NAASN Statement on the Protests Against Police Violence

NAASN Statement on the Protests Against Police Violence

The North American Anarchist Studies Network condemns the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade, David McAtee, Nicholas Gibbs, Chantel Moore, and the countless other Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) lives stolen by police violence and white supremacy. The long history of racist police brutality and murder has been facilitated by a culture of impunity that encourages such violence. We therefore stand in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement and other anti-racist groups in condemning police murders and the violent repression of protests, demanding and fighting for racial justice, and calling for long-overdue radical structural changes. These include defunding, divesting from, and abolishing police and prisons, and investing in community-led health, education, and safety alternatives. As anarchist scholars and activists, we also denounce the scapegoating of anarchists and anti-fascists to delegitimize this movement for justice, excuse further violence against protestors, and criminalize dissent.

These and many other instances of flagrant abuse of police power are stark examples of systemic injustice and racism. Police terrorize BIPOC communities, LGBTQ+ communities, people with disabilities, and poor and unhoused people on a daily basis. The coercive threat of police violence and imprisonment is omnipresent. Militarized police forces throughout the globe enforce violently racist, ecologically destructive and white supremacist systems of capitalism and settler-colonialism.

Because of the inherently violent and unjust nature of the system of policing, we stand with organizations like MPD150 who demand that police be held accountable, defunded, and ultimately abolished. True justice is not possible until the systems that beget injustice are dismantled. Astronomical budgets for oppressive, militarized prison systems and police forces should be diverted to communities in need. Instead of devoting public funds to policing and imprisoning unhoused people, for example, these funds should be used to make housing a human right. Police justify their existence by filling necessary social roles, from responding to emergencies to guiding traffic. While violent and racist police activities should cease to exist altogether, roles like emergency response should be filled by accountable, unarmed, community-based, and democratic organizations.

As a transnational network of researchers and writers operating both inside and outside the official system of higher education, we add our voices to the call for all educational institutions to both divest from local police and defund, disarm, and disband their own policing forces. We call on all academics, faculty members, and public intellectuals to use their positions to both critique oppressive institutions and organize to remove them from our communities.

As a community of scholars dedicated to the study of anarchism in North America, we recognize the danger when President Trump and others blame “anarchist thugs” and anti-fascist activists for instigating violence, thus cynically deflecting attention from the white supremacist and far right violence he has encouraged and enabled. Authoritarian leaders have long deployed the “bomb-throwing anarchist” stereotype to delegitimize protest and justify police violence against popular movements for social justice. Indeed, following World War One, the American government fomented an anti-anarchist “red scare”. This reactionary period saw mob violence, beatings, arrests, censorship, mass deportations of working-class activists, and executions, including the execution by electric chair of two immigrant radicals, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti.

Now, we see the same story begin to play out in the United States as a fearful president threatens to suspend civil and human rights to “dominate” the “rioting anarchists.” We call out such craven propaganda tactics for what they are: facile attempts to distract the American public from the real sources of violence, inequality, and racism. We note in response that anarchists have played useful and productive roles in almost every major horizontal (non-electoral) social movement in modern North American history. Rather than demonizing anarchists, we invite consideration of the wisdom and insight to be found in non-hierarchical organizing methods and radical political thought, including especially the long tradition of radical black political thought and practice, from Abolitionism to Anti-Racist Action to Black feminism and beyond.

To end, we repeat the words Sacco and Vanzetti wrote shortly before the State of Massachusetts killed them 93 years ago.  

“What I wish more than all in this last hour of agony is that our case and our fate may be understood in their real being and serve as a tremendous lesson to the forces of freedom, that our suffering and death will not have been in vain.”

• Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, 1927

Sacco and Vanzetti’s words ring true for all others killed by police and the prison system, who fill the history books of the USA and so many other countries. Through movements for freedom, we learn from each other’s struggles and stand together against interlocking systems of domination. We will ensure that these deaths were not in vain. 

In solidarity through the endless struggle,

The North American Anarchist Studies Network, 2020

CrimethInc. – Surviving the COVID-19 Corona Virus Crisis

Here is another anarchist perspective on the COVID-19 Corona virus crisis from CrimethInc.

Surviving the Crisis

Let’s be clear: totalitarianism is no longer a threat situated in the future. The measures being implemented around the world are totalitarian in every sense of the word. We are seeing unilateral government decrees imposing total travel bans, 24-hour-a-day curfews, veritable martial law, and other dictatorial measures.

This is not to say that we should not be implementing measures to protect each other from the spread of the virus. It is simply to acknowledge that the measures that various governments are implementing are based in authoritarian means and an authoritarian logic. Think about how much more resources are being poured into the military, the police, the banks, and the stock market than into public health care and resources to help people survive this crisis. It’s still easier to get arrested for loitering than to get a test for the virus.

Just as the virus shows us the truth about how we were already living—about our relationships and our homes—it also shows us that we were already living in an authoritarian society. The arrival of the pandemic just makes it formal. France is putting 100,000 police on the streets, 20,000 more than were deployed at the high point of the gilets jaunes protests. Refugees in need of asylum are being turned away along the borders between the US and Mexico and between Greece and Turkey. In Italy and Spain, gangs of police attack joggers in empty streets.

In Germany, the police in Hamburg have taken advantage of the situation to evict a self-organized refugee tent that had been standing for several years. Despite the quarantine, the police in Berlin are still threatening to evict an anarchist collective bar. Elsewhere, police dressed in full pandemic stormtrooper regalia raided a refugee center.

Worst of all, all this is occurring with the tacit consent of the general population. The authorities can do virtually anything in the name of protecting our health—right up to killing us.

As the situation intensifies, we will likely see the police and the military employing increasingly lethal force. In many parts of the world, they are the only ones who are able to gather freely in large numbers. When police comprise the only social body that is able to gather en masse, there is no word other than “police state” to describe the form of society we live in.

There have been signs that things were heading in this direction for decades. Capitalism used to depend on keeping a massive number of workers available to perform industrial labor—consequently, it was not possible to treat life as cheaply as it is treated today. As capitalist globalization and automation have diminished dependence on workers, the global workforce has shifted steadily into the service sector, doing work that is not essential to the functioning of the economy and therefore less secure and well-paid, while governments have become increasingly dependent on militarized police violence to control unrest and anger.

If the pandemic goes on long enough, we will probably see more automation—self-driving cars pose less threat of infection to the bourgeoisie than Uber drivers—and the displaced workers will be divided up between the repression industries (police, military, private security, private military contractors) and precarious workers who are forced to take on great risk to make a few pennies. We’re accelerating into a future in which a digitally connected privileged class performs virtual labor in isolation while a massive police state protects them from an expendable underclass that takes most of the risks.

Already, billionaire Jeff Bezos has added 100,000 jobs to Amazon, anticipating that his company will drive local stores everywhere out of business. Likewise, Bezos won’t give his Whole Foods employees paid leave despite the constant risk they face in the service sector—though he is giving them a $2 raise through April. In short, he still considers their lives worthless, but he admits that their deaths should be better paid.

In this context, there is bound to be revolt. It is likely that we will see some social reforms aimed at placating the population—at least temporary ones to mitigate the impact of the pandemic—but that they will arrive alongside the ever-increasing violence of a state that no one can imagine doing without, insofar as it is misunderstood as the protector of our health.

In fact, the state itself is the most dangerous thing to us, as it enforces the drastically uneven distribution of resources that compels us to face such imbalanced distributions of risk. If we want to survive, we can’t just demand more equitable policies—we also have to delegitimize and undermine the power of the state.

Strategies of Resistance

Towards that end, we’ll conclude with a few strategies for resistance that are already getting off the ground.

Rent Strikes

In San Francisco, the housing collective Station 40 has led the way by unilaterally declaring a rent strike in response to the crisis:

“The urgency of the moment demands decisive and collective action. We are doing this to protect and care for ourselves and our community. Now more than ever, we refuse debt and we refuse to be exploited. We will not shoulder this burden for the capitalists. Five years ago, we defeated our landlord’s attempt to evict us. We won because of the the solidarity of our neighbors and our friends around the world. We are once again calling on that network. Our collective feels prepared for the shelter-in-place that begins at midnight throughout the bay area. The most meaningful act of solidarity for us in this moment is for everyone to go on strike together. We will have your back, as we know you will have ours. Rest, pray, take care of each other.”

For millions of people who will not be able to pay their bills, this makes a virtue of necessity. Countless millions who live from one paycheck to the next have lost their jobs and income already and have no way to pay April’s rent. The best way to support them is for all of us to go on strike, rendering it impossible for the authorities to target everyone who does not pay. Banks and landlords should not be able to continue profiting on renters and mortgages when there is no way to earn money. That’s just common sense.

