factions—launched a meticulously executed guerrilla operation, which immediately turned into a popular insurrection, against military bases and settlements surrounding the Gaza Strip on October 7, 2023. Around 6 a.m. local time, the resistance[2] deployed a wide array of forces—totaling an estimated 3,000 fighters—on sea, land, air, and underground. They started with what Israelis call a “diversion,” by launching an unusually extensive missile strike targeting the so-called Gaza Envelope and the coast, up to Gush Dan (the Tel Aviv metropolitan area). Simultaneously, they attacked Israel’s panoptic surveillance systems and their cameras above and around Gaza, with what appeared to be relatively cheap commercial drones with DIY explosive capacities. And then they approached and breached the fence with multiple guerrilla army units, blowing holes in fences around Gaza at many points with specialized explosives, and laying down metal railings over which armed motorcyclists in groups of two could ride rapidly. Then heavy construction equipment like bulldozers and front-end loaders moved in to expand the breaches so that pickup trucks and sedans could drive through, carrying more armed fighters. Videos show that well-before 8 a.m. other factions (in this video, the Mujahideen Brigades) were in full gear and uniform, ready to participate in the uprising. With these forces the resistance completely overwhelmed Israeli defenses across many locations simultaneously, taking over the Erez Crossing—which is the main checkpoint separating Gaza from the world (alongside Rafah, which separates Gaza from Egypt to the south)—catching soldiers in their underwear in the bases, taking over entire settlements, killing many hundreds of Israeli soldiers and civilians—the death toll currently stands between 1,100 and 1,200[3]—killing and capturing high-ranking army officials; killing one mayor, too, the head of the municipal authority of the Gaza Envelope, and kidnapping over two hundred people into Gaza. ...

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— maia arson crimew - anarchism starts in the now: hope for a better future

 

at 11/15/24 3:48pm

Author: maia arson crimewTitle: anarchism starts in the now: hope for a better futureSubtitle: there is still timeDate: 2024-11-14Source: Retrieved on 2024-11-14 from https://maia.crimew.gay/posts/anarchism-in-the-now/ one: doom "All my siblings wanna swim but it's infested with great whites Tell me if shit changed since Leelah and Blake died Tell me if my best friend's about to be next in line Tell me that I'm brave motherfucker, do you wanna die?" Rural Internet - i am not brave the world is looking dire right now. it seems like everything is worse than it has ever been, or maybe just like things suddenly flipped back to "bad" after a brief period where it seemed to be getting better. but no matter what happened or how, one thing is clear: the number of socially acceptable targets and scapegoats is steadily increasing, the focus shifting constantly. the fascists call us "degenerates", blaming us for all of society's woes, while the liberal "left" throw us under the bus again and again, blaming anyone but themselves for their loss of state power. none of this is new, per se, but the suffocating feeling of this ever-accelerating descent into hell is just as scary. the US has voted four times on a federal level since trump first came to power, and somehow we're still exactly where we left off almost a decade ago. it's paralyzing, really, to see the rights we've fought over for decades—maybe even centuries—eroded away so rapidly all over the world. no matter how predictable this may have been, no amount of "told you so" changes just how shocking it still is. we undeniably are at a turning point of sorts—things are not fine, and this essay does not want to pretend they are. its goal is instead to provide a perspective for a hopeful future at a community level, a perspective beyond voting and party politics. and while clearly sparked by the results of the US election, i did my best to write this for an international audience[1]. two: community "there is no higher good than the pursuit of self happiness and fun. the act of doing something purely for fun is blindingly good, as it is the action of doing something only to create positivity and put more goodness into the world. [...] the act of having fun creates goodness, which means it is the greatest thing one can do." elena fortune, manifesto one call pierces sharply through all the vaguely hopeful posts whenever a rightward shift happens, or the state takes another life, or a fascist wins an election, or yet another right is stripped away, or one more senseless war breaks out: "organize!" but what does it really mean to "get organized"? what is community and how do we find it? a lot of those posts seem to think of organizing as simply joining a union, a political party or a similar radical organization. to me this feels too hollow, too shortsighted and too often leaves people with more questions than answers. after all, the true heart of any radical movement—of any revolution, of any kind of community—is the people supporting it and keeping it alive from behind the front lines. think about the community kitchen that cooks for you; the local bands stoking your morale; the storytellers keeping the memory of your movement alive; the researchers documenting fascists and the state; the queers who organize the parties where you can be unapologetically yourself for a night; the mental health and legal support folks making sure you and your friends are safe during and after a demonstration; the people making flyers, art, and zines; the friends you can count on for always being around and full of hope. no matter if you're at the front lines when we face off against fascists and the state, you play an integral role in keeping the movement thriving. there's a role for everyone—no matter your skillset, risk affinity or ablebodiedness. any kind of community has the ability to enact change in this neoliberal individualist society—any kind. this includes not just the examples at the start of this section, but also your local friend circle, your city's underground music scene, your polycule, your local book club, your group chat or really any other group of people. hell, even conservatives have used this to their advantage for decades now—it's one of the reasons why homeowners' associations and groups of "concerned parents" are so damn good at politicizing whatever the hell they want to. we slowly build a future for ourselves by fostering communities of all kinds, creating lifelong bonds and friendships, making collective memories of moments where time stops just for a little bit as we sit around a fire and have fun, refusing to give up our love for each other through all hatred. because no matter how fun it is to imagine the current system laying in ashes before us, actually getting there is meaningless if we have nothing to fill that void with. when i think of community i think of friendships, of friend groups, the people who share my dream for a better future. i think about the people i've gone to protests with, the people i've ran away from cops and fascists with, the people who've tended to my health afterward, the people i've hacked governments and corporations with, the online music communities that rebuilt my hope when i was on the verge of throwing in the towel, the people i've moshed with at local shows and all the people i can run to when it feels like everything is just too much. there isn't "the community", there are many communities that every single one of us are a part of. ...

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— Anonymous - Yintah film review: Anarchists in the blind spot

 

at 11/14/24 4:23pm

Author: AnonymousTitle: Yintah film review: Anarchists in the blind spotSubtitle: The necessity to write our own historiesDate: November 9th, 2024Source: Retrieved on November 14th 2024 from https://bccounterinfo.org/2024/11/09/yintah-documentary-film-review-anarchists-in-the-blind-spot-or-the-necessity-to-write-our-own-histories/ Yintah is the latest installment of a long tradition of indigenous documentaries speaking truth to power against colonial violence in so-called Canada. The story told is of an anti-pipeline struggle to protect the richness of life that the Wedzin kwa river offers, a decade long fight that involved not only the Wet’suwet’en peoples of northern British-Columbia, but also hundreds of dedicated non-indigenous comrades who fought valiantly alongside them. Except the film chose to cast them aside.​​​​​​​ The documentary portrays land reoccupation through the personal projects of Freda Huson and Molly Wickham over the course of ten years, but also makes a point to frame those individual stories in a more expansive and continual relationship of the Wet’suwet’en people to the land. The conflict over industrial and otherwise settler-colonial exploitation of the land is part of the present, past, and future of the territory, and the film does a good job situating the latest struggle against Coastal Gaslink on a longer timeline. The film ends with a strong position of indigenous resilience in the face of lost battles, and should inspire many that the fight is never over as long as we are alive. A central argument Yintah makes is one most indigenous social movements have been pushing forward in North America, which is that the land should be under local and traditional jurisdiction of its original peoples. This framework opens the door to a legalistic approach to anticolonial discourse (« Who is the rightful decider? »), which Yintah gives legitimacy to for example by recounting the Delgamuukw case as a historical win for the Wet’suwet’en and Gitxan nations. Referring to or using the western legal system is neither revolutionary nor anarchist, and comrades involved in indigenous solidarity work have highlighted this point of tension before. Yintah‘s non-critical approach to legalistic tactics distances its narrative from an uncompromising and feral position against the colonial state. But I guess it also paints a truthful depiction of how unfortunately many activists end up wasting their time and energy in lawsuits and legal cases. If we can briefly hear Freda say Delgamuukw hasn’t changed anything, then why waste precious screening minutes showcasing the legal fight in a positive light beforehand? It only reinforces reformist aspirations to pursue court battles. Relying on the judicial system to recognize indigenous governance also contributes to creating a new class of indigenous elite deciders (sellouts) that move on to exploit the land at the expense of ecosystems. This is happening right now as the Nisga’a Nation, an indigenous political entity legitimized by a treaty signed in 1998, has welcomed and invested in the construction of the PRGT pipeline, northwest of the CGL line. The question of jurisdiction is not where anarchists and indigenous land defenders share the most affinity. Indigenous jurisdiction, even put through the lens of a pre-colonial political system, opens the door to legitimizing forms of authority that, in a decolonized future, would pit anarchists against indigenous figures of power, and is also today encouraging power imbalance on current shared sites of struggle. Thankfully Yintah does not shy away from including one scene that recounts one of the most discordant moments of the struggle when chief Namoks decided on his own, in fear of police use of force, to open the Unist’ot’en gates to pipeline workers, against the will of companions on site and Freda herself. This was not the only moment when power was yielded in the name of Wets’uwet’en traditional governance and at the expense of the fight against police and CGL. But it was maybe the most impactful one, and I am thankful this movie scene offers a brief moment of nuance in an otherwise sugarcoated version of the power dynamics on the frontline. Land is of course absolutely central to anti-colonialism. During the struggle against the Northern Gateway project, the Coastal Gaslink construction and the RCMP’s heightened presence (roughly the 2012-2022 decade), the backroads territory has been the site of an impressive game of snakes and ladders to control the access to isolated valleys. Yintah chose to dedicate a lot of its screening time to traditional uses of the land. We are shown many scenes of harvesting game and berries, the importance of transferring wet’suwet’en knowledges and values to younger generations and the relationship between traditional ways of life and health. Crucial to the #LandBack movement and Indigenous resurgence, I understand why these themes are explored as an exclusively wet’suwet’en story. But the story of confrontation with pipeline projects was not exclusively wet’suwet’en, and Yintah turned a blind eye to the central role anarchists playedin defending the land against industrial invasion. This is what every comrade has been whispering about since the film came out. Over the decade, there has been hundreds of anarchists who, from far away and traveling onsite, dedicated their hearts and their time and sometimes took immense risk to defend wet’suwet’en land. Anarchists organized solidarity actions in both affinity based models and in larger scale social contexts across the country, expanding all the way to Europe and the Pacific Northwest of the US for years, and insurgent tactics have flourished during #ShutDownCanada. According to many first hand accounts, the frontline camps could not have survived without anarchists’ contributions. The struggle was huge and has changed many non-wet’suwet’en people’s lives, many anarchists, and many others as well. Including the solidarity from non-Indigenous peoples would only have strengthened the Wet’suwet’en story of resistance, not diluted it. Do we have the audacity to bring this up as a grievance to our Indigenous friends? Is it totally misplaced to critique an indigenous film that makes no place for non-indigenous peoples? Not PC for sure. ...

