Regarding the uprising in Iran, another schism is becoming apparent within the movements in the West. A schism that escalates into verbal confrontation within an extremely feverish, oppressive, and competitive environment.

Written by Thanasis Kosmopoulos / RisingUtopia– Athens Greece

Translated by Tasos Sagris / Void Network

If at least those of us who express opinions from the ramparts of the movement could manage to free our thinking from the feverish compression of these times and from the competitive-narcissistic culture that has permeated us—perhaps without our even realizing it—we could produce results through fruitful disagreements.

The schism lies in how we view the situation. Some prioritize the significance of the uprising in Iran as an expression of liberation from theocratic power, with poverty and oppression as the main causes, while those “on the other side” prioritize the geopolitical dimension, interpreting the uprising as instigated by American-Zionist imperialism in order to undermine the theocratic regime and restore the Pahlavi dictatorship.

The fact that each side focuses only on one extreme (the uprising from below), while the other focuses on something entirely different (the uprising as planned subversion), taking positions at the most extreme poles, shows how much competitive logic and self-promotion through disagreement has infiltrated the movements—even among people who are organized and know how to discuss things when they meet in person. So like imprisoned mice, we tear each other apart, each one entrenched in their own narcissism.

Setting aside, however, the “psychodynamic” fields of the outlet where this text is being written, we must take a position on the events in Iran at this time. And the position states that a mass social uprising is a reality where things are suddenly disrupted, and for the umpteenth time, in the relationship between society and power. This mass-scale uprising with hundreds of dead and wounded cannot be happening out of nowhere through manipulation by an external actor. The Americans are experts at dictatorships, at abductions, and at coup practices for changing regimes that didn’t suit them, even in mini-uprisings like Maidan, which was nothing more than the surface pretext for state overthrows that had already been prepared on the Ukrainian political stage long before.

Here it’s not the same as Ukraine. No foreign power can “stage” a mass social uprising in Iran with this altar of blood. Much less transform it so that a society of 92 million consents to the change from 47 years of theocratic power to the dictatorship of any Pahlavis. In Iran today, anti-American sentiments are far more prevalent than anti-regime ones. The US knows that even with a more easily successful military coup, Iranians would hardly accept American hegemony. The possibility of failure of an instigated practice is very serious.

There is a burden that moves Iranian society to risk their lives in the streets of Iranian cities. And as always, one of the main causes and triggers of major uprisings is the sudden decrease in income and the absence of freedom. Then no one can downgrade a mass social uprising because it is spontaneous. It is not instigated.

Some commentators, highlighting the consequences of the chronic embargo on the difficult position of the poor strata, again attribute responsibility for the social uprising to the West and its sanctions, as indirect “manipulation” toward uprising. Yes, this argument also has a basis, but the embargo doesn’t mean that the state doesn’t have the ability to find a way to fix this problem. After all, Iran has very close relations with China, participating in the Shanghai alliance.

So here there is an issue: from which perspective do we see things, and from which perspective are things actually happening.

Anyone who wants to maintain an anarchist/libertarian political identity must analyze an uprising from the perspective of the insurgents.

Freedom, the human being, the community, society—these are priorities, values, ethics, a way of seeing things. Even if geopolitics weighs more heavily on events as in Ukraine, we as libertarian anarchists must see the sufferings of societies affected by this war FIRST! The possibility of intervention by the social actor FIRST! This is the imperative of our worldview. This is what made us be with the Palestinians FIRST! We are with the Palestinians and not with their flags. This is what makes us be with the insurgent Iranians FIRST! And not with the flags of the state they are subjects of. This is our perspective. The ethics of our values above whatever geopolitical correlations.

Conversely, in the case where we view this uprising from a geopolitical perspective, it is inevitable that this downgrades the insurgents, perceives them as manipulated pawns, insults people who are giving even their blood in the struggle against the state’s forces of repression. With this logic, no uprising can fail to be instigated, since all uprisings occur under active geopolitical conditions. And the social uprising for the police asssination of 15 years old student Alexis Grigoropoulos in Greece 2008 was considered by some to be instigated by Russia while by others by Turkey. I don’t think this is the way that corresponds to the perspective of all of us who are participants in the cause of social Anarchism. I believe that by focusing on geopolitics, we have internalized a managerial conception of movements that belongs to the dominant logics of “mass management,” as well as to the detached games of the geopolitical chessboard of power relations.

Explaining the stance of many comrades on social media, I believe that during the previous period with the genocide in Gaza, some of us, beyond the historical dimension of the Nakba, belatedly discovered the geopolitical dimension of things. The tragedy of the genocide not only brought American-Zionist aggression into the frame of our political critique but also quite rightly targeted it as an axis of evil—a now established conception that is confirmed by “the Trump reality” every day.

Consequently, Gaza opened a new chapter in our political understanding, a dimension that the older ones among us had taken into account anyway, but which the younger ones didn’t have, since the social movements barely dealt with geopolitics. This new ‘discovery’ was received as a revelation, when in reality not only is this far from true, but the opposite may occur: this newly acquired analytical tool we’re so eager to showcase can actually blind us even more through our over-idealization of it. This happens because many of us treat what we previously ignored as a ‘revelation,’ when it’s actually something very old and quite leftist in origin. Because an analysis that puts societies on the margins, devaluing them as absolutely controlled and manipulated, that if it doesn’t identify them with states considers them levers of geopolitical interests, is nothing but a leftist analysis derived from the spirit of Stalinism, and later during the Cold War era.

Let’s stop “reinventing the wheel” by idealizing “our new tool” because of our previous ignorance. This way of perceiving things is wrong. Let’s do some introspection to see all those “patterns” that function permanently in our understanding, and let’s rid ourselves of them, if we want to become dangerous to the State. It’s a problem when geopolitics takes precedence over the societies. The superpowers, the regional powers, the states and their moves quite logically come to the center of our perspective through the deeper desire to see the genocidal punished, with the consequence, however, that we downgrade the subject that interests us, namely that of emancipatory uprising or the corresponding social revolution.

I would say then, recognizing that in the historical time of an uprising, the geopolitical dimension also takes place—it’s quite unlikely that Mossad units are not in the field—we must focus on what is primary, which is nothing other than solidarity with a society that is rising up for a better life and for its freedom. This in itself has value. This is axiologically our libertarian way of seeing reality, without ignoring the economic, geopolitical, religious, cultural, or historical dimension of issues. Giving honor and respect to the culture of the people of the East, divesting from our critical stance any colonial Western privileges.

In conclusion, being primarily interested in the stakes of “moving” societies does not preclude taking a position on geopolitical stakes but also on every other dimension of issues. First and foremost, we are interested in the people who are rising up and the success of their struggle for a better life; secondarily, we are interested in geopolitical conflicts, which we judge primarily based on what’s good for societies, which in reality creates that anti-colonial, anti-imperialist value code.