This idea has already been circulating in many different forms. In Melbourne, Australia, the local branch of the Industrial Workers of the World is promoting a COVID-19 Rent Strike Pledge. Rose Caucus is calling for people to suspend rent, mortgage, and utility payments during the outbreak. In Washington state, Seattle Rent Strike is calling for the same. Chicago tenants are threatening a rent strike alongside people in Austin, St. Louis, and Texas. In Canada, there is organizing in Toronto, Kingston, and Montreal. Others have circulated documents calling for a rent and mortgage strike.

For a rent strike to succeed on a countrywide level, at least one of these initiatives will have to gain enough momentum that large numbers of people will be certain they will not be left high and dry if they commit to participating. Yet rather than waiting for a single mass organization to coordinate a massive strike from above, it is best for these efforts to begin at the grassroots level. Centralized organizations often compromise early in the process of a struggle, undercutting the autonomous efforts that give such movements power. The best thing we could do to come out of this experience stronger would be to build networks that can defend themselves regardless of decisions from on high.

Labor and Transit Strikes

Hundreds of workers at the Atlantic shipyards in Saint-Nazaire went on strike yesterday. In Finland, bus drivers refused to take payments from riders in order to increase their safety from contagion and protest against the risks they are being exposed to, showing in the process that public transit could be free.

If ever there was a good time for the embattled and precarious working class to show strength through strikes and work stoppages, this is it. For once, much of the general population will be sympathetic, as the interruption of business as usual can also diminish the risk of the virus spreading. Rather than seeking to improve the individual circumstances of particular employees through wage increases, we believe the most important thing is to build networks that can interrupt business as usual, disrupt the system as whole, and point towards the revolutionary introduction of alternative ways of living and relating. At this point, it is easier to imagine the abolition of capitalism than to imagine that even under these circumstances, it could be reformed to serve all of our needs in a just and equitable manner.

Prison Revolts

Revolts in Brazilian and Italian prisons have already resulted in several escapes, including mass escapes. The courage of these prisoners should remind us of all the targeted populations that are kept out of public view, who will suffer the most during catastrophes like this.

It can also inspire us: rather than obeying orders and remaining in hiding as the entire world is converted into a matrix of prison cells, we can act collectively to break out.

Peter Gelderloos: The Police

Recently, a group of racist, anti-LGBTQ, white nationalists attacked a Gay Pride parade in Hamilton, Ontario. Instead of arresting the attackers, the police have arrested people who allegedly took action in defence against this fascist violence. When a group of activists protested the police’s conduct in front of the Mayor’s home, the Media focused their self-righteous indignation on this anarchist “hooliganism,” failing to put the protest in any real context, including the fact that the police not only failed to protect people from fascist violence, but are now prosecuting people who did. The local anarchist library and social space. The Tower, is again under attack, with increased harassment by the authorities. All of which reminded me of this section from Peter Gelderloos’ Anarchy Works (Ardent Press, 2010).

Who will protect us without police?

In our society, police benefit from a tremendous amount of hype, whether it’s biased and fear-mongering media coverage of crime or the flood of movies and television shows featuring cops as heroes and protectors. Yet many people’s experiences with police contrast starkly with this heavy-handed propaganda.

In a hierarchical society, whom do police protect? Who has more to fear from crime, and who has more to fear from police? In some communities, the police are like an occupying force; police and crime form the interlocking jaws of a trap that prevents people from escaping oppressive situations or rescuing their communities from violence, poverty, and fragmentation.

Historically, police did not develop out of a social necessity to protect people from rising crime. In the United States, modern police forces arose at a time when crime was already diminishing. Rather, the institution of police emerged as a means to give the ruling class greater control over the population and expand the state’s monopoly on the resolution of social conflict. This was not a response to crime or an attempt to solve it; on the contrary, it coincided with the creation of new forms of crime. At the same time police forces were being expanded and modernized, the ruling class began to criminalize predominantly lower class behaviors that had previously been acceptable such as vagrancy, gambling, and public drunkenness.[70]

Those in authority define “criminal activity” according to their own needs, then present their definitions as neutral and timeless. For example, many more people may be killed by pollution and work-related accidents than by drugs, but drug dealers are branded a threat to society, not factory owners. And even when factory owners break the law in a way that kills people, they are not sent to prison.[71]

Today, over two-thirds of prisoners in the US are locked up for nonviolent offenses. It is no surprise that the majority of prisoners are poor people and people of color, given the criminalization of drugs and immigration, the disproportionately harsh penalties for the drugs typically used by poor people, and the greater chance people of color have of being convicted or sentenced more harshly for the same crimes.[72]

Likewise, the intense presence of militarized police in ghettos and poor neighborhoods is connected to the fact that crime stays high in those neighborhoods while rates of incarceration increase. The police and prisons are systems of control that preserve social inequalities, spread fear and resentment, exclude and alienate whole communities, and exercise extreme violence against the most oppressed sectors of society.

Those who can organize their own lives within their communities are better equipped to protect themselves. Some societies and communities that have won autonomy from the state organize volunteer patrols to help people in need and discourage aggressions. Unlike the police, these groups generally do not have coercive authority or a closed, bureaucratic structure, and are more likely to be made up of volunteers from within the neighborhood.

They focus on protecting people rather than property or privilege, and in the absence of a legal code they respond to people’s needs rather than inflexible protocol. Other societies organize against social harm without setting up specific institutions. Instead they utilize diffuse sanctions — responses and attitudes spread throughout the society and propagated in the culture — to promote a safe environment.

Anarchists take an entirely different view of the problems that authoritarian societies place within the framework of crime and punishment. A crime is the violation of a written law, and laws are imposed by elite bodies. In the final instance, the question is not whether someone is hurting others but whether she is disobeying the orders of the elite. As a response to crime, punishment creates hierarchies of morality and power between the criminal and the dispensers of justice. It denies the criminal the resources he may need to reintegrate into the community and to stop hurting others.

In an empowered society, people do not need written laws; they have the power to determine whether someone is preventing them from fulfilling their needs, and can call on their peers for help resolving conflicts. In this view, the problem is not crime, but social harm — actions such as assault and drunk driving that actually hurt other people. This paradigm does away with the category of victimless crime, and reveals the absurdity of protecting the property rights of privileged people over the survival needs of others. The outrages typical of capitalist justice, such as arresting the hungry for stealing from the wealthy, would not be possible in a needs-based paradigm.

During the February 1919 general strike in Seattle, workers took over the city. Commercially, Seattle was shut down, but the workers did not allow it to fall into disarray. On the contrary, they kept all vital services running, but organized by the workers without the management of the bosses. The workers were the ones running the city every other day of the year, anyway, and during the strike they proved that they knew how to conduct their work without managerial interference.

They coordinated citywide organization through the General Strike Committee, made up of rank and file workers from every local union; the structure was similar to, and perhaps inspired by, the Paris Commune. Union locals and specific groups of workers retained autonomy over their jobs without management or interference from the Committee or any other body. Workers were free to take initiative at the local level. Milk wagon drivers, for example, set up a neighborhood milk distribution system the bosses, restricted by profit motives, would never have allowed.

The striking workers collected the garbage, set up public cafeterias, distributed free food, and maintained fire department services. They also provided protection against anti-social behavior — robberies, assaults, murders, rapes: the crime wave authoritarians always forecast. A city guard comprised of unarmed military veterans walked the streets to keep watch and respond to calls for help, though they were authorized to use warnings and persuasion only. Aided by the feelings of solidarity that created a stronger social fabric during the strike, the volunteer guard were able to maintain a peaceful environment, accomplishing what the state itself could not.

This context of solidarity, free food, and empowerment of the common person played a role in drying up crime at its source. Marginalized people gained opportunities for community involvement, decision-making, and social inclusion that were denied to them by the capitalist regime. The absence of the police, whose presence emphasizes class tensions and creates a hostile environment, may have actually decreased lower-class crime. Even the authorities remarked on how organized the city was: Major General John F. Morrison, stationed in Seattle, claimed that he had never seen “a city so quiet and so orderly.” The strike was ultimately shut down by the invasion of thousands of troops and police deputies, coupled with pressure from the union leadership.[73]

In Oaxaca City in 2006, during the five months of autonomy at the height of the revolt, the APPO, the popular assembly organized by the striking teachers and other activists to coordinate their resistance and organize life in Oaxaca City, established a volunteer watch that helped keep things peaceful in especially violent and divisive circumstances. For their part, the police and paramilitaries killed over ten people — this was the only bloodbath in the absence of state power.