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— Kevin Carson - When You Cross Pinochet With a Cyberpunk Dystopia…

 

at 11/9/24 5:58pm

Author: Kevin CarsonTitle: When You Cross Pinochet With a Cyberpunk Dystopia…Date: November 9th, 2024Source: Retrieved on November 9th, 2024 from https://c4ss.org/content/59956 …what do you get? Answer: “Special Little Freedom Zones.” That’s what Reason’s Liz Wolfe calls the Honduran “charter cities,” officially known as ZEDEs (Zones for Economic Development and Employment), which were declared illegal in September by the Honduran Supreme Court (“No More Special Little Freedom Zones,”” September 25). The ruling prohibits the creation of new ZEDEs; its effect on existing ones, like Próspera, Ciudad Morazán, and Zede Orquidea, is as yet unknown. Wolfe describes such charter cities as “special economic economic zones that are still bound by criminal law but able to create their own civil codes.” And again: “they get to set their own laws and regulations and typically choose to create more business-friendly conditions with less taxation.” Reason — and more specifically Reason’s Brian Doherty — has been shilling for these “special little freedom zones” since not long after a right-wing coup regime came to power in 2009. Doherty quotes an article Bryan Caplan wrote for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: “A charter city begins on empty land,” he said. “It can only grow by voluntary migration of workers and investors. If no one chooses to relocate, they’re no worse off than they would have been if the charter city had never existed.” But that so-called “empty land” bears some looking into. Honduras, Lauren Carasik writes at Foreign Policy — like many other places in the Third World — has long been characterized by irregular or informal land titles not legally registered or recognized by the central government. Ortiz says that he has resided on the land in the community of Playa Blanca on Zacate Grande Island, off of Honduras’ west coast, for decades. The problem is that he doesn’t have a title to it, leaving him no recourse to the wall. His quandary is a common one: approximately 80 percent of the country’s privately held land is either untitled or improperly so according to a 2011 USAID report. Writers like Hernando de Soto have argued that this lack of formal legal title, and the certainty and predictability, the ability to legally protect titles and enter into contract, that go with it, are a major reason for continued underdevelopment. De Soto sees the formalization of informal land titles as an important step toward prosperity. The devil lies in the details. There are two ways to formalize customary or informal land claims — from the bottom up, and from the top down. Consider, for example, the 17th century English “land reform” after the Restoration of Charles II. As Christopher Hill argued, Parliament could regularize titles from the bottom up by abolishing feudal titles, fees, and rents and formally recognizing the peasant cultivators as the legal owners of the land they occupied and worked. Or, acting from the top down, it could instead abolish the feudal obligations of the landed classes and the customary rights of their peasant tenants, and transform them into fee simple owners, i.e. landlords in the modern capitalist sense — thereby turning peasant cultivators into simple tenants at will with no right to the land. Unsurprisingly Parliament — overwhelmingly dominated by the landed nobility and gentry — chose the latter course. In Christopher Hill’s words, “feudal tenures were abolished upwards only, not downwards.” Interestingly enough, leftist president Manuel Zelaya — the one who was overthrown in the 2009 coup — had, prior to his overthrow, been working on a land reform that would have regularized peasants’ informal and customary claims to the land they were working, and given them formal legal title. That wasn’t the kind of regularization the landed oligarchy of Honduras — any more than that of 17th century England — wanted. President Hernandez, who was swept into power by the coup that overthrew Zelaya, approved the charter cities project. With the peasant occupants of land coveted by the ZEDE merchant-adventurers in possession of no formal legal title, the land could be treated as “unoccupied.” Carasik continues: Zacate Grande Island, where only a few campesino families have title to their land, is a window into exactly what that process might look like. Though under the ZEDE law residents whose land is expropriated are supposed to be repaid, the majority of the island’s families lack the legal documents necessary to support claims for indemnities. And without legal and financial resources, Zacate Grande’s campesinos are unable to contest their evictions by establishing their long-term possession of the land. So, while neoliberal advocates of charter cities wring their hands over “weak institutions” and the need for “rule of law,” ZEDEs’ predatory promoters have in fact taken advantage of those weak institutions in order to loot the commons for their own ends. On top of that, while densely populated areas will be allowed to hold plebiscites as to whether or not to be incorporated into ZEDEs, sparsely populated areas like rural villages which border on ZEDEs will have no legal defense against being absorbed by them. ...

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— Strangers In a Tangled Wilderness - Life Without Law

 

at 11/9/24 6:09am

Author: Strangers In a Tangled WildernessTitle: Life Without LawSubtitle: An introduction to anarchist politicsDate: Fall 2013, revised 2024Notes: The first edition was published in 2013. This revised edition was published in 2024. Both were published by Strangers In a Tangled Wilderness. This is the 2024 revised edition.Source: Retrieved on November 18th, 2013 from http://www.tangledwilderness.org/life-without-law/ I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things. —Emma Goldman, 1931 An anarchist is someone who rejects the domination of one person or class of people over another. Anarch-ism is a very broad umbrella term for a group of political philosophies that are based on the idea that we can live as anarchists. We anarchists want a world without nations, governments, capitalism, racism, sexism, homophobia… without any of the numerous, intersecting systems of domination the world bears the weight of today. There is no single perfect expression of anarchism because anarchism is a network of ideas instead of a single dogmatic philosophy. And we quite prefer it that way. The World Today You’re obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you think absurd. You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation. It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretenses of your civilization which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced. In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and all feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers. That’s the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world. —Octave Mirbeau, 1899 There are those who say that anarchism wouldn’t work, that we need laws and cops and capitalism. But we say that it is the systems currently in place which aren’t working. Industrialization is warming the planet to the degree that it might yet just kill us all. In the best case scenario, we’ve already created one of the largest mass extinctions in the history of the earth. Deforestation spreads the deserts in the wild and systemic racism expands the food deserts in the cities. Billions go hungry every day across the globe because global capitalism makes it more profitable for the elite of starving nations to grow crops for export than to feed their own people. Science has been subverted by the demands of profit, and research is only funded if it explores what might make some rich bastards richer. Even the middle class is beginning to fall into ruin, and in this economy there aren’t many left who buy into the myth of prosperity they sold some of us when we were kids. We’re told that anarchy can’t work because people are “inherently” flawed and are motivated solely by self-interest. They somehow make the illogical jump from this idea to the idea that we therefore need leaders and government. But if we don’t trust people to lead themselves, why do we trust them enough to put them in charge of everybody? What if instead of the top-down organizations that have led us into ruin, we created horizontal organizations? What if we made a society in which we collectively confront problems–without ignoring what makes each of us unique and without forcing the individual into subservience to the whole? Responsibility and Freedom An anarchist is one who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice. —Ursula K. Le Guin, 1974 One way some anarchists like to think about it is that anarchism is the marriage of responsibility and freedom. In a state society, under the rule of government, we are held responsible to a set of laws to which we did not consent. We are expected to be responsible without being trusted with freedom. There are laws about everything: whom we can love, what imaginary lines we can cross, what we can do with our own bodies. We are not trusted to act on our own authority, and at every turn we are being managed, observed, policed, and, if we step out of line, imprisoned. The reverse—freedom without responsibility—is not much better, and it forms the mainstream myth of anarchy. Government thrives off this misconception, the idea that it’s only the existence of cops and prisons that keeps us from murdering one another wholesale. But in reality, the people in this world who act with total freedom and no responsibility are those so privileged in our society so as to be above reproach, such as the police and the ultra rich. Most of the rest of us understand that in order to be free we must hold ourselves accountable to those we care about and those our actions might impede upon: our communities and families and friends. Anti-Capitalism The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said “This is mine,” and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this imposter; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody. —Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1754 There’s this idea, which has proven demonstrably false on a global level, that it’s “good” or “healthy” or “more natural” for most everyone in a society to act solely for personal gain. In economic terms, this is the central myth of capitalism: that everyone should try to get one over on everyone else all the time, and that if everyone does that, most people win. The people who want you to believe that myth are the people who do win: the people who already control everything. ...