Yes, today American-Zionism is the matrix and source of state terrorism, neo-fascism, and wars. It is a source of oppression and misery and subjugation of many societies around the world. We will not divest ourselves of our value code by supporting its opponents and raising flags of oppressive regimes on our otherwise anarchist social media profile. Our stance cannot be determined by geopolitical dynamics, nor by the hatred we have for opponents. The opponent of my opponent cannot be my friend.

Our value system has at its center social revolution for freedom, common ownership, equality, horizontality. That is, social emancipation, which like a polar star forms an axial direction in a straight line. Imperialism, colonialism, nation-states are forms of oppression and exploitation. They can even coexist. We too can stand against them, being critical without betraying our principles.

In this way we must meet with the struggles of Iranians as well as all those who rise up against the state/capital system.

___

Written by Thanasis Kosmopoulos / RisingUtopia– Athens Greece

The post On the Uprising in Iran and the Schism Within the Movements in the West appeared first on Void Network.

Less than a year after taking office, Indonesian president Prabowo Subianto is facing the most militant anti-government protests in years. Recent street actions are caused by the country’s incredible inequality and rule by an entrenched political class. Inequality in Indonesia is extreme, and the gap between rich and poor is widening. While the middle class is shrinking, the elite is becoming ever more wealthy, and arrogantly so. The parliament recently voted themselves a substantial hike in monthly housing allowances, bringing their total monthly income to over 100 million rupiah, more than $6000. Meanwhile, the average monthly wage for workers in February 2025 was 3.09 million rupiah, less than $200. The country’s unemployment rate hovers at 15%, more for youth, the highest in Southeast Asia.

On Thursday morning, August 28, labor unions peacefully assembled outside the parliament building to call for higher wages, tax reform and adherence to existing labor laws. After workers dispersed, students surged around the building, demanding cancellation of politicians’ new housing allowances and dissolution of parliament. That night, Affan Kurniawan, a 21-year old Ojek driver (an online motorcycle delivery/taxi service) was run over and killed by a 14-ton police water cannon and riot control vehicle. A co-worker suffered a broken leg.

Dismissed from his role as one of the most powerful generals 30 years ago for his involvement in the disappearance of pro-democracy student activists, president Probowo now claims to be ‘shocked and amazed’ by the death of the Ojek driver. He urges calm and ordered an investigation into ‘ethical’ issues related to Affan’s death. The sudden eruption of militant actions across the peninsula compelled him to visit the family of the slain driver and promise that they would be supported by the government for their lifetimes. Affan’s funeral procession was made up of hundreds of green uniformed Ojek motorcycle drivers.

These marginalized workers daily come face to face with Indonesia’s stark inequality. They routinely pick up food at luxurious malls and deliver it to middle-class homes. Their financial situation is so precarious that on December 8, 2024, Darwin Mangudut Simanjutak starved to death in Medan as he waited for a customer’s order. The night before he died, he had complained to a friend that he hadn’t eaten because he didn’t have any money. Six months later, on May 20, 2025, thousands of drivers who worked for the Gojek online platform took to the streets in 18 cities. The Indonesia Online Drivers Union reported that at least 12 of their members had died due to fatigue because workers sometimes were on the job 18 hours per day. These drivers represent thousands of others who have been denied the benefits of the country’s economic development. For years, they have struggled to get improvements to their wages and conditions only to suffer from recent tax increases and wage reductions.

Despite the president’s appeal for calm, people refused to obey. After Affan’s killing, ‘Pembunuh’ (murderer) graffiti suddenly appeared on the streets of many cities. A leading student organization called on all citizens to join them in the streets, noting that, ‘An institution that should protect has turned into uniformed executioners, trampling the dignity of civilian citizens.’

On Friday, August 29, rallies and protests were organized across the archipelago. Regional parliament buildings were set afire and the national parliament in Jakarta was surrounded and besieged. More than a dozen bus and subway stations were destroyed, as were highway toll booths and carefully selected police buildings. The basement and first floor of a large police headquarters in East Jakarta was heavily damaged by fire. Hundreds of protesters massed outside the headquarters of the Jakarta Police’s elite Mobile Brigade (Brimob), the unit blamed for Affan’s death, throwing firecrackers as police responded with tear gas. A determined group of protesters, screaming ‘Pembunuh,’ tried to tear down the gates of the notorious unit, and pulled down a sign from the building’s exterior. Protests spread to other major cities, including Bandung in West Java, Semarang in Central Java, Surabaya in East Java and Medan in North Sumatra. In Yogyakarta, people besieged the regional police headquarters for five hours. Several government vehicles, a police service center, and a traffic post were set afire. Water barriers were attacked as well, forcing closure of the northern ring road.

The next day, Saturday, August 30, people’s anger continued to be expressed. Large buildings containing the regional parliament and city council in Makassar, Sulawesi went up in flames. Three government workers were trapped in the buildings and jumped to their deaths from the third floor. Another person was mistaken for a police spy and perished after being attacked by a crowd. In Solo, former President Jokowi’s hometown, the parliament building was also torched. In Jambi, the vice-governor’s official residence burned. In Martaram, protesters set on fire the massive regional parliament. Across the country, dozens of motorcycles, cars and buses were burnt.

At a televised press conference on August 30, the head of the country’s police and the army commander refused to apologize for the murderous state violence. Instead, they blamed anarchists. By dawn, stunned citizens observed dozens of burnt shells of cars surrounded by rocks and bottle fragments in many urban areas. As television news teams surveyed the damages from the street fights, their headlines uniformly declared, ‘anarchists harm the public good.’

Elite Arrogance Spurs Popular Response

After students called for the dissolution of parliament, Ahmad Sahroni, an influential member of parliament, called that perspective ‘a foolish mentality…That kind of person is the most stupid person in the world.’ After Sahroni repeated his remark, he left for Singapore. While he was gone, hundreds of outraged people surged into his private residence. They looted it while soldiers stood by, pleading with people not to burn the house. The army watched as people carried away the bathtub, refrigerator, washing machine, furniture, and expensive designer bags. A watch valued at more than $300,000 was among the appropriated items. Liberated dollars and rupiah were thrown into the air for all to share in the expropriated cash.

Eko Patrio, another member of parliament and a popular social media influencer, served as DJ for a dance party in parliament after pay raises were enacted. His outspoken celebration led people to converge on his residence. He engaged the protesters, claiming ‘everybody makes content.’ After he left for China, his residence was looted. People also streamed into the house of finance minister Sri Mulyani and Uya Kuya before taking all their belongings.

Crass public statements made by leading Indonesian government officials have continually made news. When minister of human development Pratikno was asked by a journalist about a large worm killing a young child, he publicly laughed out loud. Pratikno pointed to his ‘tired eyes’ before breaking into laughter. The five-year-old child named Raya had been diagnosed with tuberculosis. Once in the hospital, a worm began to come out out her nose. After she died, tapeworms weighing approximately one kilogram were found inside her body. The country’s minister of health later claimed infection, not worms, were the cause of death.