The popular movement in Oaxaca was able to maintain relative peace despite all the violence imposed by the state. They accomplished this by modifying an indigenous custom for the new situation: they used topiles, rotating watches that maintain security in indigenous communities. The teacher’s union already used topiles as security volunteers during the encampment, before the APPO was formed, and the APPO quickly extended the practice as part of a security commission to protect the city against police and paramilitaries. A large part of the topiles’ duty included occupying government buildings and defending barricades and occupations. This meant they often had to fight armed police and paramilitaries with nothing but rocks and firecrackers.

Some of the worst attacks happened in front of the occupied buildings. We were guarding the Secretary of the Economy building, when we realized that somewhere inside the building there was a group of people preparing to attack us. We knocked on the door and no one responded. Five minutes later, an armed group drove out from behind the building and started shooting at us. We tried to find cover, but we knew if we backed away, all the people at the barricade in front of the building — there must have been around forty people — would be in serious danger. So we decided to hold our position, and defended ourselves with rocks. They kept firing at us until their bullets ran out and drove away, because they saw that we weren’t going anywhere. Several of us were wounded. One guy took a bullet in his leg and the other got shot in the back. Later, some reinforcements arrived, but the hit men had already retreated.

We didn’t have any guns. At the Office of the Economy, we defended ourselves with stones. As time went on and we found ourselves under attack by gunfire more and more frequently, so we started making things to defend ourselves with: firecrackers, homemade bottle-rocket launchers, molotov cocktails; all of us had something. And if we didn’t have any of those things, we defended people with our bodies or bare hands.[74]

After such attacks, the topiles would help take the wounded to first aid centers.

The security volunteers also responded to common crime. If someone was being robbed or assaulted, the neighbors would raise the alarm and the neighborhood topiles would come; if the assailant was on drugs he would be tied up in the central plaza for the night, and the next day made to pick up garbage or perform another type of community service. Different people had different ideas on what long-term solutions to institute, and as the rebellion in Oaxaca was politically very diverse, not all these ideas were revolutionary; some people wanted to hand robbers or assaulters over to the courts, though it was widely believed that the government released all law-breakers and encouraged them to go back and commit more anti-social crimes.

The history of Exarchia, a neighborhood in central Athens, shows throughout the years that the police do not protect us, they endanger us. For years, Exarchia has been the stronghold of the anarchist movement and the counterculture. The neighborhood has protected itself from gentrification and policing through a variety of means. Luxury cars are regularly burned if they are parked there overnight. After being targeted with property destruction and social pressure, shop and restaurant owners no longer try to remove political posters from their walls, kick out vagrants, or otherwise create a commercial atmosphere in the streets; they have conceded that the streets belong to the people. Undercover cops who enter Exarchia have been brutally beaten on a number of occasions.

During the run-up to the Olympics the city tried to renovate Exarchia Square to turn it into a tourist spot rather than a local hangout. The new plan, for example, included a large fountain and no benches. Neighbors began meeting, came up with their own renovation plan, and informed the construction company that they would use the local plan rather than the city government’s plan. Repeated destruction of the construction equipment finally convinced the company who was boss. The renovated park today has more green space, no touristy fountain, and nice, new benches.

Attacks against police in Exarchia are frequent, and armed riot police are always stationed nearby. Over the past years, police have gone back and forth between trying to occupy Exarchia by force, or maintaining a guard around the borders of the neighborhood with armed groups of riot cops constantly ready for an attack. At no point have the police been able to carry out normal policing activities. Police do not patrol the neighborhood on foot, and rarely drive through. When they enter, they come prepared to fight and defend themselves.

People spray graffiti and put up posters in broad daylight. It is to a large extent a lawless zone, and people commit crimes with an astonishing frequency and openness. However, it is not a dangerous neighborhood. The crimes of choice are political or at least victimless, like smoking weed. It is safe to walk there alone at night, unless you are a cop, people in the streets are relaxed and friendly, and personal property faces no great threat, with the exception of luxury cars and the like. The police are not welcome here, and they are not needed here.

And it is exactly in this situation that they demonstrate their true character. They are not an institution that responds to crime or social need, they are an institution that asserts social control. In past years, police tried to flood the area, and the anarchist movement in particular, with addictive drugs like heroin, and they have directly encouraged junkies to hang out in Exarchia Square. It was up to anarchists and other neighbors to defend themselves from these forms of police violence and stop the spread of addictive drugs. Unable to break the rebellious spirit of the neighborhood, police have resorted to more aggressive tactics, taking on the characteristics of a military occupation.

On December 6, 2008, this approach produced its inevitable conclusion when two cops shot 15-year-old anarchist Alexis Grigoropoulos to death in the middle of Exarchia. Within a few hours, the counterattacks began, and for days the police throughout Greece were pummeled with clubs, rocks, molotov cocktails, and in a couple of incidents, gunfire. The liberated zones of Athens and other Greek cities are expanding, and the police are afraid to evict these new occupations because the people have proven themselves to be stronger.

Currently, the media is waging a campaign of fear, increasing coverage of antisocial crime and trying to conflate these crimes with the presence of autonomous areas. Crime is a tool of the state, used to scare people, isolate people, and make government seem necessary. But government is nothing but a protection racket. The state is a mafia that has won control over society, and the law is the codification of everything they have stolen from us.

Peter Gelderloos

Eduardo Colombo 1929-2018: A Grand Anarchist Fighter Leaves Us

Eduardo Colombo

I was sad to hear of the passing of Eduardo Colombo, one of the more interesting anarchist writers from the post-World War II era. I included a short piece by Colombo on voting in Volume Three of Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas. I also posted on this blog his essay on the state as the paradigm of power, in which he drew on the work of Cornelius Castoriadis and Pierre Clastres. Here I reproduce a tribute to Colombo by the Spanish anarchist theorist, Tomás Ibáñez. It would be nice to see more of Colombo’s writings translated into English.

Tribute to Eduardo Colombo

Today, March 13^th, the sad note of the death of Eduardo Colombo strikes us painfully.  With Eduardo, not only disappears a dear and fraternal compañero, but also a first-rate thinker and a militant anarchist of unshakeable convictions.

It was in the 1940’s when the young student Eduardo Colombo became intensely involved in the anarchist movement in his native Argentina participating in the anarcho-syndicalist struggles of the FORA (Worker Federation of the Argentina Region), collaborating and taking on management responsibilities in his renowned newspaper, “La Protesta”.  Since then, an extensive period of time has passed of more than 70 years during which Eduardo Colombo never abandoned not for even one minute his early and intense commitment to “the idea” and the sought after Social Revolution, for which he lived all his life with inexhaustible enthusiasm.

Doctor and psychoanalyst, he was also professor of social psychology at the University of Buenos Aires until the military coup of 1966 expelled him of his teaching duties and caused him just a few years afterwards to seek asylum in Paris where he arrived with his compañera Heloisa Castellanos in 1970.  There, in spite of the difficulties of professional and social relocation, he did not hesitate to involve himself immediately in the activities of the anarchist movement in France, at the same time strengthening his ties with the anti-franco movement of the libertarian exiles.

His willingness to permanently engage thought and action led him to position himself as one of the most important theorists of contemporary anarchism, while participating in dozens of events at the internal level.  Let me briefly mention examples of that tireless international activity: his participation as speaker in the libertarian days of Barcelona in 1977, his contribution to the organization of the extraordinary international anarchist conference in Venice in 1984, and his interventions in the international anarchist gathering in Saint-Imier in 2012.

His numerous books and articles contributed to his permanent invitation to conferences, above all in Italy, Greece, Spain, Argentina and various other Latin American countries.  He was also one of the founders in 1997 of the anarchist magazine “Réfractiones” and one of its principal animators for two decades.

There will be time to detail more closely this unforgettable figure and his valuable intellectual contributions that go beyond simply the anarchist movement to cover also the field of psychoanalysis and philosophy.  However, we cannot close this brief summary without again emphasizing that he who left today was a militant anarchist of incomparable strength and worth, furthermore a beautiful being and endearing person.

Tomás Ibáñez

Barcelona, March 13^th,  2018

Translated from the original: https://www.portaloaca.com/historia/biografias/13551-eduardo-colombo-1929-2018-un-gran-luchador-anarquista-nos-deja.html

Ursula Le Guin (1929 – 2018)

Ursula Le Guin

I was sad to hear of the death of Ursula Le Guin yesterday. I heard her speak at an international anarchist symposium in Portland, Oregon back in 1980. She talked about her views on anarchism, buddhism, anthropology, science fiction, creativity and writing, and answered questions about her stories and books. The book that anarchists celebrated was The Dispossessed, about an anarchist colony on a large moon orbiting a planet like Earth. Here I reproduce a dialogue between the main character, Shevek, from the anarchist moon, Anarres, and a rich woman, Vea, living on the Earth-like planet that Shevek has secretly arranged to visit. Shevek expresses the ideas of the anarchists on Anarres, the “Odonians,” while Vea speaks from the vantage point of a cynical female member of the ruling class who cannot accept that the anarchists can live without hierarchy and authority, arguing that they have merely internalized them. It’s a great passage, drawing out some potential issues about life in an anarchist society, while showing that even a cynical “propertarian” (the word Le Guin uses to describe the capitalists) really wants to be free, but cannot see that freedom itself is a kind of relationship, and not something that can be achieved in isolation, or by exploiting others.