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— Fundi - The Consequences to Rahtid

 

at 11/2/24 1:16am

Author: FundiTitle: The Consequences to RahtidDate: February 1974Notes: Transcribed from Documents of the Caribbean Revolution (Tunapuna: New Beginning, 1974) by Matthew Quest and Ryan Cecil Jobson.*Source: Retrieved on 2024-11-02 from medium.com/clash-voices-for-a-caribbean-federation-from-below/joseph-edwards-the-consequences-of-rahtid-february-1974-71bdbe7668e6 Joseph Edwards, a Jamaican refrigeration mechanic, spoke of radical labor politics in Rasta idioms. Let’s reason “to Rahtid!” His selected writings have been published as Workers Self-Management in the Caribbean (2014). When we read his ideas comparatively with Trinidad’s CLR James, Guyana’s Walter Rodney, and Jamaica’s Michael Manley and Trevor Munroe we can begin to see the antagonisms or debates within the Caribbean radical tradition that nobody wants us to know about. Further research into Edwards’ legacies reveals another one of his fugitive essays. Unsigned, and without a title, it might best enter history as “The Consequences to Rahtid.” The editors have made some slight edits and added subtitles to clarify reception of the text. Edwards aka “Fundi,” the Caribbean Situationist, besides being adept in the language of Rastas, Rudies, and Dreads, was an experimental thinker alert to anarchism and autonomist Marxism, Surrealism and Dada, the intersection of art in everyday life and the search for a liberating psychology. We were pleased to discover this essay as the Introduction to Documents of the Caribbean Revolution published in February 1974 by New Beginning Movement. This places him firmer among those who advocated a Caribbean federation from below. This essay concludes by emphasizing that “none shall escape the consequences to rahtid.” The Jamaican patwa term“rahtid” can be used in isolation as an exclamation of excitement, astonishment or recognition that a bad outcome will impact us adversely. The way some might respond “Oh, shit!” when spontaneous events don’t go their way, place their ambitions in danger, or make their previous plans a burden or embarrassment. In this idiom, though, the suffix “to rahtid” indicates a punctuation or accent. None shall escape the consequences to their fullest expression and extent. Reflect on this as we read the popular social motion he recognizes and records alert to dread philosophy. He also begins the essay with the word “Iddeally.” A typo was not going to be found in the first word of the first sentence. And he was not emphasizing “I” like Rastas underscore the presence of Jah. Instead it was a play on the psychological “Id” that Freud, who was embraced surprisingly often by radicals of his generation, framed as the unconscious impulses or instincts of our psyche that contain elemental drives and hidden memories. What did this mean for a radical political life? Fundi talks about spontaneity and organization in an original manner that reveals that we cannot understand the unfolding Caribbean Revolution unless we understand how activists with a faulty way of seeing can replace the social motion and ideas of the Caribbean masses with the pronouncements of their parties, unions, and organizations — remarkably he says despite the insightful visions offered found therein, this is a limitation of the very book he is introducing. How many “progressives” are aware trade unions can be oppressive to workers today? How many mentally go to pieces in the midst of prison breaks and what is termed looting? Are you aware that in freedom movements there are often a clash between wishing to fulfill one’s ideals and principles and “radical” activists who believe no matter how rebellious everyday people express themselves they will never be ready for what they think revolution requires? This is a result that for far too many “revolution” is their bureaucratic policies coming to state power — and they will relate to any strategy for them to have weight above society. Fundi underlines a certain type of Caribbean Nationalism is worried about radical ideas being shared that are not homegrown in the region. He thrashes the argument as an obstacle to communication between toilers across the globe together clarifying their experiences. Fundi says it is by learning comparatively what has happened to struggles for direct democracy and labor’s self-emancipation on a world scale that one can be confident about the dynamics that will unfold in the Caribbean region, that of course is made up of different territories with borders dividing us. We know from his other writings he has in mind the popular committees of the French, Russian, Spanish, and Hungarian Revolutions that CLR James taught many Caribbean radicals to value equal to the Haitian and Cuban Revolutions. Past revolutionary history is littered with what Fundi calls ‘gaps’ between the aspiring leaders (in and out of organizations) apparent consciousness, and the masses creative self-directed initiative. And for Fundi this is how popular self-directed liberating activity appears but can be defeated and contained by emerging new States where radicals and progressives often justify the joining of its bureaucracy after the fall of the Old Regime. Listen to how Fundi encourages us to help unleash the creative spontaneity of everyday people. He wants us to become comfortable with what appear Jamaican and Caribbean toilers impossible demands on society. And he poses what happens when we don’t expect such events unfolding before our eyes. ...

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— Fundi - Union Versus Menegement

 

at 11/1/24 10:27pm

Author: FundiTitle: Union Versus MenegementDate: 1970sNotes: Transcribed by Mutt.Source: Retrieved on 2 November 2024 from <organisemagazine.org.uk/2024/11/01/union-versus-menegement-joseph-edwards-theory-and-analysis> This piece, authored by Joseph Edwards—also known as Fundi or the Caribbean Situationist—offers a unique perspective within the anti-authoritarian tradition of the Caribbean left. Assumed to be the first publication of the Trinidadian labor organizing group, The New Beginning Movement (NBM) (1971–1978), this booklet was released as Abeng Pamphlet No. 1. The NBM drew inspiration from the Black Power Revolt and the legacy of C.L.R. James, applying his concepts of workers’ autonomy and self-management to forge a Pan-Caribbean International that extended links to Canada, the United States, and Great Britain—regions experiencing a growing Caribbean worker population in the early 1970s. Established during a declared “state of emergency” by the Eric Williams government, the NBM aimed to create alternative forms of governance, functioning as a rudimentary coordinating council to facilitate large assemblies and provide essential news services. The text of this booklet is derived from a talk given at a seminar for workers. The urgency of Edwards’ critique is rooted in the Rastafarian ideals of the ‘MAN’ and the ‘MEN’ as degenerate beings, this is reflected in the title. He warns workers that organizing under the banner of unions can often become a means of extending political control and identifies potential pitfalls that could obstruct the quest for power, which has been withheld for centuries of colonization in the Caribbean. Drawing inspiration from the revolutionary Paul Bogle, he calls for a necessary revolt within the workers’ movement, which he fears may become stagnant under a unionization model that is as repressive as management itself. The booklet presents a formulated plan of resistance, inspired by the burgeoning Pan-Caribbean revolutionary Black Power Movement, tailored for workers who are already reevaluating party politics in the context of their everyday lives. Unfortunately, this zine was only available at an antique shop in Brooklyn, NY, priced at $100 USD. My heartfelt thanks go to Christian Kennedy for purchasing it, allowing for its digitization. Mutt. THE TASKS OF INDEPENDENT WORKER ORGANIZATION One heart brethren. We are supposed to be dealing with the struggle of workers representation versus menegement which basically is a struggle involving workers and capitalists. But there are certain things we consider as basic that we would like to mention before going into the details. FIRST PRINCIPLES First it needs to be emphasized that menegment is a part, a functioning part of the ruling class in Jamaica. and every workers’ representation organized at every place of work should fully understand workers today and including some in union leadership, who seem to accept that capitalism is a part of the everlasting makeup of society and do not see menegment as really part of the oppressor class from which workers will eventually have to take power. Any union which does not see menegment as part of the oppressor class is unable to construct any proper strategy directing and influencing their activities. Therefore, what worker organizations which are independent of the NWUBITU (National Worker’s Union and the Bustamante Industrial Trade Union) set-up should have is the deep and thorough going understanding that menegment is the everyday functioning part of the oppressor class. And that all institutions of today-the churches, the educational set-up, the press, parliament, police, courthouse, etc., which seem to appear as independent institutions of the society – are in fact a part of the whole set up of society that strengthens and backs up the position of menegment. Therefore, the organization of workers is not only a struggle against the men we see in the manager’s office or the owners of a particular business place, but it is part of the overall struggle against capitalist society. And this is the position we all face as workers. STRATEGY OF INDEPENDEDENT WORKER ORGANIZATIONS We should definitely take all this intro consideration in determining how Unions should function – what are their objectives and what is the strategy of their actions. What should influence all unions is an overall strategy for the overthrow of capitalism, which will take away the responsibility for the management of production out of the hands of the capitalists and place it in the hands of the working-class and thereby organize the entire society for the benefit of the working-class people. A particular union representation at a particular place of work may not consciously express this objective in a distinct way in their everyday activities. What I speak of is the movement – the trade-union movement must be particularly directed towards that end – and the activities of any particular union representation or the tactics of groups of workers at their particular place of work must be directed towards achieving this overall objective. With that understanding there is nothing really as an overall strategy concerning any one particular union representation. What must be understood is a strategy connecting the entire trade-union movement to bring out the success of the main objective of the working-class. But workers representation, whether it be an agricultural workers union or the Public Cleansing Workers Union or any union here in Kingston or in the countryside, should only represent different methods that different groups of workers are using to bring about, gradually but surely, the stage where they will finally come intro confrontation with capitalist power and will bring the workers into the position of power in the country. ...

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— Marianne Enckell - Ronald Creagh, an appreciation

 