Although no one knows what will happen next, clean-up crews work at a feverish pace to clear streets of burnt out vehicles and to repair public transportation infrastructure. Of more than 500 people injured, dozens are still hospitalized, according to Street Paramedics Organization. Negotiations are underway for the release of more than 600 arrested people and for punishment of police involved in the killing of Affan. One eyewitness to Affan’s murder publicly stated that the Brimob vehicle ‘suddenly sped through the middle of the road without paying attention to the gathered crowd.’ Officials have detained seven Brimob officers for ‘ethical’ questions in connection with the driver’s death. Not surprisingly, government investigators have yet even to determine who was behind the wheel.

Political reforms of little consequence to the poor have been swiftly publicized. Probowo suspended the new housing allowances. Eko has been suspended as secretary-general of National Mandate Party (PAN). Apparently the final straw came after people criticized parliament members dancing to celebrate their housing allowance raise. Eko posted a video mocking people angered by the dancing. Ahmad Sahroni was also suspended from parliament by his NasDem Party, mentioning his statements ‘have offended and hurt the feelings of the people.’ Another party member, Uya Kuya, was shown dancing over a caption reading, ‘just dance with it, you guys thought that Rp3million a day was a lot.’ She was also suspended.

New repressive measures have also been enacted. Probowo warned that the protests could be considered ‘treason and terrorism.’ Three newly created mobile patrols of hundreds of heavily armed police now roam Jakarta. The country’s police chief ordered his officers to shoot with rubber bullets anyone who enters Brimob headquarters. The University of Indonesia has suspended all in-person classes and replaced them with online formats for at least the next week. At the same moment, preliminary reports indicate that protests continue to erupt across the archipelago.

Clearly, recent street actions and looting have stoked fear among the elite and middle class. The uprising has also provided new energy and pride to Ojek drivers and marginalized citizens, a palpable change that could be one of its most important outcomes. Prabowo canceled a trip to Beijing where he had long planned to attend a summit of leaders of countries opposed to US imperial actions. While he has expressed sympathy for Affan’s family, he has also promised that firm responses will meet ‘anarchist acts,’ damage to public facilities, and looting of public and private properties. Many people fear that if militant protests continue, state violence may become more murderous.

The post Notes on Class Struggle in Indonesia- by Paul O’Banion appeared first on Void Network.

We should start by looking back at the abrupt end of the movement against the “reform.”¹ After a series of demonstrations called by the unions, after a growing number of strikes which did not succeed in spreading or increasing their duration, the perspectives for struggle were increasingly reduced. Fatigue and lassitude finally took over, along with a feeling of powerlessness to change the balance of power favoring a government supported by capitalist forces and well-off sectors of society. The strikes, though involving active and determined workers, never generalized to a level capable of blocking the functioning of society. Repeated demonstrations, the energy and creativity of the demonstrators, the use of blockades and sabotage, the formation of networks of struggle collectives, the links forged between students and workers, and the sympathy of the majority of the working class—all these were not enough to sustain the dynamic and make it possible to pass to a more offensive level of struggle. Although very popular, the active movement remained the effort of a minority. The successive demonstrations only revealed to the eyes of the participants the impasse which the union forces sought increasingly to hide with triumphalist speeches, an irritating demagoguery. The movement was finally exhausted, and the activism of minorities could do nothing about it.

The clear end of the movement did not efface the collective consciousness with a profound and massive rejection of the neoliberal line of present-day capitalism and its more and more authoritarian modes of governing. This rejection did not succeed in finding its way to become a decisive force of opposition. The rejection it expressed is therefore still there, so the defeat was not experienced as the defeat of the collective and its subversive energy. The general feeling is summed up by a phrase given different emphases and nuances: “We have lost but they haven’t won. The fight will start again, sooner or later.”

This disgust with the political class and its propagandists, with the increasing repression of all forms of opposition, with general unhappiness, social impoverishment, and growing class inequality provided a context for the explosion of revolt against police violence among young people in working-class neighborhoods. This is racist violence that is a daily experience in the neighborhoods that are parking places for young people—poor and for the most part excluded from the world of work and social life in general—who, though of immigrant origin, are often “French” for one or two generations. Police violence and its racist dimension have a long history in France, with roots deep in the class conflicts marking the origin of industrial capitalism in France and the repression of successive groups of immigrants who have long composed the working class. To that must be added the consequences of a badly digested colonial heritage and the nationalist rebellions of the postwar period. More recently, police repression has returned to the forefront of social life with the movement of the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests), of whom more than 3,000 were wounded and mutilated by the police. Now it is extending to all forms of opposition to the social order, including struggles against the destruction of the environment. These have been systematically criminalized and confronted by the police. This was notably the case recently at Sainte-Soline, in the center-west of France, where 30,000 people, mobilized to block an agricultural-industrial project of privatizing water resources, came up against militarized police forces that produced dozens of wounded and left two young people in critical condition.

It is hard to analyze an event like the banlieue youth revolt, characterized by spontaneity and improvisation. Clearly, the spontaneity is the fruit of a pre-existing situation, and the unpredictable was obviously to be predicted. But this revolt took unexpected forms and it is difficult to see its links with earlier struggles. Karl Marx once suggested there are social revolts that are like earthquakes—it is pointless to try to predict them, and even more to dissect them or to set them in pre-established schemas and political projects constructed in advance. Nonetheless, if one is an enemy of the existing order, one cannot dissociate these events from the current crisis of society and one is inevitably led to solidarity with them, even if that solidarity is purely abstract and impossible to make concrete, even if these revolts do not open a perspective on radical social change. Perhaps they are signs of something different on the horizon. Only the future will tell and provide perspective. Meanwhile, some facts can help us understand the circumstances of the explosion.

The recent revolt of young people in working-class neighborhoods has surpassed the similar revolts of 2005² in intensity and breadth. While at that time, the rebellion went on for three weeks, this time it lasted only a few days, but involved more of the country; it reached many little provincial cities traditionally considered “calm” and not only the big urban centers. The revolt was not confined to neighborhoods outside the city proper, the suburbs, but expanded into the urban centers. As a Communist city official in the Paris region observed, “Symbolically speaking, this went far beyond what happened in 2005.”³ Indeed, the explosion of anger and rage focused above all on “symbols of the state” and in particular on the so-called forces of order, the police and the gendarmerie (military police), viewed in any case by the young of these neighborhoods as the heart of the state’s repressive control. Contrary to what the government and its propagandists want people to think, schools and civic institutions (libraries, cultural enters) were not the most commonly attacked locations—even though for many kids these places are centers of power, places that they assimilate to others where they are rejected, devalued, excluded. Among the 2,500 public buildings set on fire or damaged in more than 500 urban areas there was a high number of police stations and gendarme posts, compared to a small number of schools (168). Gun stores were pillaged here and there by people who took hunting rifles and other weapons, a new fact testifying to the increased level of violence in clashes with the authorities. Another novelty: a hundred mayor’s offices were attacked, along with elected politicians, occasionally in their private residences.