The Dispossessed – Chapter 7

[Vea] sat down on a low, cushioned stool near [Shevek], so she could look up into his face. She arranged her white skirt over her ankles, and said, “Now, tell me how it really is between men and women on Anarres.”

It was unbelievable. The maid and the caterer’s man were both in the room; she knew he had a partner, and he knew she did, and not a word about copulating had passed between them. Yet her dress, movements, tone — what were they but the most open invitation?

“Between a man and a woman there is what they want there to be between them,” he said, rather roughly. “Each, and both.”

“Then it’s true, you really have no morality?” she asked, as if shocked but delighted.

“I don’t know what you mean. To hurt a person there is the same as to hurt a person here.”

“You mean you have all the same old rules? You see, I believe that morality is just another superstition, like religion. It’s got to be thrown out.”

“But my society,” he said, completely puzzled, “is an attempt to reach it. To throw out the moralizing, yes — the rules, the laws, the punishments — so that men can see good and evil and choose between them.”

“So you threw out all the do’s and don’ts. But you know, I think you Odonians missed the whole point. You threw out the priests and Judges and divorce laws and all that, but you kept the real trouble behind them. You just stuck it inside, into your consciences. But it’s still there. You’re just as much slaves as ever! You aren’t really free.”

“How do you know?”

“I read an article in a magazine about Odonianism,” she said. “And we’ve been together all day. I don’t know you, but I know some things about you. I know that you’ve got a — a Queen Teaea inside you, right inside that hairy head of yours. And she orders you around just like the old tyrant did her serfs. She says, `Do this!’ and you do, and `Don’t’ and you don’t.”

“That is where she belongs,” he said, smiling. “Inside my head.”

“No. Better to have her in a palace. Then you could rebel against her. You would have to. Your great-great-grandfather did; at least he ran off to the Moon to get away. But he took Queen Teaea with him, and you’ve still got her!”

“Maybe. But she has learned, on Anarres, that if she tells me to hurt another person, I hurt myself.”

“The same old hypocrisy. Life is a fight, and the strongest wins. All civilization does is hide the blood and cover up the hate with pretty words!”

“Your civilization, perhaps. Ours hides nothing. It is all plain. Queen Teaea wears her own skin, there. We follow one law, only one, the law of human evolution.”

“The law of evolution is that the strongest survives!”

“Yes, and the strongest, in the existence of any social species, are those who are most social. In human terms, most ethical. You see, we have neither prey nor enemy, on Anarres. We have only one another. There is no strength to be gained from hurting one another. Only weakness.”

“I don’t care about hurting and not hurting. I don’t care about other people, and nobody else does, either. They pretend to. I don’t want to pretend. I want to be free.”

David Graeber: Democracy v. the State

Continuing with the democracy and anarchy theme, here are some excerpts from an essay by David Graeber on the incompatibility of democracy and the modern state. The complete article, “There Never Was a West, Or, Democracy Emerges from the Spaces in Between,” can be found in Graeber’s collection of essays, Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire, published by AK Press. I included some of Graeber’s writings on the “new” anarchism, anarchy and democracy in Volume Three of Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas. Graeber explores many of these ideas in more detail in his book, The Democracy Project.

Democracy and the State: The Impossible Marriage

For the last two hundred years, democrats have been trying to graft ideals of popular self-governance onto the coercive apparatus of the state. In the end, the project is simply unworkable. States cannot, by their nature, ever truly be democratized. They are, after all, basically ways of organizing violence. The American Federalists were being quite realistic when they argued that democracy is inconsistent with a society based on inequalities of wealth; since, in order to protect wealth, one needs an apparatus of coercion to keep down the very “mob” that democracy would empower. Athens was a unique case in this respect because it was, in effect, transitional: there were certainly inequalities of wealth, even, arguably, a ruling class, but there was virtually no formal apparatus of coercion. Hence there’s no consensus among scholars whether it can really be considered a state at all.

It’s precisely when one considers the problem of the modern state’s monopoly of coercive force that the whole pretence of democracy dissolves into a welter of contradictions. For example: while modem elites have largely put aside the earlier discourse of the “mob” as a murderous “great beast,” the same imagery still pops back, in almost exactly the form it had in the sixteenth century, the moment anyone proposes democratizing some aspect of the apparatus of coercion. In the US, for example, advocates of the “fully informed jury movement,” who point out that the Constitution actually allows juries to decide on questions of law, not just of evidence, are regularly denounced in the media as wishing to go back to the days of lynchings and “mob rule,” It’s no coincidence that the United States, a country that still prides itself on its democratic spirit, has also led the world in mythologizing, even deifying, its police.

Francis Dupuis-Deri (2002) has coined the term “political agoraphobia” to refer to the suspicion of public deliberation and decision-maki ng that runs through the Western tradition, just as much in the works of Constant, Siey<&, or Madison as in Plato or Aristotle. I would add that even the most impressive accomplishments of the liberal state, its most genuinely democratic elements—for instance, its guarantees on freedom of speech and freedom of assembly—are premised on such agoraphobia. It is only once it becomes absolutely clear that public speech and assembly is no longer itself the medium of political decision-making, but at best an attempt to criticize, influence, or make suggestions to political decision-makers, that they can be treated as sacrosanct. Critically, this agoraphobia is not just shared by politicians and professional journalists, but in large measure by the public itself.

The reasons, I think, are not far to seek. While liberal democracies lack anything resembling the Athenian agora, they certainly do not lack equivalents to Roman circuses. The ugly mirror phenomenon, by which ruling elites encourage forms of popular participation that continually remind the public just how much they are unfit to rule, seems, in many modern states, to have been brought to a condition of unprecedented perfection. Consider here, for example, the view of human nature one might derive generalizing from the experience of driving to work on the highway, as opposed to the view one might derive from the experience of public transportation. Yet the American—or German—love affair with the car was the result of conscious policy decisions by political and corporate elites beginning in the 1930s. One could write a similar history of the television, or consumerism, or, as Polanyi long ago noted, “the market”.

Jurists, meanwhile, have long been aware that the coercive nature of the state ensures that democratic constitutions are founded on a fundamental contradiction. Walter Benjamin (1978) summed it up nicely by pointing out that any legal order that claims a monopoly of the use of violence has to be founded by some power other than itself, which inevitably means by acts that were illegal according to whatever system of law came before. The legitimacy of a system of law, thus, necessarily rests on acts of criminal violence. American and French revolutionaries were, after all, by the law under which they grew up, guilty of high treason. Of course, sacred kings from Africa to Nepal have managed to solve this logical conundrum by placing themselves, like God, outside the system.

But as political theorists from Agamben to Negri remind us, there is no obvious way for “the people” to exercise sovereignty in the same way. Both the right-wing solution (constitutional orders are founded by, and can be set aside by, inspired leaders—whether Founding Fathers, or Fiihrers—who embody the popular will), and the left-wing solution (constitutional orders usually gain their legitimacy through violent popular revolutions) lead to endless practical contradictions. In fact, as sociologist Michael Mann has hinted (1999), much of the slaughter of the twentieth century derives from some version of this contradiction. The demand to simultaneously create a uniform apparatus of coercion within every piece of land on the surface of the planet, and to maintain the pretense that the legitimacy of that apparatus derives from “the people,” has led to an endless need to determine who, precisely, “the people” are supposed to be.

In all the varied German law courts of the last eighty years—from Weimar to Nazi to communist DDR to the Bundesrepublik—the judges have used the same opening formula: “In Namen des Volkes,” “In the Name of the People.” American courts prefer the formula “The Case of the People versus X” (Mann 1999: 19).

In other words, “the people” must be evoked as the authority behind the allocation of violence, despite the fact that any suggestion that the proceedings be in any way democratized is likely to be greeted with horror by all concerned. Mann suggests that pragmatic efforts to work out this contradiction, to use the apparatus of violence to identify and constitute a “people” that those maintaining that apparatus feel are worthy of being the source of their authority, has been responsible for at least sixty million murders in the twentieth century alone.