at 10/29/24 4:19pm

Author: Marianne EnckellTitle: Ronald Creagh, an appreciationDate: 2024Notes: Scanned from original.Source: Anarchist Studies 32.1 (2024) An ‘inimitable singularity’: this is how Ronald Creagh described the American utopian communities he studied for his doctoral thesis. [1] But Ronald himself was also an inimitable singularity. A cosmopolitan by family and culture, with British, Italian, Egyptian roots, he had studied in France and written his MA on the free thought periodicals in nineteenth century North America – after having been a priest for many years. He then turned towards the early anarchist movement; this led him to visit the CIRA library (Centre international de recherches sur l’anarchisme) in Lausanne, in the early ’70s. My mother, who was in charge at that time, suggested that a familiarity with contemporary anarchists could perhaps help him better understand the history; Ronald reckoned he had not thought about it, but he agreed. He was enthused by his meetings with Paul Avrich and Sam Dolgoff, among many others, and soon became an active exponent and a prolific author of anarchist history, stories and ideas. His first published book, Laboratoires de l’utopie (1983), was an in-depth study of the North American communities’ movement. He described his project in an interview in 2016. [2] Practical utopia is experienced by people who strive to live in the present, without waiting for the revolution with a capital ‘R’, shaping the world as they would ideally want it. These are the communities I wanted to examine in the American states. Two criticisms have been directed at these communities in an attempt to demolish them. The first is that they have changed nothing in the world. I think that’s a criticism that once again falls within our usual productivist mentality, ‘it’s got to be profitable’. These people aren’t profitable, so they’re not interesting. Secondly, these communities are often ephemeral. This is actually their quality. Life is ephemeral, and yet we value it. Quality moments may be ephemeral, but they remain essential to our lives. Utopia must remain ephemeral; as soon as it takes root or lasts forever, it turns into a myth and becomes reactionary. Observing the recent solidarity and anti-globalisation movements, he noted that they ‘may be referred to as “accepted anarchism”: it is a practice without any formal affiliation to some organized movement or anarchistic ideology [...] the revival of anarchism is also the resurgence of utopia [because] utopia is not simply a landscape of thought, it is embedded in movements’. 3 Is the world wide web a practical utopia? Ronald very soon became fascinated by the possibilities of the internet. The internet user is a tightrope walker. He travels the Web via hypertext links, suspended bars in nothingness, which he traverses in a series of somersaults. Sometimes a partner catches him upon arrival, sometimes there is no partner. It’s not a serene reading, but a circus performance. Sometimes, the cyberworld is inaccessible. The computer refuses, spits out cryptic explanations or stubbornly remains silent. Sometimes you fall into a hole, sometimes you drive along a freeway dotted with flashing advertisements, and an avalanche of information crushes you. Sometimes the screen freezes and the mouse arrow sticks like a flattened fly on a window. [4] This sounds like a faithful portrait of the incredible website he created, RA Forum, now hosted by CIRA-Marseille. [5] As unpredictable as its author, the website encompasses around 10,000 articles and bibliographical information in eleven languages in its three main sections, Research on anarchism, Elisée Reclus, Dissertations. Try to follow a path, and you’ll find yourself in a forest of images, signs, sources, and possibilities, but there is no safe way back. This is the potential of the social imaginary, a concept Ronald Creagh shared with Cornelius Castoriadis. Ronald Creagh died in Montpellier, September 8th, 2023, at the age of 94. He was emeritus professor at Montpellier University, where he had taught American civilisation for many years and directed several doctoral theses. His main works deal with American history (Laboratoires de l’utopie, 1983; enlarged edition, Utopies américaines, 2009; Nos cousins d’Amérique, 1988; L’affaire Sacco et Vanzetti, 2004; Les États-Unis d’Élisée Reclus, 2019), with utopias, Reclus, Murray Bookchin, politics and international relations, and various other themes. [6] He wrote scores of articles, both for academic and anarchist journals, gave speeches in various circles, took part in a large number of conferences around the world. Unfortunately, only a few papers by him have been published in English; reviewing his Utopies américaines in Anarchist Studies 19, 2 (2011), John Clark wrote that it ‘certainly needs to be translated into English as soon as possible’. Was it a utopian proposal? Marianne Enckell has been a librarian and archivist at CIRA for sixty years, and a member of editorial committees of several anarchist journals, such as Réfractions (1977-2023), together with Ronald Creagh. [1] John Clark, ‘The Modern Social Imaginary’, in Rêves et passions d’un chercheur militant, mélanges offerts à Ronald Creagh, (Lyon, 2016). ...

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— John Clark - Ronald Creagh (1929-2023)

 

at 10/29/24 4:10pm

Author: John ClarkTitle: Ronald Creagh (1929-2023)Date: 2024Notes: Scanned from originalSource: Anarchist Studies 32.1 (2024) Ronald Creagh took great satisfaction from the fact that he was born in Alexandria, Egypt, a historic city that was the centre of ancient learning. He grew up in a multicultural milieu in Port Said, Egypt. He was the offspring of a British-Sicilian father and a Franco-Lebanese mother and was taught Sicilian by his paternal grandmother. He said that Sicilian was his first language. In 1947, his family migrated to Australia, while Ronald moved to France to become a Roman Catholic priest. He took a degree in sociology at the Sorbonne, a masters’ degree at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, and then taught at the Institute of Human Sciences and Techniques and at the School of Management. During a research trip to the United States, Ronald encountered radical student movements and his ideas and values began to change. He was more deeply transformed and radicalised by the events of May, 1968 in Paris. He left the Church and became an anarchist. He soon began his studies at the University of Paris, where he wrote a 1164-page doctoral dissertation on the history of anarchism in the United States. Ronald then settled in Montpellier, where he became a professor of American Studies at l’Université Paul Valéry (Montpellier 3), specialising in the history of anarchism and utopian communities. He continued throughout his life to be very active in the anarchist movement. He was a core member of an extraordinary circle of primarily southern European anarchist activist-intellectuals. He was an editorial collective member of the anarchist journals Divergences and Réfractions, and he collaborated with the CIRA (International Centre for Research on Anarchism) in Lausanne and Marseille, the ACL (Atelier de Création Libertaire) in Lyon, and the Centro Studi Libertari/Archivio Giuseppe Pinelli in Milano. One of Ronald’s greatest achievements was his creation of the remarkable RA (Research on Anarchism) Forum, an online archive with many thousands of links to articles, books and documents in English, French, Spanish, German and Italian, in addition to various other languages. He taught himself the skills necessary to maintain and organise this huge database (which, sadly, became inactive when he could no longer oversee it). He also created and was the primary moderator of the Research on Anarchism (RA) discussion list for many years. Ronald wrote extensively on the history of anarchism and utopianism, and authored a number of original works. His books include L’Anarchisme aux États-Unis, 1826–1886, L’Affaire Sacco et Vanzetti, Quand le Coq rouge chantera, Laboratoires de l’Utopie, Nos cousins d’Amérique, La Déférence, l’insolence anarchiste et la démocratie, Terrorisme: entre spectacle et sacré, L’Imagination dérobée, Utopies américaines, Elisée Reclus et Les Etats-Unis, Les Zanars, and Les Etats-Unis d’Elisée Reclus, in addition to several edited works. In 2016, a festschrift in his honour, entitled Rêves et passion d’un chercheur militant: Mélanges offerts â Ronald Creagh, was published by the ACL. In 2019, a documentary film on his life, ‘Ronald Creagh, une essence de l’utopie’, appeared. An excerpt can be found online at https://vimeo.com/629195770). Ronald was in the midst of a very creative period when he passed away. He had completed work on his autobiography, had recently finished an important 11,000-word essay on Joseph Déjacque (the English version of which I’m editing for publication), and had done extensive work on a new book that was in progress. On a more personal level, here is a text I wrote for presentation at Ronald’s funeral: My words cannot begin to convey what Ronald has meant to me, and to my family. He was extremely generous to the family when we came to Montpellier for the 1979-1980 academic year. Since then, over the past forty-four years, I have had no better or more caring friend than Ronald. He has also been my closest collaborator in many areas of my work, especially concerning Elisée Reclus, whom we both admired so much, and, more recently, Joseph Déjacque, who inspired both of us. But beyond this, Ronald was above all a kind, generous, loving person. He had difficult times in his life, but accepted everything with equanimity, and, indeed, with gratitude. He was a happy person who desired, above all, to make others happy. Ronald and I talked on Skype for over an hour on July 14, and for almost a half hour on July 31. A few days ago, I thought about calling him again, and planned to do so soon, but, sadly, did not do so in time. In our recent conversations, Ronald talked at length about the book he was working on, and about having finished his autobiography, which he hoped to see translated into English. He was always extremely lucid and full of new ideas, despite the fact that he was enduring ongoing medical problems. He faced these afflictions with a very good spirit, and always retained his lively, creative mind. I also recorded two long conversations with Ronald in the last several years in which he discussed many topics that were very important to him. In one of these conversations, he told me about three lessons in life that he had learned, and which he liked to pass on to others. I think these precepts, in his own words, say as much about him as anything I possibly can. ...

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— Fifth Estate Collective - Remembering Ronald Creagh

 

at 10/29/24 4:02pm

Author: Fifth Estate CollectiveTitle: Remembering Ronald CreaghDate: 2023, FallNotes: Accessed October 21, 2024 at https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/414-fall-2023/remembering-ronald-creagh/Source: Fifth Estate #414, Fall 2023 Longtime French anarchist scholar and activist Ronald Creagh died on September 8 at age 94. He was in touch with anarchists and anti-authoritarians on several continents. Those who knew him personally appreciated his broad-minded openness and supportive spirit. Some Fifth Estate staffers were among those who found him engaging and attentive in conversations on many subjects. In recent years he was a regular reader of our online current and past articles and enjoyed discussing them. Ronald was born in Egypt in 1929, the son of a Lebanese mother and an English father. At the age of 18, in 1947, he moved to France with his mother. After university, he held various teaching positions, and developed a specialty in research and writing about utopian communities in North America. In the 1970s he participated in several programs in U.S. universities and became friends with anarchist historian Paul Avrich and anarcho-syndicalists Esther and Sam Dolgoff. He came to identify with anti-authoritarian ideas and, especially after retiring, became actively involved with the Centre Internationale de Recherches sur l’Anarchisme (CIRA) anarchist archive in Lausanne, Switzerland and CIRA Marseille in France. Ronald wrote more than thirty books of interest to anarchists, nearly all in French. He also wrote for and edited several libertarian journals, including Réfractions, Divergences (an online international journal), and the English language journal Anarchist Studies. In 1995 he launched the multi-lingual anarchist archive website RA Forum, which he administered for more than twenty years. Comrades at CIRA Marseilles have taken on its admin chores, so its content is still available (archives.cira-marseille.info/raforum/ ). Ronald was also very interested in radical music and art, and connected with surrealists in France and elsewhere. An article by him about surrealism in Egypt (“Libertarian Tempests”) can be found, in English, on theanarchistlibrary.org.