Institutions of repression and control are replacing the collapsing institutions of the welfare state. This evolution has been visible for years: the increase of repression is the counterpart to the willful and continuous dismantling of the welfare state. The realization of this fact was central to the revolt of the Gilets Jaunes and more recently to the movement against the pension “reform.” To quote Marx once again, the forms of political power tend to correspond to the forms of the capitalist exploitation of labor. The latter are increasingly violent, characterized by the precarity, fragility, and harshness of working conditions and low wages. The forces of repression are hated in the poor neighborhoods, where young people are abandoned to “uberized” jobs. They are, so to speak, a world of proletarians outside of the classical proletariat. The police, on the other hand, are always supported by the bourgeois classes (naturally), by shopkeepers, and also by workers who are afraid of losing the little they still have and who are attached to a “balanced” past, mythologized and longed for, which will not return.

The modern French state (and in this it is setting an example for Europe) is increasingly based on institutions dealing in open violence. The police have become a state within the state. Even worse, recent developments suggest that the branches of the police charged with repression on the streets somehow lost their connection with the top of the institution, with the hierarchy of command. Instead, they are very much under the control of the police unions whose links with the extreme right are by now well known. This development is producing unease even among the ruling elite, the leading liberal press, and the judiciary. The same development can be seen in other sectors of the state: for instance, everyone knows (even if it is not openly said) that the Minister of the Interior, in charge of the police, cannot be nominated without the agreement of the police unions. Similarly the Minister of Agriculture and Ecological Transition is “chosen” by the main agricultural-industrial firms, as the energy minister is “chosen” by the bosses of the nuclear industry. One could say that we are progressing towards transparency about the real nature of democracy.

There is also the question of social immiseration. The explosions of revolt brought with them a lot of looting—much more than in 2005. In many places, after the kids had broken shop windows and stolen some candies it was their mothers and grandmothers who came to stock up on noodles, sugar, flour, oil, and canned food—something that tells us a lot about the period we are entering in our supposedly affluent society. These revolts were also, in part, hunger riots.

The young people who ran free in the streets were for the majority very young, between twelve and seventeen, younger than in 2005. There were over 3,000 arrests, with more than 1,300 youths processed through expedited trials, and more than 700 individuals sentenced to serious prison terms, 8 months on average.⁴ Thus the imprisoned surplus population continues to grow. A few big-city suburbs and neighborhoods saw a momentary mix of kids in revolt and those who have been drawn for years to clashes with the police in demonstrations, the so-called black bloc. But for the most part these remained two worlds separated by ideology. I’ve heard of the reply (real or made up) of a young rebel to a black bloc member: “You get yourselves arrested because you are engaged in politics, we do it because we are young!” On the other hand, given the form of the revolt, its spontaneity and suddenness, and the places in which it broke out (streets and blocks), workers generally expressed no solidarity. Here and there the intervention of teachers or local civic or cultural workers made it possible to discuss things, to “reason with” the young people’s rage. Discussions of the event certainly took place in workplaces and among families at home, but without any particular impact. One wonders to what extend the “family” institution still exists within the world of proletarians which is decomposing or imploding. We know that the number of single-parent families continues to increase, especially those headed by single mothers, for the most part unable to pay attention to the children thanks to the struggle for daily survival: long hours of work and transportation, debilitating fatigue. Macron’s speech demanding that families “control your children,” visibly had no relation to reality.

However, in the neighborhoods where the revolts broke out, people openly expressed a clear understanding of the situation and a critique of the police. The sense that the government lies, that the police are out of control and defend the interests of the well-off, is generally shared. People reject state violence, which is seen as violence against the working classes—even if at the same time people demand more from the state. A contradiction which reveals the present level of social consciousness, far from understanding that the repressive state is the only state possible in the present period of capitalism.

Groups thinking of themselves as “radical” saw these revolts as the basis of a “revolutionary” situation, which should be developed and “politicized.” Given the circumstances, in particular the repressive force of the modern state, to incite fourteen-year-olds to pursue this path of confrontation, ignoring their weaknesses, seems irresponsible. Much wiser were the words of a woman from a neighborhood association who, because she didn’t feel like having any arguments to calm the young people down, simply advised them: “Take care, don’t put yourself in danger.” Because they really are in danger, before and during the revolt. It is already a lot to take seriously the reasons for their anger.

Practically all the discourse of the old left, in contrast, demonstrates incomprehension of the events, a denial of the condition of this abandoned youth who “is angry at everyone, at the whole world,” as someone said. It is true that rage against the world does not necessarily lead to the idea that another world is possible. And there is a big difference from the social movement that preceded it, where this idea was present even if it could not be realized. The fact is that a social explosion without results or immediate perspectives is disturbing. Thus the renowned thinker Edgar Morin (one of the last nonconformist left intellectuals) who wrote about the events without touching on the material conditions—the daily violence—that provoked them invoked jihadism to suggest a nihilist quality. It’s an easy and perverse move to make, since the great majority of the young people involved are of immigrant origin: “Unlike the jihadists motivated by hatred for unbelievers, we see here the opposite of faith, a sort of nihilism. Beyond rage at the death of Nahel M. it seems that the intoxication of smashing everything and setting fires was lived as a dark festival by those who carried it out.”⁵ The threatening image of the (twelve to seventeen-year-old !?) “barbarian” thus discreetly replaced the figure of the “jihadist,” a discursive development that deserves some discussion. In any case, Morin concluded that “the events can be read in two different ways: as revealing the deep evil that is eating way at our society, or as an attack of adolescent madness, collective and transitory.” The “profound evil of our society” seems the correct reading to me.

To conclude, with a few notes on the attitude of political and union forces: Here things are at the moment somewhat confused. The near totality of political forces in France defend the liberal principles of capitalism. Only the new party France Insoumise takes a position against this orientation, with the weak support of several marginal Socialists (the majority have signed on to Macron’s neoliberal project) and the Greens, themselves divided between “realists” and “radicals.” In contrast, the decaying Communist Party, currently run by a neo-Stalinist clan, patriotic and productivist, holds demagogic ideas about “order” and the police, regarded as “order workers.” The political class as a whole is engaged in a ferocious struggle to put France Insoumise , now the principal enemy of the liberal consensus, beyond the pale. For the time being, this party has been behaving in a rather dignified way within bourgeois politics: it has defended the young arrestees and demanded a “democratic reconstruction” (?) of the police. That it asked angry young people not to destroy social goods (schools, social centers, libraries, health centers, public transportation) without mentioning the attacks on the police and their buildings has been very badly taken by other political organizations. This might explain, in part thanks to electoralist demagoguery, why they are far from power. What would they do if they were in the government? There is also the fact that this new party is composed of people coming from civil society, militants involved in the recent struggles, neighborhood activists. It is a party motivated by the strong feeling of social conflict that has been at work in France for years. However, even given young people’s disgust for politics, it is likely that this attitude will be rewarded in the next elections. The unions have also been prudent in their reactions. The biggest ones (CFDT, CGT) and the more combative one (SUD) did not condemn the youth; they timidly tried to establish links with their revolt and the general social situation.