It is in this context that I might suggest that the anarchist solution— that there really is no resolution to this paradox—is really not all that unreasonable. The democratic state was always a contradiction. Globalization has simply exposed the rotten underpinnings, by creating the need for decision making structures on a planetary scale where any attempt to maintain the pretense of popular sovereignty, let alone participation, would be obviously absurd. The neo-liberal solution, of course, is to declare the market the only form of public deliberation one really needs, and to restrict the state almost exclusively to its coercive function. In this context, the Zapatista response— to abandon the notion that revolution is a matter of seizing control over the coercive apparatus of the state, and instead proposing to refound democracy in the self-organization of autonomous communities—makes perfect sense. This is the reason an otherwise obscure insurrection in southern Mexico caused such a sensation in radical circles to begin with.

Democracy, then, is for the moment returning to the spaces in which it originated: the spaces in between. Whether it can then proceed to engulf the world depends perhaps less on what kind of theories we make about it, but on whether we honestly believe that ordinary human beings, sitting down together in deliberative bodies, would be capable of managing their own affairs as well as elites, whose decisions are backed up by the power of weapons, are of managing it for them—or even whether, even if they wouldn’t, they have the right to be allowed to try. For most of human history, faced with such questions, professional intellectuals have almost universally taken the side of the elites. It is rather my impression that, if it really comes down to it, the overwhelming majority are still seduced by the various ugly mirrors and have no real faith in the possibilities of popular democracy. But perhaps this too could change.

David Graeber

Brazilian Anarchists on the Crisis in Brazil

Brazil is back in the news as people there begin again to mobilize against corrupt politicians (for a detailed analysis of the corruption itself, see this article from the Guardian newspaper). It’s been four years since the “Free Pass Movement” that began as a protest against transit fare increases and turned into a movement for free access to a variety of public services. Since then the most corrupt of the Brazilian politicians forced the impeachment of the President, Dilma Rousseff, replacing her with someone even more corrupt, Michel Temer. On May 24, 2017, Temer issued a decree for the military enforcement of “law and order.” In the piece below by Coordenação Anarquista Brasileira (Brazilian Anarchist Coordination, CAB), the CAB calls for the intensification of the popular movements for political power through directly democratic organizations (translation from anarkismo.net).

Direct democracy now!

Brazil is experiencing a political earthquake, laying bare the rottenness of the country’s elites and further weakening the ties that sustain them in power. The orchestrated operation that enabled the recording between President Michel Temer and the owner of JBS, the largest meat company in the world, changes the balance of forces in the country and pours petrol on the political and social crisis. With the political instability it is more difficult for the government to mobilize its base and move forward with the Labor Rights and Pension Reforms, the biggest attacks on the oppressed class.

But this is no reason to celebrate and we must not be complacent about these struggles. Now is the time to intensify the struggle, to generalize the mobilizations with the blockading of streets, work stoppages building towards the general strike to block the social cuts and reforms. We must deepen democracy, but direct democracy, where workers in their places of work, study and residence decide the direction of the country. We cannot accept the crumbs from those at the top, we need to impose a popular program of social rights built and decided by the people. We need to build direct democracy – outside the agreements of those at the top – in neighborhoods, in slums, in villages, in land and housing occupations, in factories, in schools.

The coup that brought down the PT/PMDB’s fourth mandate in the presidency made it possible to begin a successful first round of harsh anti-people measures at an overwhelming pace, with broad support in Congress and in the media, notably the Globo television network. Temer approved the high school education reform, the PEC spending cap bill, the outsourcing bill, privatizations and several more attacks – initiated during the PT government itself.

Decades of bureaucratization of struggles by the large trade unions centrals and the practice of co-opting leaders of big social movements by the PT helped, and is still helping, to demobilize the people and impede the generalization of resistance against these attacks. Despite this, other sectors such as high school students and indigenous people are breathing new life into the social struggle. The growth of popular dissatisfaction with Temer’s labour and pension reforms manifested itself with great impact in the streets, in the mobilizations by the general strike of 15 and 28 April, forcing the coup makers to back down with their proposals.

With more than 90% rejection, the Temer government doesn’t even have the legitimacy to sustain this false democratic system. This serves only to maintain the businessmen and political class robbing and killing the people. Lula and Dilma’s government of class conciliation was a government for businessmen and the rich, with a few crumbs for the poor. And the innumerable accusations of corruption only make evident the disgusting relationship of favoritism that exists between big business and the state. The cases of corruption are not isolated incidents but what makes the wheels of the state and private sector turn. That is, the representative system does not serve the interests of the people but those of capitalism, so that the political and business class can advance their projects.

That is why “magic solutions” like privatization, outsourcing, attacks on workers’ rights only serve to make businessmen profit more. Attacks on social rights, attacks on indigenous people and their territories, on peasants and the landless, on women, LGBTQIs, the genocide of blacks and residents of slums and poor neighborhoods and the criminalization of poverty are the same. They are all measures and policies for the right wing and conservative sectors, businessmen, landowners, bankers to impose their ideology, profit more, concentrate more wealth and exploit the people more. Businessmen, like João Dória, are no different from other politicians, they are enemies of the people.

If professional politicians are in disrepute the justice system tries to assert legitimacy with anti-corruption operations in order to increase its power in the state structure. The heads of the Judiciary, Federal Police and Public Prosecutor’s Office, with sectors directly aligned to the United States, have massive support from the Globo network to accumulate power with dangerously authoritarian biases. It is necessary to repudiate this escalation and to avoid any illusion in salvation by bourgeois justice.

The old media plays a crucial role in the tangle of ruling class interests. The Globo network, which supported the Parliamentary Judicial Media Coup, engineered and legitimized the current coup and has now placed itself on the stronger side, with the Attorney General’s Office (PGR, Procuradoria-Geral da República), for the departure of Temer. The purpose is to recuperate the conditions to approve the reforms with the election of a new president by indirect elections. We can not underestimate the role that communication giants play in the ideological field.

Globo’s turn against Temer does not signify any advance for the popular camp. In the discrediting of professional politicians it discards old bets, like Aécio Neves, and orients its agenda by the worldwide tendency to leverage the candidacies of personalities seemingly “from outside” the political-partisan camp. They seek to put in place subjects directly from the business community (Doria, Meirelles), the judiciary (Nelson Jobim, Carmem Lúcia, Joaquim Barbosa), or even the entertainment media (Luciano Huck). It is strategic to advance in the discrediting of the old media and to strengthen the demand for the democratization of communication with restrictions to the power of these companies, as well as to strengthen popular means of communication.

It is still necessary to question the reason for the denunciations only arriving at this moment. Even though they have discarded some politicians and triggered some instability, the action shows loyalty in the agreements between state and capital. The criterion is economic and there is an interest in defending a company that recently faced the Carne Fraca (“Weak Meat”) operation; an action that, if on the one hand has demonstrated the terrible conditions in which our food is produced, first served the US interests of weakening a competitor in the international dispute of the meat market. It should be noted that it was the PT/PMDB government that fattened JBS up through BNDES with millions of dollars, transforming the company into one of the largest in the world.

From Below and to the Left, Direct Democracy now!

The fact is that the demand that brought many people onto the streets in this 1 year of Temer government could become reality: Michel Temer’s departure from the presidency of the republic. And we ask ourselves: what now? What is the next step? We know that with the coup makers weakened and their parliamentary base oscillating, there is a lack of conditions to continue the process of labor and pension reform.

Now it is urgent to generalize the struggle against the reforms and to take back the rights that were rolled back by coup makers from the past and the present conjuncture, the PT/PMDB. In addition to blocking the reforms we need to build a project that makes the rich pay for the cost of the crisis and that recognizes the political, business and media elite as enemies of the people. Big companies like JBS owe the government more than 400 billion, about three times the amount they contribute to the false social security deficit.

Only the organization of the people and pressure in the streets can prevent the reforms and attacks on social rights. Nothing from parliament will go in that direction. We have to prevent businessmen and the political elite from making their summit agreements and coups in order to proceed with their project. Mobilization and popular pressure are necessary and urgent now to block the reforms from moving forward amid this instability. They are necessary pressures to impose a popular agenda on the government, even in the case of a direct election. And the mobilization of the people today is urgent to prevent the worst case scenario, which is a suspension of the elections in 2018 through a political-military intervention and the persecution of the combative sectors of the left.

The electoral left demands rights now so that the Presidency of the Republic and lulismo (Lula-ism) can appear, as in previous years, managing to present itself as a supposed popular exit in the middle of the earthquake of the political crisis. We can not deceive ourselves! We have affirmed and continue affirming: we must overcome petismo (PT-ism) and all its inheritance on the left. The belief that Lula will have to deal with the crisis and bring about improvements in the living conditions of those at the bottom of society does not hold up. An election of Lula would only represent another class pact with the bourgeoisie and the bosses, in even more withdrawn terms than in previous years.

The important thing at the moment is that the struggle has to be from below and in the streets in order to advance a popular rights program! Promote organization, mobilization against the pension and labor rights reform, and for the construction of a popular project based on class independence. Catalyze popular dissatisfaction in revolt and advance in grassroots struggles.