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— El Libertario editorial collective - Neither Chavez nor Carmona: Self-management is the way

 

at 10/29/24 3:14pm

Author: El Libertario editorial collectiveTitle: Neither Chavez nor Carmona: Self-management is the wayDate: April 21, 2002Source: Retrieved on October 24, 2024 from https://www.nodo50.org/ellibertario/descargas/folleto-abril-02.txt Given the political crisis that Venezuela is going through and that was manifested in the events before, during and after April 11, we anarchists consider it necessary to state our position. In this regard, therefore: 1) Hugo Chavez's contradictory policies have not benefited the most disadvantaged sectors of the country, increasing in three years of management the rates of poverty, unemployment and social insecurity. In addition, his government repeats errors and vices characteristic of previous ones. But in no way do the sectors of the current opposition that tried to capitalize politically in their favor on the events of April 11 represent a different and satisfactory alternative. 2) We strongly condemn any coup d'état, regardless of the sector it may be from. We object to the predominant position that the armed forces currently have in solving problems that should be resolved by the active and direct participation of the whole of society. 3) We declare ourselves against the authoritarianism of the left and right as evidenced in the way of thinking and the actions carried out by both the representatives of the government and the opposition. These are based on the Manichean simplification of the country's problems, the political and social exclusion of their speeches, the agreements made behind closed doors, the manipulation of the information media at their disposal and the use of antidemocratic methods at their convenience. 4) We reject the human rights violations that occurred during the coup government led by businessman Pedro Carmona Estanga. The repression of popular protests, the raids on community media, the arbitrary arrests and the witch hunts undertaken, certify the dictatorial nature of the regime that wanted to establish itself in the country. Likewise, we do not forget the accomplices and opportunists who recognized and welcomed the establishment of a de facto government. 5) We demand that those responsible for the deaths that occurred in the events of April 11 in the city center be clarified, as well as for the victims of the following days in the south and west of Caracas. We support an impartial and non-governmental investigation, so that by clarifying the facts the murderers can be identified and held accountable for their actions before the community. 6) The citizen mobilizations that occurred during those days reiterate that the active, conscious and responsible participation of the people influences the decisions of those who hold power and is the seed of a direct and self-managed democracy. In this sense, we anarchists reiterate our commitment to horizontal, autonomous and cooperative processes that aim at the self-organization of society to resolve its own problems and that antagonize the inequality promoted by current globalized capitalism.

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— Alan Barnard - Primitive communism and mutual aid

 

at 10/29/24 3:11pm

Author: Alan BarnardTitle: Primitive communism and mutual aidSubtitle: Kropotkin visits the BushmenDate: December 17, 1992Source: Socialism (ASA Monographs); Ideals, Ideologies and Local Practice. Chris M. Hann (editor). <routledge.com/Socialism-Ideals-Ideologies-and-Local-Practice/Hann/p/book/9780415083225> But still we know that when the Europeans came, the Bushmen lived in small tribes (or clans), sometimes federated together; that they used to hunt in common, and divided the spoil without quarrelling; that they never abandoned their wounded, and displayed strong affection to their comrades. Peter Kropotkin (1987a [1902]:83) Concepts such as ‘anarchist’, ‘communist’, ‘socialist’, and even ‘Bushman’, are artificially constructed. This does not mean that they have no meaning. On the contrary, it means that their meanings are contingent on the anthropological and sometimes the political perspectives of the commentators. Each ethnographer’s understanding of the ‘Bushmen’ is mediated through a desire to represent them within a larger theory of society. For the last seventy years or so, ‘primitive communism’ has erroneously been equated with either ‘revolutionary communism’ or ‘Marxism’. My intention in this chapter is to provide an alternative, very much non-Marxist view of primitive communism—namely that of Peter Kropotkin, anarchist Russian prince, geographer, and an early mentor of A.R. Radcliffe-Brown. Whereas Marx and Engels perceived history as a sequence of stages, Kropotkin saw it in terms of a continuity of fundamental human goodness. His own contribution on ‘Anarchism’ in the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1910; reprinted in Kropotkin 1987c: 7—22) is a classic summary of the historical setting for his social theory. After hearing a lecture entitled ‘On the law of mutual aid’ by the Russian zoologist Karl Fredorovich Kessler in 1880, and reading The Descent of Man (Darwin 1871) in 1883, Kropotkin resolved to put forward his own version of Darwinism (Kropotkin 1987a:13—14; see also 1988a [1899]:298—301). The result was Mutual Aid (Kropotkin 1987a [1902]). This was conceived as an answer to the Social Darwinists, who saw in nature a mutual struggle which validated the aims of capitalism. Among other noteworthy writings are Kropotkin’s influential comments on ‘Anarchist Communism’ (1987b [1887]) and The state’ (1987d [1897]). The former was originally published in The Nineteenth Century as two separate articles—‘The scientific bases of anarchy’ and ‘The coming anarchy’. The titles are revealing, for they reflect Kropotkin’s twin concerns: the theoretical understanding of society, and the practical solution to its problems. The practical solution was much the simpler aspect, as abolition of the state was seen as the easy answer. The state, in its turn, was a problematic concept. For many, including some anarchists in Kropotkin’s day, the state and society were synonymous. Yet Kropotkin (for example, 1987d [1897]:9—16) argued strongly against this assumption. For Kropotkin, society predates the state, and his notion includes both animal societies and human, ‘primitive communist’ societies. Authority and Sharing Among the Bushmen Two specific concerns in Bushman ethnography have been the degree of authority in the hands of leaders, and the extent of sharing as a mechanism for redistributing wealth and preventing the development of a social hierarchy. Among the earliest true ethnographers of Bushmen was Dorothea Bleek. In 1920 and 1921 she conducted field research with the Nharo (whom she called Naron) and the Southern !Kung or •Au//eisi (Auen), who lived along the Bechuanaland-South West Africa border. Her comments are interesting because she implies a change, in the time not long before her fieldwork, from hierarchical to egalitarian organization among those she classified as Northern and Central Bushmen. Both Naron [Central Bushmen] and Auen [Northern Bushmen] had chiefs when the old men were young. The middle-aged men just remember them.... Among Southern Bushmen there were no chiefs and they had no name for chieftainship.. There are no class distinctions among Naron and Auen, nor, excepting the medicine men, are there any trades. (Bleek 1928:36, 37) Contrast this statement with the comments of a more recent ethnographer George Silberbauer on the G/wi, a Central group who live east of the Nharo in what became (at Silberbauer’s own instigation) the Central Kalahari Game Reserve of Botswana: There are no chiefs or headmen and every adult member of the band has rights equal to those of all the other members who reside in the band’s territory.... In the regulation of the band’s affairs, none has any more authority than any other by reason of superior status and, except for the obligations within his or her kinship group toward senior kin., no man or woman yields to the superior authority of any other member. (Silberbauer 1965:73) Silberbauer, like most of his contemporaries, has emphasized the lack of hierarchy. Elsewhere (1982:31, 34), he proposes consensus as the basis of Bushman political power. Power, he suggests, lies not in the ability of individuals to force a consensus, but in their perceiving the mood of the band and compromising and creating opportunities to have their goals realized when the time is appropriate. ...

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— Nohara Shirõ - Anarchists and the May 4 Movement in China

 

at 10/29/24 3:08pm

Author: Nohara ShirõTitle: Anarchists and the May 4 Movement in ChinaDate: January 1975Notes: Translated by Philip Billingsley.Source: Momoyama Gakuin University Library, Japan: <stars.repo.nii.ac.jp/record/7177/files/KJ00004276158.pdf> & <libcom.org/library/anarchists-may-4-movement-china> Translator’s Note Until the post-Cultural Revolution thaw that began in 1979, Chinese readers found it next to impossible to gain access to information about the strong anarchist influence within their country’s revolutionary movement. From the point of view of the ruling Communist Party, in whose favour historical materials were invariably rewritten, this was a necessity borne out by the fact that, when people took to the streets in 1989 to demand a degree of control over their own lives, among the slogans that they raised were the traditional ones of anarchism. One of the few sources of information on anarchism available in Chinese before the 1960s was the collection titled An Introduction to the Periodicals of the May 4 Period (Wusi shiqi qikan jieshao), which first appeared in 1958 and was reissued in 1979. To those with the energy to wade through the six hefty volumes, the collection proved to be a treasuretrove. It not only listed all the major periodicals of the May 4 period and after, but also reprinted their Contents Pages, Editorial Statements, etc, while providing an analysis of the significance of each periodical. The latter, while written from the standpoint of the Communist Party, was nevertheless remarkably objective, even with regard to the anarchist periodicals. Toward the latter the policy was one of stating the facts then suggesting shortcomings, making it possible to sift out considerable information not only about anarchist activities but also about the considerable overlap between groups of different political persuasions during those years. It was this collection, in fact, that provided the catalyst for Nohara Shiro’s original essay. Nohara Shiro, until his death in 1981, was a Marxist historian specializing in Chinese history and politics who had also become strongly involved in the movement to eradicate pre-war feudal and fascist influences from Japanese education and learning. The essay translated here originally appeared in his 1960 collection, History and Ideology in Asia (Ajia no rekishi to shisb). Despite his personal preference for Marxism over anarchism, Nohara’s approach to the subject is quite open-minded. The strengths of his essay are its focus upon practical organizing attempts rather than intellectual activities, and its revelation of the considerable anarchist influence upon Li Dazhao, whom the Communist Party has long claimed as its own. Whilst most of the early intellectual exponents of the anarchist idea either drifted away into obscurity, were converted to Marxism, or joined the bandwagon of the nationalist movement (some even becoming outright fascists), the organizing activities described here often became the building blocks for the subsequent communist movement. Nohara’s work is thus invaluable not only for shedding light on the role of anarchism as an intellectual stimulus for the Chinese revolutionary movement as a whole, but also for making clear the political debt owed the anarchists in terms of practical activities. In the Commentary I have attempted to marshall additional material on themes raised by Nohara, without losing a sense of proportion. The Chinese anarchist movement, like its counterparts elsewhere, has often been overlooked because of a lack of materials, and the Commentary is an attempt to assemble previously scattered information and make it accessible to readers. The translation is a completely revised version of one that first appeared in issues 1–4 of the small magazine Libero International, published in Kobe and Osaka from 1975 to 1977. The Commentary and Introduction have also been considerably expanded and amended. In accordance with standard East Asian practice, personal names of Chinese, Japanese and Korean individuals have been transcribed with the family name preceding the given name. Chinese characters for most of the individuals and periodicals mentioned may be found in Chow, 1963. A Note on the Pronunciation of Chinese Names and Terms Most letters are pronounced roughly as written, with the exception of the following: c = ts as in ‘its’ q = ch as in ‘chin’ x = hs as in ‘shin’ si = sir zi = zer as in ‘Tizer’ Part One Introduction The students’ movement for democratization that erupted in China in April 1989 only to be bloodily crushed by the authorities some two months later was the latest in a series whose origins can be traced back to the beginnings of modern China’s revolutionary process. Sparked off by the death of Hu Yaobang, the former Secretary-General of the Chinese Communist Party who had been deposed in disgrace by conservatives two years before, the movement had derived further inspiration from the visit to Beijing of the Soviet leader Gorbachev, then at the height of his popularity thanks to his perestroika’ reform initiative. And yet it was not by chance that the movement also coincided with the 70th anniversary of the famous student movement of May 1919. Ironically, while the latter has been appropriated as a primary revolutionary icon by the ruling Communist Party, it was against the dictatorial style of that very party that the 1989 students were protesting. Sadly, despite the students’ insistence upon a nonviolent movement and the fact that they sought merely to urge the Party to live up to the revolutionary ideals it still claimed to espouse, the government’s reaction was as ruthless as had been that of its counterpart, the warlord regime of seventy years before. ...