A bit of sociological information gives us something to think about: comparing the locations of these revolts with those of demonstrations against the pension “reform” shows an overlap, particularly in the small provincial cities. We can at the very least conclude that the atmosphere of social revolt currently deep-rooted in French society has reached the young people excluded from it. Their need to fight against social injustice, against injustice in general, is an idea whose time has come. Like the recognition that the government lies and that we can’t expect it to improve the situation of the weakest members of society. We should not forget that the recent struggles of the Gilets Jaunes and their insurrectionary spirit remain alive. Everything is there: everything is present, in the memory of the moment.

We have to see what comes next, for better and for worse. The general situation will not be stabilized, austerity will increasingly affect the working classes, the exclusion of the young will continue and even be more severe. The forms of political representation will continue to discredit themselves, parliamentary democracy will take more authoritarian forms. Other events, movements, struggles will come. History goes on.

__________

Written by Charles Reeve

Source: Brooklyn Rail

1. See Charles Reeve, “Letter from Paris”, https://brooklynrail.org/2023/04/field-notes/Letter-From-Paris-1
2. In 2005 revolts in French banlieues broke out on October 27 in response to the deaths of two adolescents, electrocuted within a power installation while attempting to escape a police patrol.
3. The mayor of Grigny, L’Humanité, June 30, 2023.
4. Figures from the Ministry of the Interior, July 5, 2023.
5. Edgar Morin, “La crise française doit être située dans la complexité d’une polycrise mondiale,” Le Monde, July 29 2023.

The post France: A Movement Ends, An Explosion of Rage appeared first on Void Network.

“Revolution — without icons and without capital letters — remains a necessity, as an indeterminate idea of change and as the compass for human will. Not as a model, not as a prefabricated schema, but as a strategic hypothesis and a regulating horizon.” These words by the philosopher Daniel Bensaïd begin Enzo Traverso’s new book, soberly entitled Revolution: An Intellectual History. Traverso, one of Italy’s foremost historians of ideas, now teaches at Cornell University. Il manifesto met up with him in Rome during a recent visit in which he presented his book.

Today, the enemies of political and social revolution speak of “revolution” when they are selling the latest model of smartphone, the latest brand of toothpaste, or running for election. Whereas those who would be in favour of revolution are silent. In what sense is revolution still a “strategic hypothesis” today, as Bensaïd argued?

There has been an obfuscation of the word “revolution,” which has become devoid of content, an empty signifier. There was a time when the Left had to choose between reform and revolution. Today, the word “revolution” refers to the latest model of iPhone and “reform” to some socially regressive measure related to the introduction of neoliberal management (hence labour reforms, reforms to the healthcare system, university reforms and so on). This metamorphosis is also significant in the field of historiography, where the idea of “fascist revolution” — itself belonging to fascist rhetoric — is widespread, while the revolutionary dimension of events such as the Spanish Civil War or the Paris Commune tends to be ignored. The concept of “revolution” changes, as do its political uses. We are well past the era when a historian like Eric Hobsbawm made it the key to interpreting modernity. I am convinced that this eclipse has its origin — far from questions of the communicative strategies of politics and the culture industry — in the defeat of the revolutions of the twentieth century. This was, indeed, the age of revolutions, not just wars and totalitarianism. In the century of the “principle of hope,” communism had become a concrete and possible utopia, in Ernst Bloch’s sense. This “horizon of expectations” has vanished.

You write that the movements over the last fifteen years, and perhaps even longer than that, have not manifested a historical memory, yet they are not prisoners of the past and they need to reinvent themselves. How is it possible to create a revolutionary political tradition, under these conditions?

Obviously, it is not a matter of blaming young people for their lack of historical memory. Rather, it is a question of coming to terms with the “sense” of history that is today dominant. The new social and political movements have considerable potential, but they are the offspring of a historical turning point that has evacuated the utopian horizon of the past, identified precisely with the idea of revolution. Reconstructing its history and semantic shifts will perhaps help us understand that it remains a compass for our time.

What does it mean not to have a memory of revolution?

It means that the cycle of revolutions in the twentieth century has come to an end and that we are living the consequences of this change. For a century, history seemed to be running towards socialism, whose premise was the conquest of power by military force. This vision is light years away from our intellectual universe today. It is this turn of events that prevents the new movements from fitting into a historical continuity. This does not mean that there will be no more revolutions. On the contrary, there have already been some in recent years — just think of the “Arab Spring”. These revolutions, however, no longer identified themselves with past models — socialism, national liberation, pan-Arabism —which are now obsolete, exhausted, or defeated, and they did not really know where they were going. Once the oppressive regimes of Ben Ali and Mubarak had been overthrown, they did not know how to replace them.

Even when strong models did exist, many revolutions failed. Is a loss of bearings an aggravating factor?

It is also a condition that allows for great freedom. The idea of a radical transformation persists even though it does not recognise itself as heir to the models inherited from the twentieth century, in particular communism and anti-colonialism. But a new model is not yet in sight. This vacuum is at the origin of an incredible creativity, I would even say a considerable theoretical sophistication, present in movements that are forced to reinvent themselves. At the basis of this creativity is a revolutionary question: how to change the world, put an end to capitalism, save the planet, overcome the appalling inequalities that plague our societies? I think that this need is widely felt among young people today.

Reference to the 1960s and 1970s runs through several of your books, for example Left-Wing Melancholia. Marxism, History and Memory. What are the differences between those years and today?

Those who discovered politics in the 1970s had to choose from a wide range of well-defined movements and organisations. This is, fortunately, not the problem for young people today, who think and act without feeling that they are being enclosed in ideological cages. However, this change does not only offer advantages, but also brings great fragility, precisely because these movements are not inscribed in a historical continuity. They are ephemeral, short-lived sparks. When they do manage to build up a durable and established political presence, they run the risk of being reabsorbed by traditional politics, as we have seen with Podemos, with Syriza, or even in Great Britain, where the attempt to renew the Labour party from below hit a wall. In Italy, all the movements that have appeared in the last twenty years have failed to give themselves a political expression except through coalitions of micro-apparatuses that would stifle any enthusiasm. We need to go beyond these brief upsurges to reconstruct a horizon of expectation, to reinvent an idea of futurity.