Do not allow yourself to be carried away by immediate solutions, in this process of reorganization of the left and summit agreements to save bourgeois democracy. There is no rabbit in a top hat, the way out is to build popular organization in the neighborhoods, in schools, in workplaces with the poor and oppressed people. We must demand the suspension of all the anti-people measures initiated by the PT government and continued by the coup leader Temer.

The moment is unfavorable for us oppressed, but the crisis and the dispute between the elites open up space for other projects. We need to use the dissatisfaction to delegitimize this system and channel the social struggle.

Direct Democracy now!
For the suspension of all anti-people measures!
Against the fiscal adjustment and rights cuts!
Away with Globo coup makers!
Build Popular Power against austerity and repression!

Tomás Ibáñez: The Coming Anarchism

The Autonomies website has recently posted a translation of an essay by the Spanish anarchist, Tomás Ibáñez, “The Anarchism to Come,” which could also be translated as “The Coming Anarchism,” an allusion to Kropotkin’s 1887 article, “The Coming Anarchy.” I thought it fitting to reprint excerpts from Tomás Ibáñez’s essay some 130 years later. While highlighting the necessary differences between contemporary anarchism, historical anarchism, and the “coming anarchism,” Tomás Ibáñez nevertheless argues that there are certain “invariant” elements of classical anarchism that must be preserved in order for something to be considered any kind of anarchism. Originally published in Libre Pensamiento, No. 88.

Current forms of anarchism

I believe that it becomes quite clear that the context in which the coming anarchism will find itself will be eminently different from the context in which it has operated until recently, which can only but substantially modify it.

Some of these changes are already beginning to gain form, such that, to glimpse, even if confusedly, the characteristics of the coming anarchism, it is very useful to observe the current anarchist movement, and especially its most youthful component.  This component represents a part of contemporary anarchism that already manifests some differences with classical anarchism, and with that which I have sometimes called “neo-anarchism”.

What we can observe at the present is that, after a very long period of very scarce international presence by anarchism, what is emerging and is already proliferating in very appealing ways in all of the regions of the world, are various collectives concerned with a great diversity of themes; multiple, fragmented, fluctuating and at times ephemeral, but which participate in all of the movements against the system, and sometimes even initiate them.  Undoubtedly, this fragmentation corresponds to some of the characteristics of the new context which we are entering and which is making possible a new organisation of the spaces of dissidence.  The current reality which is becoming literally “shifting” and “liquid” demands, certainly, much more flexible, more fluid organisational models, oriented according to simple proposals of coordination to realise concrete and specific tasks.

Like the networks that rise up autonomously, that self-organise themselves, that make and unmake themselves according to the exigencies of the moment, and where temporary alliances are established between collectives, these probably constitute the organisational form, reticular and viral, that will prevail in the future, and whose fluidity is already proving its effectiveness in the present.

What seems to predominate in these youthful anarchist collectives is the desire to create spaces where relations are exempt from the coercion and the values that emanate from the reigning system.  Without waiting for a hypothetical revolutionary change, it is for them a matter of living from now on as closely as possible to the values that this change should promote.  This leads, among the very many other kinds of behaviour, to developing scrupulously non-sexist relations stripped of any patriarchal character, including in the language, or to establishing relations of solidarity that completely escape hierarchical logic and a commodity spirit.

It also contributes, and this is very important, to the weight that is given to those practices that exceed the order of mere discursivity.  The importance of doing and, more precisely, of “doing together“, is emphasised, putting the accent on the concrete effects of this doing and on the transformations that it promotes.

In these spaces, the concerts, the fiestas, the collective meals (vegan, of course), form part of the political activity, equal to the putting up of posters, neighbourhood actions, talks and debates, or demonstrations, at times quite forceful.  In reality, it is a matter of making the form of life be in itself an instrument of struggle that defies the system, that contradicts its principles, that dissolves its arguments, and that permits the development of transforming community experiences.  It is for this reason that, from the new libertarian space that is being woven in different parts of the world, experiences of self-management, of economies of solidarity, of networks of mutual aid, of alternative networks of food production and distribution, of exchange and distribution are developing.  The success on this point is complete, for if capitalism is converting itself into a form of life, it is obvious that it is precisely on this terrain, that of forms of life, where part of the struggle to dismantle it must situate itself.

A broad subversive fabric is gaining shape that provides people with antagonistic alternatives to the system, and which, at the same time, helps to change the subjectivity of those who participate in them.  This last aspect is terribly important for there exists a very clear awareness, in having been formatted by and for this society, that we have no other remedy than to transform ourselves if we want to escape its control.  Which means that desubjectification is perceived as an essential task for subversive action itself.

Lastly, it is by no means infrequent that the alternative anarchist space converges with broader movements, such as those that mobilise against wars, or against summit meetings, and those that from time to time occupy squares rediscovering anarchist principles like horizontalism, direct action, or the suspicion before any exercise of power.  In fact, one could consider that these broader movements, which do not define themselves, far from it, as anarchist, represent what at one moment I qualified as outside the walls anarchism, and they prefigure the coming anarchism.

Together with these youthful anarchist collectives, another subversive phenomenon that responds to the technological characteristics of the current moment and which enriches as much the revolutionary practices, as the corresponding imaginary, consists of the appearance of hackers, with the practices and form of political intervention that characterise them.

In a recent book, it is correctly pointed out that if what fascinates and what attracts our attention are macro-concentrations (the occupation of squares, the anti-summit protests, etc.), it is nevertheless in other places where the new subversive politics is being invented: this is the work of dispersed individuals who nevertheless form virtual collectives: the hackers.

In analysing their practices, the author specifies that the value of their struggle resides in the fact that it attacks a fundamental principle of the current exercise of power: the secrecy of State operations, a strictly reserved hunting area and totally opaque to non-authorised eyes, which the State keeps exclusively to itself.  The activists draw on a practice of anonymity and of the elimination of traces that does not respond to the demands of secrecy, but to a new conception of political action: the opposite of creating an “us” heroically and sacrificially confronting power in an unmasked and physical struggle.  It is about, in effect, not exposing oneself, of reducing the cost of the struggle, but above all of not establishing a relationship, not even of conflict, with the enemy.

The anarchist invariant

Next to its inevitable differences with classical anarchism, a second consideration that we can advance, also in full confidence, is that to continue to be anarchism instead of becoming something else, the new anarchism should preserve some of the constitutive elements of the instituted anarchism.  It is these elements that I like to call “the anarchist invariant“, an invariant that unites the current and future anarchism, and that will continue to define, therefore, the anarchism to come.

In fact, this invariant is composed of a small handful of values among which figures prominently that of equaliberty, that is, freedom and equality in common movement, forming a unique and inextricable concept that unites, indissolubly, collective freedom and individual freedom, while at the same time completely excluding the possibility that, from an anarchist perspective, it is possible to think freedom without equality, or equality without freedom.  Neither freedom, nor equality, severed from their other half, fall within an approach that continues to be anarchist.

It is this compromise with equaliberty that places within the heart of the anarchist invariant its radical incompatibility with domination in all of its forms, as well as the affirmation that it is possible and, further, intensely desirable, to live without domination. And it is with this that the motto “Neither to rule, nor to obey” forms part of what cannot change in anarchism without it ceasing to be anarchism.

Likewise, anarchism is also denatured if it is deprived of the set formed by the union between utopia and the desire for revolution, that is, by the union between the imagination of a world always distinct from the existing one, and the desire to put to an end this last.

Another of the elements that is inscribed permanently in anarchism is an ethical commitment, especially to the ethical exigency of a consonance between theory and practice, as well as to the demand for an ethical alignment between means and ends.  This signifies that it is not possible to attain objectives in accordance with anarchist values along paths which contradict them.  Whereby, the actions developed and the forms of organisation adopted should reflect, already, in their very characteristics, the goals sought; they should prefigure them, and this prefiguring constitutes an authentic touchstone for verifying the validity of means.  In other words, anarchism is only compatible with prefigurative politics, and it would cease to be anarchism if it abandoned this imperative.

Lastly, neither can one continue to speak properly of anarchism if this renounces the fusion between life and politics.  We should not forget that anarchism is simultaneously, and in an indissociable way, a political formulation, but also a way of life, but also an ethics, but also a set of practices, but also a way of being and of behaving, but also a utopia.  This implies an interweaving between the political and the existential, between the theoretical and the practical, between the ethical and the political, that is, ultimately, a fusion between the sphere of life and the sphere of the political.

To continue to be “anarchism”, the “coming anarchism” cannot do without any of these elements.