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— Raphael Sassaki - Moore on Jerusalem, Eternalism, Anarchy and Herbie!

 

at 10/28/24 9:48am

Author: Raphael SassakiTitle: Moore on Jerusalem, Eternalism, Anarchy and Herbie!Date: January 2017Notes: Originally published in Folha de São Paulo.Source: Retrieved on 28th October 2024 from alanmooreworld.blogspot.com Raphael Sassaki: How did you come up with the idea of Jerusalem, which tells a story that spreads through 1000 years in Northampton? How was the writing of it? Alan Moore: Rather than originating from a single idea, Jerusalem is more the convergence of several different impulses and concepts. Foremost amongst these were the growing need to talk about the tiny but historically peculiar district I was raised in, and the simultaneous urge to talk about my family in a way that included both its history and its mythology. This, I soon realised, would require the proposed book to possess an unusually wide register that could encompass often-brutal social realism on the one hand and fantastical experimentalism on the other. In addition to such technical considerations, it occurred to me that the work’s actual scope and substance needed to be radically extended if I was to talk about my family or their environment in a way that was meaningful: I could not talk about that neighbourhood and its inhabitants without discussing poverty, which would demand a similar investigation into wealth, and social history, and economics. I could not mention that materially disadvantaged population without also speaking of their spiritual imaginings and yearnings, which, as it turned out, necessitated an account of the town’s religious development that reached from a pilgrim monk in the 9th century, through John Wycliffe’s radical translation of the bible into English and the subsequent upheaval in both visionary writings and incendiary politics, to the English Civil War and the reforms of Phillip Doddridge that came after. Having raised the issue of a visionary literary tradition I next felt obliged to follow that thread from John Wycliffe to John Bunyan (and his fellow hymn-composers Phillip Doddridge and John Newton) through to William Blake, John Clare and, via the medium of Clare’s non-contemporary asylum-mate Lucia Joyce, her father James Joyce and her unrequited love, the author Samuel Beckett. Blake, a powerful offstage presence throughout the whole novel from its title onwards, prompted an appraisal of Blake’s major influence, Northampton pastor and originator of the Gothic movement in the arts, James Hervey. John Clare and Lucia Joyce, along with Blake himself and members of my family, seemed to imply that madness was a topic that would need addressing. And of course no picture of a neighbourhood could be complete unless the immigrant experience, specifically the black experience, is dealt with, which in turn demands paying attention to the slave trade and its many consequences. The above is by no means a full, inclusive list of everything that went into the making of Jerusalem, but I trust it will at least provide an explanation – what with each new subject raising whole sets of subsidiary subjects to be dealt with – as to why the book needed to be so long. Jerusalem deals with the idea of eternalism: everything that has happened is happening right now and forever. Could you explain your views on this? My conception of an eternity that was immediate and present in every instant – a view which I have since learned is known as ‘Eternalism’ – was once more derived from many sources, but a working definition of the idea should most probably begin with Albert Einstein. Einstein stated that we exist in a universe that has at least four spatial dimensions, three of which are the height, depth and breadth of things as we ordinarily perceive them, and the fourth of which, while also a spatial dimension, is perceived by a human observer as the passage of time. The fact that this fourth dimension cannot be meaningfully disentangled from the other three is what leads Einstein to refer to our continuum as ‘spacetime’. This leads logically to the notion of what is called a ‘block universe’, an immense hyper-dimensional solid in which every moment that has ever existed or will ever exist, from the beginning to the end of our universe, is coterminous; a vast snow-globe of being in which nothing moves and nothing changes, forever. Sentient life such as ourselves, embedded in the amber of spacetime, would have to be construed by such a worldview as massively convoluted filaments of perhaps seventy or eighty years in length, winding through this glassy and motionless enormity with a few molecules of slippery and wet genetic material at one end and a handful or so of cremated ashes at the other. It is only the bright bead of our consciousness moving inexorably along the thread of our existence, helplessly from past to future, that provides the mirage of movement and change and transience. A good analogy would be the strip of film comprising an old fashioned movie-reel: the strip of film itself is an unchanging and motionless medium, with its opening scenes and its finale present in the same physical object. Only when the beam of a projector – or in this analogy the light of human consciousness – is passed across the strip of film do we see Charlie Chaplin do his funny walk, and save the girl, and foil the villain. Only then do we perceive events, and continuity, and narrative, and character, and meaning, and morality. And when the film is concluded, of course, it can be watched again. Similarly, I suspect that when our individual four-dimensional threads of existence eventually reach their far end with our physical demise, there is nowhere for our travelling bead of consciousness to go save back to the beginning, with the same thoughts, words and deeds recurring and reiterated endlessly, always seeming like the first time this has happened except, possibly, for those brief, haunting spells of déjà vu. Of course, another good analogy, perhaps more pertinent to Jerusalem itself, would be that of a novel. While it’s being read there is the sense of passing time and characters at many stages of their lives, yet when the book is closed it is a solid block in which events that may be centuries apart in terms of narrative are pressed together with just millimetres separating them, distances no greater than the thickness of a page. As to why I decided to unpack this scientific vision of eternity in a deprived slum neighbourhood, it occurred to me that through this reading of human existence, every place, no matter how mean, is transformed to the eternal, heavenly city. Hence the title. ...

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— Alan Moore - Fandom has toxified the world

 

at 10/28/24 9:43am

Author: Alan MooreTitle: Fandom has toxified the worldSubtitle: On superheroes, Comicsgate and TrumpDate: 26 October 2024Source: Retrieved on 28th October 2024 from www.theguardian.com About a decade ago, I ventured my opinion that the adult multitudes queueing for superhero movies were potentially an indicator of emotional arrest, which could have worrying political and social implications. Since at that time Brexit, Donald Trump and fascist populism hadn’t happened yet, my evidently crazy diatribe was largely met with outrage from the fan community, some of whom angrily demanded I be extradited to the US and made to stand trial for my crimes against superhumanity – which I felt didn’t necessarily disprove my allegations. Ten years on, let me make my position clear: I believe that fandom is a wonderful and vital organ of contemporary culture, without which that culture ultimately stagnates, atrophies and dies. At the same time, I’m sure that fandom is sometimes a grotesque blight that poisons the society surrounding it with its mean-spirited obsessions and ridiculous, unearned sense of entitlement. Perhaps this statement still requires some breaking down. Concerning the word “fan”, I first encountered this contraction of “fanatic” during childhood, in a television documentary on the phenomenon. All I remember is the weary spouse of a woman devoted to the late Jim Reeves, sitting in a family home that had become a mausoleum of memorabilia, and mournfully accepting that his wife had only married him because his name happened to be James Reeves. Soon after that, the word passed into common usage, although only in the milder sense of somebody quite liking something, and without the connotations of a person listening to Distant Drums on endless replay with the curtains drawn, or a cultist running wild-eyed from the treeline waving a machete. “Fan”, then, meant merely “enthusiast”, but sounded less Edwardian. Quite liking comics, aged 14 I thus became a comics fan with my discovery of British fandom, which was then still gummy-eyed and fresh out of the egg. The first convention I attended in London, in the basement rooms of a Southampton Row hotel in 1969, was tiny and inspiring. The attenders barely totalled a three-digit number, almost all of them some few years short of legal drinking age. The comics companies, having no monetary interest in a handful of penniless teenagers, went blissfully unrepresented, and the only industry celebrity that I recall was the sublime and sweetly unassuming genius Frank Bellamy, passing Dan Dare or Garth originals around, appearing wonderstruck that anyone had heard of him. The only thing uniting the assembly was its passion for an undervalued storytelling medium and, for the record, the consensus verdict of the gathered 15-year-old cognoscenti was that costumed musclemen were the main obstacle preventing adult audiences from taking comics seriously. Of that hardly-a-hundred schoolkids, office boys and junior librarians, the great majority were actively involved in their pursuit, publishing or contributing to a variety of – for the most part – poorly duplicated fanzines, or else going on to work professionally in the field, such as Kevin O’Neill, Steve Moore, Steve Parkhouse or Jim Baikie, all of whom were downstairs at the Waverley hotel that weekend, keen to elevate the medium that they loved, rather than passively complain about whichever title or creator had particularly let them down that month. Of course, this was the 1960s and the same amateur energy seemed to be everywhere, spawning an underground press, Arts Lab publications and a messy, marvellous array of poetry or music fanzines that were the material fabric of that era’s counterculture; flimsy pamphlets as important and innovative today as they were then, although considerably more expensive, trust me. Soon thereafter, caught up in the rush of adolescent life, I drifted out of touch with comic books and their attendant fandom, only returning eight years later when I was commencing work as a professional in that fondly remembered field, to find it greatly altered. Bigger, more commercial, and although there were still interesting fanzines and some fine, committed people, I detected the beginnings of a tendency to fetishise a work’s creator rather than simply appreciate the work itself, as if artists and writers were themselves part of the costumed entertainment. Never having sought a pop celebrity relationship with readers, I withdrew by stages from the social side of comics, acquiring my standing as a furious, unfathomable hermit in the process. And when I looked back, after an internet and some few decades, fandom was a very different animal. An older animal for one thing, with a median age in its late 40s, fed, presumably, by a nostalgia that its energetic predecessor was too young to suffer from. And while the vulgar comic story was originally proffered solely to the working classes, soaring retail prices had precluded any audience save the more affluent; had gentrified a previously bustling and lively cultural slum neighbourhood. This boost in fandom’s age and status possibly explains its current sense of privilege, its tendency to carp and cavil rather than contribute or create. I speak only of comics fandom here, but have gained the impression that this reflexive belligerence – most usually from middle-aged white male conservatives – is now a part of many fan communities. My 14-year-old grandson tells me older Pokémon aficionados can display the same febrile disgruntlement. Is this a case of those unwilling to outgrow childhood enthusiasms, possibly because these anchor them to happier and less complex times, who now feel they should be sole arbiters of their pursuit? ...