In the neoliberal societies that you analyse in Singular Pasts: The “I” in Historiography there is the terror of failure and defeat. Does this put us off even thinking of trying again?

Maybe, but socialism was born out of “working through” defeat, namely the defeat of the French Revolution that ended with the Restoration. The twenty-first century was born out of another historical defeat, of global dimensions. The younger generations probably do not realise this, but they act in a context heavily burdened by this legacy. Recovering a sense of history, knowing that changing the world is an age-old project — a project that in the twentieth century not only seemed possible, but was put into action — could offer an identity, however unstable it is, and make us feel less vulnerable.

One of the most interesting ideas that has emerged in recent years from the movements is intersectionality, the convergence of struggles and a new idea of class as the object of multiple oppressions and the subject of possible resistances. This perspective is often evoked in France, a country where you have lived and taught, including in the experience of La France Insoumise. Can this be a useful practice for constructing the sense of the revolutionary perspective?

La France Insoumise has evolved in a positive way. Several unsavoury nationalists or “sovereigntyists” left or were asked to leave. It participated in the Gilets Jaunes even without being the driving force in this movement. It was able to integrate the environmental dimension and practise — as far as possible — intersectionality between claims and demands based on gender, race, and class. Because it is attuned to the anti-racist movements in working-class banlieues, it overcame the narrow limits of “national-republicanism”, the old framework of French socialism. The left-wing coalition has achieved a significant electoral success, but clearly this is no revolution. It must overcome many obstacles.

How so?

From a purely formal point of view, the programme of the left-wing NUPES coalition is more moderate than that of François Mitterrand’s Union de la gauche in 1981. It does not include the nationalisation of certain key sectors of the economy. Mélenchon has honestly acknowledged this: even if he had become prime minister, he would not have had the strength to implement his programme without the support of a strong social movement, which is missing at the moment. The problem is the very high level of abstention. In the current context, the old programme of social democracy — redistribution of wealth, social reforms, defence of wages and pensions, access to education, transport, and health — implies a rupture with the neoliberal order. La France Insoumise embodies this rupture. In the post-war period, social democracy was the instrument of the “humanisation” of capitalism facing a gigantic challenge, that of socialism as a “principle of hope” unfolding across a global scale. Today, social democracy has become one of the pillars of the neoliberal order. In the era of universal reification, a genuine social-democratic programme cannot be realised without a rupture with the dominant model of capitalism.

There is not only the history of revolutions but also a history of counterrevolutions. This has been the case since the beginning of the modern revolutions, the French and Soviet revolutions, with devastating effects. Are counterrevolutions simply reactions or are they autonomous, producing a new reality of their own?

It is a kind of norm of history: there is no revolution without counterrevolution, bound by a symbiotic relationship. The “velvet revolutions”, which emerged when Soviet power was in crisis and could no longer send the tanks to suppress them, were an exception. Counterrevolutions have a culture and ideology of their own, which go through transformations. In the twentieth century, they produced fascism. The rhetoric of fascism was intended to be “revolutionary”, but its main component was reaction against Bolshevism. The twentieth-century counterrevolution did not claim to restore the ancien régime but rather to invent a new form of power. Its culture was not insignificant, even if some considered it only an “anti-culture”; after all, fascism invented a new idea of civilisation. In Germany, Nazism produced great figures like Jünger, Schmitt and Heidegger. In France, the literature of the first half of the twentieth century is marked, after Proust, by a string of fascists like Céline and Drieu la Rochelle.

Can the current neoliberal cycle be interpreted as a counterrevolution — as a reaction to the global revolutionary cycle of the 1960s and 1970s?

Yes. I would like to answer, as a historian, by evoking Fernand Braudel’s longue durée. The neoliberal age we are living through today can be seen as a backlash — in this sense, a counterrevolution — against the long cycle of twentieth-century revolutions. On the social level, this is obvious. All the social achievements of the last century have been called into question. The power relations between classes on a global scale have changed profoundly. In Brooklyn, workers in an Amazon warehouse gained recognition for their union — and this was one of the great achievements of recent years. If we think about what the labour movement was in the 1960s and 1970s, there is no doubt that this achievement comes in a frightening context of regression.

What is the history of the counterrevolution which we are living through?

For decades, neoliberalism was a heretical current within the culture of the ruling classes. During World War II, who would have taken seriously a book like The Road to Serfdom, which presented Roosevelt as a fifth columnist for totalitarianism, at a time when the Soviet Union, the United States and Great Britain were fighting Nazism and fascism? At the time, Hayek’s ideas were inadmissible. The first sign of a turnaround came with the Chilean coup of 1973. The Chicago Boys arrived and introduced structural reforms that the Left around Gabriel Boric still has to joust with today. Pinochet embodied the armed counterrevolution. Subsequently, neoliberalism imposed itself with an “anti-totalitarian” rhetoric based on the combination of liberal democracy and market society.

So, neoliberalism is not only a reaction, but also an institutionalised political form and a specific form of life that aspires to continual self-renovation. Is it right to cast it as “revolutionary”?

The neoliberal “revolution” — which extends far beyond neoliberalism as an economic model — is a permanent bombardment of images, fashions, commodities, and illusions. It is, in a word, a “privatised utopia”. This is no innocent operation. It seeks to instil the feeling that everything is transforming around us even if the socio-economic order that produces catastrophes and immense suffering, capitalism as civilisation — what Andreas Malm calls the “capitalocene” — remains immutable. I would like to emphasise that neoliberalism has not only imposed itself with armies, but above all as a “democratic” alternative to totalitarianism, which all twentieth-century history has been folded into.

If revolution has been hijacked by counterrevolutionaries, how can this outlook be turned around?

I don’t think that anyone has the recipe for that. Revolution is a historical moment in which the oppressed become aware of their strength, their ability to change the world through collective action. Walter Benjamin used an evocative formula: the splitting of the atom that unleashes extraordinary and explosive forces. Revolution is the moment when the linearity of history is suddenly broken and everything becomes possible, when new horizons open up: revolutions are factories of utopias. This inevitably entails considerable risks because dangerous paths can also be taken.

Revolutions, however, do not happen by decree, they arise from below and spread like “furies”, as Jules Michelet put it. But it is important to know that, even though revolutions are continually being exorcised, they are still breathing life into history.

________

Source: autonomies.org/2022/08/enzo-traverso-revolutions-are-still-breathing-life-into-history

The post Enzo Traverso: Revolutions are still breathing life into history appeared first on Void Network.

Preface 

Below are two excerpts from Rodrigo Karmy Bolton’s The Future is Inherited, a compilation of essays and reflections composed during the initial months of the 2019 Chilean uprising, which recently appeared in English. 