Tomás Ibáñez

‘We Are Being Cornered’ – Turkish Anarchist Communiqué

Turkish anarchists: “We are being cornered”

Below I reproduce a statement from Turkish anarchists in the latest edition of the Meydan anarchist newspaper (follow Meydan at: meydangazetesi.org; @MeydanGazetesi and facebook.com/meydangazetesi). The editor of Meydan, Hüseyin Civan, was sentenced to 15 months in prison in December for allegedly supporting terrorism, as the Erdogan government continues it crackdown on political dissent, and its war against the Kurds. This translation was first published in the online edition of
Freedom, the long-running English anarchist journal.

We are being cornered

With the fear and shock that constantly oppresses our lives, with the agendas that change by the day, by the hour, with the constant repetition we see in news articles, debates, newspapers and radios, with the shares and retweets, the media that takes us for idiots and is fed by manipulation, with the gentrification and demolition policies that erase our past, our identity and our memory, with the “illusion of democracy” that weakens and imprisons our freedom, and with the reality that becomes more and more incomprehensible everyday, we are being cornered.

We are being cornered because the rulers require it in order to declare their authority and assert their dominance over our stolen willpower. We are being cornered because the rulers require it to keep their power and to create new objects to use in their own wars. We are being cornered because this is the only way the government is able to create space for itself and to exist.

We are being cornered by misery

The days that have to keep going through the exhaustion, the bodies that fall powerless, the minds that become unhappy as they weaken…

The rulers submerge the streets that we use to walk to school in the mornings, to go to work and to catch a bus in darkness. They corner us with unhappiness by squeezing us into minibuses and metrobuses that are full to the brim and by sending us to work at the crack of dawn. As the government corners us with unhappiness, they drag us towards hopelessness and despair.

We must resist the government that decides when we may sleep and when we must wake, that snatches our morning sun and pushes us towards darkness and despair, in order to win back our bodies and minds. We must find the courage to defy those who would turn us into blind and deaf, unknowing and unfeeling individuals and break out of this complacency and cornered-ness.

We are being cornered by panic

The broadcasting prohibitions that follow exploding bombs, the unfounded accusations after suspicious packages are found and bomb threats are made, the people who choose or are forced to choose to stay away from crowded places, the dollars that are exchanged in order to “prevent a crisis,” the people who dream of running away from the land that is oppressed by war, death and economic crises…

In the land we live in, the government dominates the individual with fear and panic, it incapacitates, corners and in time, annihilates. As the government enforces this state of fear and panic in all public areas, the individual loses control, becomes vulnerable and is cornered into the annihilation imposed by the rulers.

Our lives are cornered into the grip of crises or death, and our days are spent looking for a way out of fear and panic, out of this cornered-ness.

The only way out of this fear and paranoia that wear down our bodies and minds, and that allow the socio-economic circumstances to slowly consume us, is through creating spaces for ourselves outside of this panic-culture. The way to create a world where we won’t be cornered and imprisoned by fear and panic is to expand the spaces where the rulers [cannot] impose fear on us and eliminate the culture that makes paranoiacs of us all.

We are being cornered by agendas

The attempted coup and the OHAL (regional state of emergency) that was declared in the aftermath, the operations that are conducted against the Kurdish movement and revolutionaries almost every day with the excuse of FETÖ (Fethullah Terrorist Organisation, which Erdogan claims is linked to Fetullah Gulen and behind the abortive July coup last year), the surveillance and arrests, the people dismissed from their jobs because of new KHK’s (rulings by decree) that are announced every day, the judges that are put under surveillance during trials, the bills that are put forward, amended and passed as we all sleep, the bombs that explode in two different locations in the same week, the assassinations occurring before the effects of the bombs have passed, the images of soldiers burned alive by ISIS…

In the geography we live in, we’ve greeted each new day of the past six months with “last-minute news.” When one day is clouded by news of bombs, the next is greeted by Turkish military tanks entering Syria. Just as the friendship between Russia and the Republic of Turkey starts to settle, the assassination of a Russian ambassador sends us into a panic of “we’re going to war with Russia.”

We can no longer keep up with news that drops like bombs and headlines that can change multiple times a day. Far from keeping up with the ever, and increasingly swiftly, changing agendas of our ruler, we are flung from one agenda to the next, we are cornered by them.

In order to escape this current in which we have been swept up and cornered, we must break free of this “agenda traffic” and find a way to create our own agendas to countermand those of the government. Against the government that locks us in our homes for fear of bombs one day, and calls us to “democracy meetings” the next day, against the government that denies the existence of an economic crisis one day and urges us to exchange our dollars as a “preventative” measure the next day, we must come up with our own agendas, discuss and debate them, circulate them.

We are being cornered by repetition

The news that is presents all day long as “breaking news” with the same subtitles, the news programs that broadcast the same reporter, repeating the same deaths with the same expression every hour, the headlines that are debated for hours with no resolution, the repetition that knows no end on TV and other communication channels…

The government uses media, and the unending reiteration of news and debates, to pull us into relentless repetition. The same news of death, in the same sorrowful tone, the same news of rising costs, with the same commentary, the same news of war, with the same dismissal, are transmitted on our TVs every hour of every day. Through this excessive repetition, we become accustomed to poverty, to starvation, to death and soon find ourselves desensitized and cornered by the onslaught.

We must have our guard up against this repetition and desensitization, and especially, we must keep the senses that they are trying to usurp alert and vigilant. We must not become accustomed to that which they want us to accept, and we must not let our will be usurped in order not to be cornered by these repetitions.

We are being cornered by media

Especially after (the coup of) July 15th, the sole purpose of the media became manipulation. From news to debate programs, from sports to TV shows, everything we see, be it on the government’s official channel or not, is used as a means of propaganda. Far from relaying information or showing reality, the media becomes a platform where reality is warped and propaganda is delivered through provocation. Social media, for its part, carries the same function in the even more easily controlled medium of the internet.

Media corners us through the ever present manipulation imposed on us in every bit of news, every TV show, every TV program. This manipulation aside, all we can do to protect ourselves against incomplete or regulated information is to create our own platforms on which to communicate and share information.

We are being cornered by gentrification and demolitions. While the rulers use every instrument in their hands as a means of oppressing the individual, they resort to attacks from every angle to sustain their tyranny. Gentrification and demolition are examples of this type of attack.

The government, in an effort to control the individual, firstly controls the spaces in which the individual lives. In areas where the government’s own dominant culture does not exist and cannot take root, the use of gentrification and demolition is a way of dislodging and uprooting the individuals living there, but even more so, it is a way of displacing the yesterdays, the todays, the identity and the cultures of those people.

The rulers that redevelop areas for the purpose of their own existence, of course, wish their identity and presence to take hold in the new spaces they create. Especially in the aftermath of July 15th, the renaming of so many streets, squares, parks and intersections to “democracy” is telling of a government dismantling existing truths and imposing its own culture.

They intend not only to demolish our living spaces through gentrification, but also to recondition our history, our culture, our identity and our memory.

In defence against this assault on our space and “selves” and this attempt by the rulers to corner us in their areas of command, we must create new, collectively operated places and communal, unrestricted living-spaces. Against the transformation of these public areas by the government we must create new spaces without government, without capitalism, where the individual cannot be oppressed politically or economically.

We are being cornered by democracy

The term “democracy’”that we keep hearing, especially since July 15th, is imposed on us by the current rulers as a means of [ensuring] their longevity. In this era where everything is done in the name of “democracy,” where all practices are theorised as benefiting democratization, we experience day to day what is really meant.

Every day they place media organisations under surveillance and arrest, they push people to unlawfulness in the name of their own “democratic” purposes and interests, and it is in this unlawfulness that the people are cornered. The “democracy” they speak of means that all individuals will have their willpower usurped and all will be cornered into places where the rulers are accountable to no one.

Of course it is possible to fight against the “democracy” being forced on us. We must construct politics outside of the politics of the government, we must build a self-organizing, center- less, unrepresented political process, we must create a culture where our lives aren’t cornered, where our will is not usurped by the rulers.

We are being cornered by truth being rendered meaningless. In order to destroy the current reality and create one of their own, the rulers corner us in a construct of their own politics. The most essential tool they have as a means of realising this construct is to “create an illusion that can render the truth meaningless.” Since the dawn of time, rulers have used a series of constructs to disconnect people from their realities. But the rulers of our time, who have become highly adept at using such tools, with their social media, mainstream media and their crazy politicians, are launching the biggest ever war on reality, specifically, on the reality of the downtrodden.

The easiest way to enslave a person, to seize their sense of self, to corner them into a constructed illusion, is to remove that person’s existing reality. Those who lose touch with reality, in time also lose their ability to think correctly and be productive. They lose their sense of self and are cornered into the illusions produced by the rulers.