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— Rudolf Rocker - The Truth About Spain

 

at 10/27/24 10:57pm

Author: Rudolf RockerTitle: The Truth About SpainDate: 1936Source: This text was retrieved on 2024-10-16 from https://www.scribd.com/document/292981558/Rocker. Clarifications for text which was obscured in the original source were retrieved on 2024-10-27 from https://stars.library.ucf.edu/prism/ If there is any event that can bring about a rediscovery of inner strength on the part of organized labor and the libertarian elements of the world, it is the grand struggle against Fascism now being waged in Spain. After the unresisting defeat of the labor movement in Germany the effect of the heroic battle of the Spanish workers, peasants, and intellectuals against the Fascist bandits is that of a refreshing thunderstorm. It is the first time since Fascism made its appearance in Europe that the entire population of a country offered such a spirited resistance to the imminent danger. That is why the example of these struggles is international in its significance, far transcending in scope the frontiers of one country. The desperate struggle is the common cause of all movements that do not want to fall under the bloody yoke of Fascism. Yet one must single out the surpassing promptness of action shown by the C.N.T. and the F.A.I., which from the very beginning imparted a momentum to the struggle, enabling it to banish the bloody spectre of Fascism from the gates of Catalonia. It was the plan of the plotting militarists to seize all the important points by a strategy of surprise which would render inevitable the fall of Madrid. The most important link in this plot was the crushing of Catalonia, the fortress of the revolutionary labor movement of Spain, so as to cut off the capital from all the large cities. Catalonia is the center of Spanish industry and also the most highly developed province in respect to culture and spiritual life. The fall of Barcelona, the largest city of Spain, would have rendered impossible any prolonged resistance to the Fascists. That is why General Goded flew in haste to Barcelona in order to lead the revolt in person. But the vigilance of the C.N.T. and the unexampled bravery of its members frustrated those plans at the very beginning. In a few days the so-called "rebels" were utterly defeated. The victory of the workers in Barcelona led to the quick suppression of the Fascist revolt in Taragona, Lerida, and Mataré and the liberation of the whole Catalonian province from the Fascist hangmen. The workers' militia soon comprised 20,000 men, 13,000 of whom belonged to the C.N.T. and the F.A.I., 2,000 to the Socialist trade unions of the U.G.T., and 3,000 to the parties of the People's Front. Apart from that, Barcelona also equipped an army of 8,000 men, all members of the C.N.T., who, under the command of the Anarchist Durutti, set out for Saragossa in order to wrest the city from the hands of the Fascists. There are so many fables circulated by the foreign press about the aims of the C.N.T. and the F.A.I. that it is necessary to give our readers a clear picture of these two organizations. We, of course, cannot at the present time go into the long and glorious history of the struggles conducted by these powerful organizations, or of the persecutions to which they were subjected. It would fill volumes. For the present we will only dwell upon the ideological significance of this movement and point out how this ideology operated in the tactics of these organizations. The “Confederacion Nacional del Trabajo” (C.N.T.) was founded in 1910 and within a period of five or six years embraced a million organized workers in all parts of the country. The organization was new only in name, but not in its tendencies and methods. The history of the Spanish labor movement is shot through with long periods of reaction during which the movement could lead only an underground existence. After each such period the movement was organized anew. The name changed, but the aims remained the same. The first labor movement in Spain arose in Catalonia in the year 1840 when, in Barcelona, trade unions were organized by Juan Munts, a weaver. The Spanish goverment tried to suppress this movement, and sent General Zapatero, one of the darkest reactionaries in Spanish history, to Barcelona. In June, 1855, a great general strike broke out in Catalonia which developed into a full rebellion. The workers wrote upon their flags on the barricades: “Asociacion o Muerte!” (The right to organize or death!) The rebellion was brutally suppressed, but the movement continued its underground existence, until finally it wrested from the government the right of free association. This first labor movement was strongly influenced by the ideas of Pi y Margall, the leader of the Spanish federalists and a disciple of Proudhon. Pi y Margall was one of the foremost savants of the country, a great and all embracing mind, whose works exercised the greatest influence upon the development of libertarian ideas in Spain. His political ideas had much in common with those of Richard Price, Priestly, Thomas Paine, Jefferson, and other representatives of English-American liberalism of the first period. He wanted to reduce the power of the State to a minimum and gradually supersede it by a socialist administration of economy. In 1868, after the abdication of King Amadeo 1., Bakunin wrote his “Manifesto to the Spanish Workers,” and a delegation of the Jura Federation visited Spain to invite the Spanish workers to join the “International Workmen’s Association.” Thousands of organized workers joined the new movement enthusiastically and adopted the anarcho-syndicalist ideas of Bakunin to which the large majority of the Spanish workers have remained loyal to the present day. ...

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— Anarkata - Move Like Mycorrhizae

 

at 10/22/24 12:55am

Author: AnarkataTitle: Move Like MycorrhizaeSubtitle: Some Suggestions for PraxisDate: 2022Source: 115.-anarkata-move-like-mycorrhizae.pdf What are mycorrhizae? mycorrhizae (pronounced “my-core-ih-zigh”) are mutual relationships between fungi and plant roots. They move nutrients between plants they are connected to. They can also sap nutrients from one part of a fungal network. They spread vastly within an ecosystem in ways that prevent researchers from being able to trace where the network begins or ends. They play both pathogenic and symbiotic roles. They develop in very steady, slow ways. Occasionally you see mushrooms sprouting up, aboveground, but mycorrhizae are primarily an underground entity. In this Kickback we see them as emblems for what Anarkata movement building feels like, since we work from the ground (or underground), and work from the roots (as Black Anarchic Radicals). Kritical Kickbacks Kritical Kickbacks are chill, accessible, nonhierarchical, chance to get in touch w anarkata principles through political education, mutual aid, or both. Since we push ourselves to an Anarkata frequency here, we want to center the most marginal among us, guard the lane against harm in the space, keep ourselves to that wavelength and not reproduce any transphobia, ableism, religious bias, fatphobia, or any oppression. This also means these spaces don’t demand vocalizing thoughts of everyone but also that the voices of the most marginal among us who want to communicate is prioritized. Black August – Black August is a time to commemorate Black freedom struggle, to fast, to study, to train, to fight. Almost five decades old now, Black August began in California prisons after the death of George Jackson in the 70s. Focused on revolutionary freedom fighters, the Black August tradition has grown to harness attention to a range of important moments in Black history—such as the Ferguson uprising which happened in August 2014, the birth of Marsha P Johnson on August 24th, and the birth of Oluwatoyin Salau today, to name a few. Black August has spread beyond the prison movement to other political trajectories like the wild thing/Anarkata Turn. We commit to study, solidarity, struggle, and spiritual care in the name of the most marginal. Introduction Anarkata has nine ideological touchstones that help us build revolutionary communities in a way that is 1) Pan African/African-centered, 2) anarchic, and broad based in terms of drawing on 3) Black militant traditions and multiple tendencies such as 4) Black feminism, 5) Queer/trans liberation, 6) Disability Justice, 7) Black Radical Ecology, 8) Afropessimism/Counterhumanism, 9) Prison Abolition. We work to undermine and destroy all hierarchy and class domination, by harnessing radical (anti-capitalist, anti-colonial) propositions around Black cultures of opposition. We fight for self-determination and Black autonomy, through centering the most marginal, and building from below. This requires a dialectic between communalistic organizing models and comprehensive organizing models, because this allows us to combat both internal threats and external threats to Black liberation. Internal threats are manipulative, abusive, selfish, ego-driven community members, especially cis men who have not done the work to deprioritize tendencies toward cishetero-masculinism and gender violence or even boujie folk (and boujie wanna bes) who put their aspirations for success under capitalism in the way of the activities and perspectives we need to actually get free. External threats are infiltrators, wreckers, snitches, feds/police, fascists who want to bring about our demise. We must guard the lane against all of these, and we do this most effectively by grounding ourselves in Black Anarcha/Trans Feminist (or “Anarcho-Pantherist”) understandings, methods, and principles such as intersectional (margin-centering) analysis, care work, trauma-informed approaches, boundary setting, capacity work, accountability culture, restorative/transformative insights, consent culture, political education, mutual aid, and community defense. From there we try to build a revolutionary movement in a way that encompasses multiple spheres of activity, to address different facets and phases of struggle. This is a complex task that historically folk have taken a rigid, centralized, “build the party” approach to meet. Anarkatas avoid this framework because it has been hierarchical or authoritarian in many ways. What is hierarchy? Anarkatas say all hierarchies leave Black people vulnerable to capitalist exploitation and colonial domination. In a hierarchy, someone or some group/class has authority and uneven access to resources, knowledge, skills to push their will or interests on another person or group. In a hierarchy those with authority reinforce the material interests of the ruling (capitalist/colonizer) class by keeping people subject to their own (or someone else’s) authority and access to resources, knowledge, skills. Hierarchies are generally upheld by those whose interests are not aligned with the best interests of the masses or margins, although sometimes the oppressed reproduce them. In a hierarchy, the person/people with authority exert their will/interests over others at the interpersonal and organizational level, in ways that ultimately reinforces or intersects with the coercion, manipulation, violence, neglect, repression and exclusion built into larger structures of dominance, oppression, exploitation. Hierarchy causes important information, leadership skills, resources, and power/access in the world of revolutionary activity to get centralized in and dictated by one place (or individual). This can limit the capacity for members of the community to freely or organically take initiative in matters of liberation struggle. This also puts movements at risk of infiltration, intel-gathering, and destruction by the enemies/feds/pigs/wreckers because now there are easily identifiable Great Men running things who can be targeted. Historically speaking, and even now, such individuals are often men, and such orgs are cis male dominated or masculinist in their character. And even when they are not, they run the risk of reproducing patriarchy or some other form of oppression (such as ableism) heaping all kinds of violence and exclusion that does direct harm to our beloved community members and vastly underdevelops the movement. ...