In October 2019, Transantiago, the Metropolitan Transit system in Chile’s capital, raised the train fare by thirty pesos. In response, high school students planned what they called a Evasión Masiva, a week of coordinated protests across the city where participants and commuters alike jumped metro turnstiles and refused to pay the fare. On Friday, October 18, a “mass evasion”  shut down Santiago’s metropolitan transit system during rush hour. Crowds began gathering across the city, and by nightfall, barricades guarded by singing revelers burned at every major intersection. Banks and government buildings were set ablaze, while supermarkets, WalMarts, and one sixth of all corporate owned pharmacies were looted. The country’s President at the time, Sebastián Piñera, held a press conference in which he declared a “state of emergency” in the city. Twenty-four hours later, tanks and Humvees patrolled Santiago, military curfews were enforced, and civil liberties were suspended for the first time since the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990).

This inaugural wave of unrest was quickly countered by a series of political maneuvers that sought to channel the energy in the streets into institutional changes. By November 2019, the ruling conservative party and its opposition agreed to initiating a process that would lead to the drafting of a new constitution. 

Two years have since passed. The constitutional convention has begun to draft a new constitution, and Gabriel Boric, a leader from the 2011 university student movement turned congressional representative, now serves as Chile’s president. In the eyes of many who cleave to the normative framework of political conflict, this trajectory appears as a sorely needed process of social change. However, as Karmy’s meditations on the experiences and rhythms of October 2019 reveal, the most powerful elements of the revolt are often those least capable of being translated into institutional transformations.  

For Karmy, the date “October 18th” marks not simply a night of insurrection, but a fissure that split Chilean history open, like a short circuit that bridged the anger against the Pinochet Dictatorship, the 1990’s transition to democracy, and the present forms of technocratic governance. After decades of violent social control, forced disappearances, torture, and extrajudicial murder, the political reconciliation that announced the shift from dictatorship to parliamentary democracy was made possible by a series of agreements and accords between Pinochet’s administration, its political supporters, and its centrist and leftist opponents. This meant that throughout the 1990s, Pinochet remained a “senator for life” and the head of the Chilean military, while his 1981 constitution enshrining the Chicago boy’s neoliberal principles remained in place.

Although social democrats and progressives like to present the rampant inequalities and political restrictions that plague contemporary Chile as institutional hangovers from the dictatorship, the Chilean left has its own part to play in this history. As Karmy shows, their inability to break away from “the transitional episteme” has committed them to a pragmatic framework of political conflict, which prioritizes the restoration of a shared legitimacy and the practical matter of governability over all expressions of “popular,” i.e., everyday people’s concern for justice, dignity, and self-respect. If the revolt taught us anything, it’s that the real conflict is not between the camps of left and the right, but between an elitist framework for resolving questions of governance, and a Chilean people who no longer wish to be governed as a population whatsoever.

Whether or not the energy from October 2019 will succeed in breaking out of this transitional episteme remains to be seen. What limitations would need to be overcome, in order for this to happen? In Chile’s capital, it was the state of exception and the military in the streets that allowed the game of mass evasion to be transformed into a general revolt. Yet constitutional states of exception have been declared many times in Chile’s periphery in recent years, without the corresponding eruption of mass revolt. Mapuche communities in Southern Chile have been occupied by the Chilean military since September 2021, in response to an escalation in direct actions against the local elite complicit with extractive industries and ecological destruction earlier that year. In the desert regions along Chile’s northern border, the military has also been called on to police the crisis of mass undocumented immigration spurred by Venezuelans fleeing the economic crisis. This suggests, first, that our understanding of popular revolt must expand beyond the spectacle of urban riots and street demonstrations, to consider what revolt looks like in other territories. At the same time, the concept of “popular” revolt has often been hamstrung by its association with an idea of “the people” as the agent and actor of struggle, whether this be the Nation or various abstract “communities.” As Karmy shows, the protagonists of the Chilean revolt, at the moment they take to the streets, cannot be neatly subsumed under any such categories. In this way, his work not only allows us to see the limitations of the 2019-2021 wave of global uprisings, but also helps us identify potential connections with others struggles internationally that continue to confront similar obstacles. 

—Emilio Janequeo, Santiago de Chile, April 2022

October 18 [1]

Whatever happened to this date? Is it just a chronological date? Perhaps, a dislocated number that, while locating itself on a calendar, desperately flees from it. Its potency does not match its figure, its life with its letter. It explodes without referring to any leader, nor to any political party or partisan vanguard. Everything is much more precarious, but at the same time, more resistant, it can flee between the interstices of the city and permanently “evade” the “who” created by police dynamics. “Evade” designated the subtraction of the sensible life of bodies — what we will call “surface” — with respect to the governmental machinery of neoliberal reason.

As if a crack opened in the middle of the road, as if a historical continuum had stopped. The atmosphere normalized the presence of multiple sounds: sirens breaking the city buzz, helicopters machine-gunning the airspace, shots from various weapons filtering through diverse populations, never before images being monitored by images already frozen, songs — Víctor Jara ^[2] or Jorge González ^[3] — penetrating from other times to face a voracious repression; pots and pans biting into the night coming from dark windows and protesters defying the curfew with shouts and hand-to-hand combat against police or military uniforms.

Nights and days were not the same, but they were the same. A single day, hour or minute that condensed days and nights, days and nights as if there was no more difference between them. Other faces ravaged the mornings, other voices dictated the rhythm; the poor, the blind, those who had said “enough” to a life that promised nothing but debts, to an existence that had renounced all historicity, to an agony whose grief paralyzed bodies. The streets were invested with graffiti with which the crowd embraced the moment of their celebration. It all meant that the downward gaze in front of the boss could not carry on. The randomness of the clash was violent: the boss found the servant in the ferocity of a revolt, without the domestication he presupposed, without the ignorance he attributed to him, without the fear that he had instilled in him.

“No fear” is infinitely replicated on the walls of Chile. With no fear, but with rage: a whole generation that had been hardened by the silence of dictatorship imploded in the emergence of rage brought by their children. But anger not as a psychologically manageable emotion, but as a politically ungovernable affect. The entire transitional episteme was made for docile bodies. It was always a matter of modesty, of control, of learning not to demand beyond “what is possible” within a historical and political limit that became ontological. If not, the military could return or the businessmen could flee: fear provided the affective tonality to the transitional episteme. Sociologists, economists and politicians consolidated an upper echelons’ agreement around the prevalence of neoliberal reason. Everyone had to give in because everyone had to accept the established limit that was forged in the formula “as far as possible”. 

Those who raged during the dictatorship could faint in the desolation of democracy, those who fought during the dictatorship had to tame their spirits in the new transitional machinery. But injustice remained unredeemed. And it is that fissure that always challenged the transitional episteme that is actualized in the politicization of anger that ends up leading the Chilean government machine to bankruptcy.

Rage has been the ardor of an injustice that went beyond the psychological sphere captured by neoliberal confiscation and, like a blast crossing two eras at once, it left historicity in the hands of children: “He who doesn’t know about children, knows nothing of riots.” A revolt leads a people to experience its in-fancy, precisely, the inactuality with oneself, the strange thunder of its untimeliness. Usual spaces and times are shattered into a thousand pieces. And the revolt reminded us that the most decisive tremor, the adjustment with our historicity, is nothing more than a future that is inherited.