The rulers corner the individual with fear and panic, with ever-changing agendas, with unending repetition, with media that only serves to manipulate, with gentrification and demolition, with the illusion of democracy, and with the meaninglessness of truth. Because the more they corner the individual, the more space they have to roam free.

It is when the individual becomes aware that they have been condemned into a corner in every facet of their lives that they begin to struggle against it.

They begin to create a new reality first in a self-organising way, and then through the perspective of organizations and community, and then to experience this collectively created reality, collectively.

The buses, metros and metrobusses of dawn, the hopeless unhappiness, the impotent helplessness, the minimum wage squabbles over tea and simit [a circular bread], morning marriage programs, the evening news programs and the night time debate programs, the workplace deaths filed under ‘accident’, that people are uprooted from the neighbourhoods they built with their own hands and placed into 60 metre squared flats, that those without dollars or gold coins to exchange are falling into an economic crisis, that people are destroyed by male dominance and slaughtered by hate policies, the cement walls and iron bars, that people are burned alive and beaten with chains for the sake of our governments engaging in a war of interest, the unreal reality, the loneliness, the hopelessness and the chaos. Yes, we will escape these things.

Against those that incarcerate us, that break our will as they corner us, and that in time, make prisoners of us, from the cornered-ness that we have been subjected to, we must break free. We are at the threshold of a socio-economic explosion due to this very cornered-ness that we must step over, we must mold unrestricted lives with our collective hands, that is to say, with our organisations.

Meydan No. 35, January 2017

DAF – Turkish Revolutionary Anarchist Action Group

Anarchist Resistance: After the Elections – Before the Revolution

The website “Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness” has recently posted a collection of anarchist responses to the Fall 2016 US elections, “Our Work Has Begun – The Future is Coming.” Here is the contribution from Anarchist Resistance NYC. Their criticisms of electoral strategies cannot be separated from the call for alternative means of action; as Malatesta argued, abstentionism in itself doesn’t change anything.

The Days After the Election and the Days Before the Revolution

by Anarchist Resistance NYC

Today, many radicals are asking themselves how they could be waking up to President Trump. Our question instead is what does this mean for the Left in this country. Paralyzing myths have now been shattered, and this situation could, with a lot of work, passion, and clear thinking, lead to a strategy of action and a far greater positive change than voting for the status quo. The change we are talking about is generational and will have a far greater effect than any string of elections, no matter how repugnant they may be.

Those that see the Greatness of America as being misogynist, nativist, anti-urban, and homogenous in race, sexuality and faith are fighting a rearguard battle against the future which they can not hope to win.

First, this election has dispelled the myth, spread during Occupy, that the primary division in this country exists between the 99% and the 1%. Trump’s victory proves that the conflict is deeper than what amounts to a very simplistic and inaccurate economic calculus: the 99 must surely win against the 1. Many of the so-called 99%ers came out in to support a billionaire, while the other half supported a pro-free trade, Wall Street democrat. Yes, there is absolutely a conflict between the rich and the poor, but that has never been the only division in this country. Those that see the Greatness of America as being misogynist, nativist, anti-urban, and homogeneous in race, sexuality and faith are fighting a rearguard battle against the future which they can not hope to win. This doesn’t mean that they will go away quietly and without inflicting great harm, but that is the nature of dying ideologies.

What is distressing is that this desperate rhetoric has captured the imagination of many who have suffered real humiliation and pain under the neo-liberalism of the one-percent. The tragedy is that the rejection and failure of neo-liberalism has led those “left behind” to eagerly cast their lot with the equally oppressive and failed ideology of paleo-conservativism, with its xenophobia, isolationism and anti-intellectualism. This has created a desperate new political alignment that rejects the very things that can restore its adherents’ respect and livelihood.

From this vantage point, American electoral politics has been nothing more than a zombie horde of defunct worldviews along with oppressive and dangerous ideologies lurching across the blue and red states. No president can overturn the demographic reality that this country will continue to urbanize, will become more and more diverse, and that the mythologized manufacturing jobs of the past will remain dead and buried. These realities are the true wheel of history – the dead will inexorably give way to the living, the past to the future – and no election can change that.

Revolution is not an event that suddenly happens, but something that is carefully prepared, built towards, and eventually implemented by those aligned with the future. All governments, whether they are liberal or conservative, will fight equally hard against threats to the State or the capitalist power structure.

The second shattered myth is that electoral politics is a valid arena for populist leftist change. Whether it is Syriza or Trump, Podemos or Hillary, in the end the Left must confront the oppressive powers of the State and capitalism, none of which can possibly be subverted by superficial electoral games. This is not to say there would be no difference between a Trump administration and a Bernie administration, rather it is to say that the latter would only serve to stall the inevitable confrontation. Electoral politics holds out the promise of slow-moving, incremental socio-political advancement, but real evolution only comes about with a radical change of environment, and this can only be achieved through social revolution.

Revolution is not an event that suddenly happens, but something that is carefully prepared, built towards, and eventually implemented by those aligned with the future. All governments, whether they are liberal or conservative, will fight equally hard against threats to the State or the capitalist power structure. So if we are seeking a confrontation that promises a substantial and irreversible change in society, it doesn’t really matter if it is a liberal or a conservative regime in power. Liberal and conservative governments are both inherently reactionary and resistant to any kind of meaningful change, if only because their very existence is dependent on freezing the present and obscuring all possible futures.

We have seen this play out recently in places like Spain, Greece, the UK, and countless other countries. It is always the same paradigm: the political structure refuses to truly change and will continue an endless cycle of lurching back and forth between liberal and conservative. This brutal and blind impulse towards self-preservation is not only found in rightist regimes. Both right and left-wing regimes have used the implements of totalitarianism – prisons, secret police, fear, war, and economic oppression – to maintain the status quo. To have a future, we must reject all the State’s apparatuses of oppression, and this includes electoral politics with its self-serving divisiveness and false promises of change and hope.

The third myth is that the government has ever been our government. The government is the tool of the State, it is an occupying force now, just as much as it was before. All occupying forces of the twentieth century pair an outward benevolence with a healthy dose of fear and repression. We have always understood this formula, and have been struggling against it. Trump’s victory, nevertheless, heightens the sense of urgency to pull down the mask of benevolence, and we must not squander it. The government has never been our protector, and now those caught up in the trap of “representative democracy” may finally see this as well.

Without these myths, what ways are open to us in the dark days to come? The situation has changed and will continue to change during the next four long years. It won’t be easy, in large part because currently the Left is small and lacks the maturity needed to mitigate many of the on-coming attacks on the future. Attacks on women, LGBTQ, POC, immigrants, political dissidents, and so many others, have been par for the course for too long, and the coming years will be no different. Trump’s victory has only increased the number of bullies and people who are fearful.

We need to pluck up our courage, ready or not, and do what we can to stand up to the bullies. We need not only audacity, but imagination. Our theater of action must move beyond the co-optable symbolic opposition to the lived reality of everyday struggles against oppression. Our actions need to be bold like the Greek anarchists who squatted a hotel to house refugees or the German Leftists who physically shut down and re-purposed a neo-fascist radio station. We need to take up space in Trump’s America and support others to speak, move, and love in their own neighborhoods without fear. We need to continue to expose the systemic brutality against those racially targeted by the police.

While the Trumpists spew their fevered conspiracy theories we will double down on reality. Yes, we will get bashed, we will lose some fights, but there is too much at stake to stay on the sidelines waiting “for next time.” There is no cavalry coming, no courts, no congressional gridlock, no petitions, no media; now it is clear the only recourse is action from the ground up. This is the time when we must ask ourselves: do we really stand with those being bullied even when to do so may cost us our own safety? Is it worth it to stand side by side with the targeted, the scared, and the disheartened, knowing there will be risks? This time we cannot delude ourselves – thanks to Trump these risks are greater but so also are the rewards.

We can cower in the corner, or we can stand up and make new comrades with whom we will grow our resistance. We must become ungovernable to the occupation and unwavering in our support of those that feel targeted. This is how resistance is born and how it achieves victory.

The liberals promised to protect everyone with nothing but a ballot, and now they have been routed and are publicly conceding on all fronts. They are asking us to passively accept whatever injustices Trump has planned for us, for our neighbors, for our friends, for our co-workers, and for those comrades we have not yet met. We have never believed in hiding who we are or being ashamed of our liberatory aspirations.

We know the power of solidarity. We have relied on it for generations and we know it is a stronger, more honest way to protect ourselves and ensure our future. The time has come to stand up for ourselves and what we fight for, to defend the communities that the liberals have abandoned to fend for themselves while cynically asking them to return to the fold in four years’ time. Four years is too long to hide in fear or to look the other way. Let us not be afraid, let us not offer concessions, for we know our work has begun and the future is coming.

Let us not be afraid, let us not offer concessions, for we know our work has begun and the future is coming