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— O Globo, Hostis - There is a Third Thing

 

at 10/19/24 3:33pm

Author: O Globo, HostisTitle: There is a Third ThingSubtitle: Brazilian capo speaks like a prophet; everything he said is both actual and unsettling.Date: 2017Notes: Taken from O Globo, Translated by Pepe RojoSource: Retrieved on 9/24/2024 from https://incivility.org/2017/07/22/there-is-a-third-thing/. Marcos Camacho, better known by his nickname Marcola, is the leader of a criminal organization in São Paulo, Brazil, called Primer Comando de la Capital (PCC, Capital’s First Commando). Marcola’s answers allow us to get a glimpse at what could be the future of common delinquency in Latin America. O Globo: Are you part of PRIMER COMANDO DE LA CAPITAL (PCC)? Marcola: Even more than that, I am a sign of these times. I was poor and invisible. You neves glanced at me during decades, while it seemed easy to solve the problem of misery. The diagnosis was obvious: rural migration, rent disparity, few slums, discreet peripheries; but the solution never appeared… What did you do? Nothing. Did the federal government ever made a budget reserve for us? We were just news when a slum in the mountain caved in, or romantic music along the “beauty of the dawn at the mountains” line… Now we are rich with the drugs multinationals. And you are agonizing with fear. We are the late beginning of your social conscience. O Globo: But the solution would be…. Marcola: Solution? There’s no solution, brother. The mere idea of a “solution” is already a mistake. Have you seen the size of the 560 villas miseria (slums) in Río? Have you overseen São Paulo’s periphery on an helicopter? Solution: How? It could only be through millions of dollars spent in an organized manner, with a high level government, an immense political will, economic growth, a revolution on education, general urbanization, and it would have to happen under the leadership of an ‘clear-minded tyranny’ that could jump over our secular bureaucratic paralysis, that could pass over the Legislative accomplice, and the penalty-avoiding Judicials. There would have to be a radical reform of the penitentiary system of the country, there would have to be intelligence communication between provincial, state and federal police forces (we even have ‘conference calls’ between jail inmates…) And that would cost billions of dollars and would entail a deep psychosocial change in the political structure of the country. What I mean is: it’s impossible. There is no solution. O Globo: Aren’t you afraid of dying? Marcola: You are the ones afraid of dying, not me. Better said: here in jail, you can’t come over and kill me, but I can easily have you killed outside. We are human bombs. In the slums, there are a hundred thousand human bombs. We are right in the middle of the unsolvable. You are between evil and good, and in the middle, there’s the frontier of death, the only frontier. We are already a new species, different bugs, different from you. For you, death is this Christian drama lying in a bed, with a heart attack. Death for us is daily bread, thrown over a mass grave. Weren’t you intellectuals talking about class struggle? About being a martyr? A hero? And then, we arrived! Ha, ha… I read a lot; I’ve read 3,000 books, and I read Dante, but my soldiers are strange anomalies of the twisted development of this country. No more proletariat, or unhappy people, or oppressed. There is a third thing growing out there, raised in the mud, educated through sheer illiteracy, getting their own diplomas on the street, like a monstrous Alien hidden under the crevasses of the city. A new language has already sprung. That’s it. A different language. You’re standing right before post-poverty. Post-poverty generates a new murderous culture, helped by technology, satellites, cellular phones, internet, modern weaponry. It’s all that shit with chips, megabytes. O Globo: What changed in the outskirts? Marcola: Mangoes. Now we have them. Do you think someone like Beria Mar, who has 40 million dollars, isn´t in charge? With 40 millions jail becomes a hotel, a desk… Which police force is going to burn down that gold mine? You get me, right? We are a wealthy corporation. If a functionary hesitates he is “placed on the microwave”. You are the broken state, dominated by the incompetent. We have nimble ways of dealing. You are low, bureaucratic. We fight on our own terrain. You do so in a strange land. We are not afraid of death. You are dying of fear. We are well armed. You only have .38´s. We are attacking. You are on defense. You have the mania of humanism. We are cruel, merciless. You transformed us on crime superstars. We regard you as clowns. We are helped by the population of the villas miseria, either out of fear or love. You are hated. Your are regional, provincial. Our weapons and products come from outside, we are “global”. We never forget you, you are our “clients”. You quickly forget us, as soon as the scares we provoke pass away. O Globo: But, what should we do? Marcola: I´ll give you a hint. Get the “dust barons” (coke lords)! There´s congressmen, senators, businessmen, there´s ex-presidents in the midst of the coke and the weapons. But, who is going to do that? The army? With what money? They don´t even have enough money for recruits. I am reading “On war” by Clausewitz. There’s no perspective for success. We are devouring ants, hidden in the corners. We even have anti-tank missiles. If you do something wrong, some Stingers will drop by. To end us… only an atomic bomb in the villas. Have you thought about Radioactive Ipanema? ...

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— Anonymous - Towards Another Uprising

 

at 10/19/24 7:39am

Author: AnonymousTitle: Towards Another UprisingDate: Early October, 2024Source: Retrieved on October 19, 2024 from https://anarchistnews.org/content/towards-another-uprising At the end of 2010 an individual act of despair in the town of Sidi Bouzid ignited a daring, enraged, and joyful upheaval that travelled through North Africa into the Middle East and beyond. People defied the oppressive systems they had been immersed in for generations and came together in the streets to topple the political elites at their helm. The authorities, at first stunned by this courageous spirit that they couldn’t understand, then unleashed a cynical and brutal response. This defeat is still being inflicted on the people in the region, and is also felt all over the world by those who stood in solidarity with the uprisings but were mostly unable to overcome their powerlessness as the uprisings were massacred. The horrors in the region during the last decade are many. To name some that stick most in my mind: Sisi has turned back the clock in Egypt to military dictatorship with the material support of the US. The regimes in the other North-African countries are paving over any sign of freedom while being coaxed by European countries to shut down the immigration routes over the Mediterranean. Without the murderous military campaigns of Hezbollah and the IRGC in Syria, Assad wouldn’t have survived the uprising. The Iranian regime itself brutally oppressed three different uprisings in the country in the last decade. Most people in Lebanon are in a daily struggle for survival because of the greed of its political leaders while mobs at the orders of Hezbollah beat down street protests. Early on in the uprisings, Hamas, who has shot political opponents in broad daylight on the streets of Gaza, culled attempts at an uprising by rounding up protest organizers and threatening them with murder. Leaders in the region understood once again that they can use any means against the populations under their control without real push-back from outside. Indifference, cynicism and opportunism trump moral appeals, and strategic alliances are always in play. The world churns on. For those of us who have not looked away, how can we not see a connection between Assad bombing Syrian cities into obliteration and Netanyahu razing Gaza? The authors of “Towards the Last Intifada” (Tinderbox #6) don’t acknowledge these experiences of the last decade. Instead, they propose to join the opposing side of an American geopolitical alliance (keeping true to American centralism in their own way). According to them, the Axis of Resistance shows the path forward for anarchists to struggle against empire. This article seems to confound resistance with ‘the Resistance’. That is to say, they collapse any form of resistance from people in Palestine, and more broadly in the region, into a particular representation, adopting an umbrella term used by states, militaries, para-state/para-military organizations to describe their own activities. The authors of the article warn anarchists against being too sensitive to hierarchy – as if that is the only aspect of ‘the Resistance’ anarchists might find difficult to accept. It is now a year after the bloody incursion of Hamas into Israel. Apart from discourse, the accomplishments of the Resistance so far are: Hezbollah has launched ineffectual rockets that have only inflicted significant damage on a Druze village, Iranian leaders are busying themselves with making appeals to the West to reign in Israel, militias in Iraq attacked a couple of US military bases in the country early on and then fell silent, while only the Houthis seem to have taken Nasrallah’s “Unity of Fronts” seriously. They succeeded in disrupting global shipping routes and have carried out some unexpected aerial attacks on Israel. In the meantime, Israel has wiped out the leadership of Hezbollah, drops bombs on Lebanon on a daily basis, has regularly bombed sites in Syria without retaliation, and commits executions in Tehran. The Axis of Resistance and the Unity of Fronts are mere slogans that obscure the strategic dealings among political, authoritarian organisations and states with their own (often differing) interests. It’s delusional to see it as something else. And Israel is calling the bluff of ‘the Resistance’ with an exponential military escalation. Israel’s massacres in Gaza, with the material support of the Western countries, are relentless. The apartheid regime in the West Bank and Israel has been built up for decades, leaving almost no oxygen to breathe for those living under its control. Faced with this bleak reality and an overwhelming powerlessness to put a stop to it, anarchists may be looking for an effective resistance (or rather, as it appears, an image of one). But if we want to fight against oppression, we can’t be content with any opposition. Choosing to join one authoritarian, militaristic system against another will not put an end to the horrors of this world – neither in this conflict nor in any other. It is neither inherently defeatist or a sign of privileged indifference to refuse to take sides between warring groups and states. That conclusion can only be reached if we would reduce reality to simplistic representations. Instead, by being open to complexity and specificity, anarchist action can be a liberating endeavor. It is here that we can find affinities, build relationships on a different basis, and muster the strength and courage – or perhaps, humility and passion – to attack. Anarchists find their effectiveness when they can undermine and destroy oppressive systems. We will not find it in a military prowess which, at the end of the day, produces more oppression and misery. And so those that have a spirit of their own and a memory of past rebellions will fight for another uprising. ...

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As of 11/23/24 12:07am. Last new 11/21/24 9:23pm.