It is not a question of “future” as a horizon that owns a precise direction, but of a future in the sense of a disposition to the possibility of becoming others, in which a potency never rested on some trauma that could foreshadow it in some way, but always remained irreducible to the tricks of the law. It is a power that is nothing more than future and that only its clandestine transfer of the impersonality of a common can make it possible for bodies to know what it is that they are actually capable of. Because this potency is defined by its transmissibility and it becomes nothing more than an affirmation of life that escapes any suture provided by power. The future is inherited precisely because the bodies were able to “evade” the fear inoculated by the oligarchy during their years of dictatorship and in the convoluted transition.

The gaze of the former servant — like that passive “Indian” before the colonist — does not bow his head in front of power, but rather defies it and suffers the direct destruction of its eyes. The servant burns everything, launching himself in his martyrological potency for yesterday’s dead, for those who were defeated in the past. Rage burns everything on history’s pyre, without the authorization by the masters who once crushed the native, the worker, the student. In-fancy dislocating the civilized continuity between life and language to lead us to the cleft of popular imagination: the only barricade that connects bodies with surfaces, the new with the old, life with its forms.

The entire university apparatus, with its knowledge of order, believes that the revolt is a “social phenomenon.” A reduction to causalism by current sociology, when truly the revolt is a medium of common sensibility in which the spirits of the past embrace the incandescence of our present. Thousands of Chileans knew this when they sang “The right to live in peace” (El derecho de vivir en paz) by Victor Jara or “The dance of those left behind” (El baile de los que sobran). Uncle Ho, who fought against North American imperialism, became a surplus, a remnant, much like the municipalized students of the 1980s, ungovernable who transmitted potency from one moment to another, who inherited the future to those who could hear the intensity of their voice. That is why October 18 is not a date, but rather an artifact of spiritualism by which the defeated were able to “evade” the historical cruelty of the victors.

Revolt^[4]

One of the first days of protests I found myself at 11am in Plaza Italia. I was going to the demonstration called for 2pm, but decided to arrive earlier to get a feel for the atmosphere. After all, politics is always an atmospheric affair. I began walking from Plaza Italia towards the Andes, that is, towards the Salvador Metro station and the landscape was made up of the rubble after the battle. On Sunday, there was a large demonstration, and protests continued during the night, in the midst of the declaration of a curfew. There was the sour smell of tear gas along the road, burning the skin; burned plastic occasionally penetrated the urban ruin. Some shops were burnt, others were intact: The Gabriela Mistral Cultural Center (GAM) was intact, the Kentucky Fried Chicken branch was burnt; the theater of the University of Chile was intact, the branch of the Bank of Chile was completely burnt.

Popular violence is not a “Hobbesian violence”[5] but a violence interrupting capitalist symbolism. These are not vandals who simply destroy everything they touch, but molecular movements that, most of the time, direct their fury against the signs of power. But this does not mean, that once the revolt is in full swing, several criminal gangs will not penetrate the popular din to progressively restore exchange value from within, inoculating economy into what the revolt had made aneconomical. Precisely: every revolt runs at a loss. The aneconomy of the revolt interrupts “the normal flow” of the country’s capital, the institutions stop working, temporality is strongly suspended. The upsetting of reality, a necessary elixir of revolt, is a sign that a people has broken out as a revolt. 

Because no revolt carries with it the sign of purity. It is dirty, full of mixtures that flourish in the suspension of historical time it has opened. Every revolt fights against its own centrifugal forces, because its power is measured in the ability to remove sovereign violence that, however, tries to capture it permanently. For this reason, a revolt must bring into play an untimely relationship with the present. It never fits with itself because it wildly differs from itself. We cannot demand purity and hygiene from a revolt, because all dynamics oriented towards cleansing or purification symbolize the triumph of sacrificial or sovereign violence that the revolt is destituting. It is sacrifice that purifies, sacrifice that cleanses the world to slaughter the goats that crystallize the new evil on earth.

Sacrifice is precisely the weapon of all reactionary politics, waiting like a shadow within the state formula: “no people has ever doubted that there was an expiatory virtue in the effusion of blood,” wrote Joseph De Maistre in his Treatise on sacrifices.[6] Precisely because the violence of the revolt deposes the sacrificial dynamic, because in it the martyrological power is at stake, that is, the one that seals without blood the revocation of all sovereignty: “A political execution”, asserts Paul W. Kahn, “read as an act of martyrdom, proclaims the weakness, not the strength of the state.”[7] This is because martyrdom threatens to “expose the state and its claim to authority as nothing.” [8] Popular violence is martyrological in this sense: its potency destitutes [9] sovereign violence, exposing its weakness and dissolving its claim to authority as nothingness.

It does not destroy, but destitutes; it does not establish, but revokes. It breaks the subject supposed to know that has erected the discourse, making it fall like a mask, and it can do nothing but exercise sacrificial violence so as to restore order. All calls from the government and the occasional political actor to dialogue are based on the sacrificial fiction, in which all the agents in conflict get solved in the same general equivalent: police lives are as much of a victim of violence as those of citizens who have fallen under the military bullet or police hunt. The government’s discourse is sacrificial precisely when it condemns violence “wherever it comes from.” This sets it up to exercise the greatest violence of all — sovereign violence precisely — which is such because it can crush all the other types of violence that it considers simply sectorial.

But in addition, the sacrificial paradigm raised by the state discourse restores, in turn, capital, to the extent that it restores the equivalent codification that enables state violence to be reconciled in the same unit with the torn revolt of a citizenry out in the open. The martyr breaks sacrifice to the same extent that it exposes its nothingness. Could we say that the notion of sovereignty once proposed by philosopher Georges Bataille is that of a true and properly martyrological sovereignty inasmuch as it implodes the moment it is exercised? [10] And if this is so, would not the Schmittian conception of sovereignty be one that has not assumed the radical nature of its concept, that has never lived up to what it proclaims? [11]

In any case, the term “martyrdom” has had a bad name because, from my point of view, it has always been conceived under the sacrificial aura or, what is the same, it has always been represented from the point of view of the victors who appropriated its concept to capitalize on it in terms of the restitution of order. Using the well-known Benjaminian distinction between pure and mythical violence, I would like to differentiate martyrdom from sacrifice and maintain that the first refers to a popular violence of a redemptive and destituent nature that establishes or preserves nothing and, the latter is oligarchic violence oriented towards the establishment and preservation of order.

In this light, a revolt is martyrological and not sacrificial, and brings with it the courage of living labor in which the affirmation of a potency is played out, rather than the consolidation of power. Beyond the purification of liberal discourse that condemns all violence, wherever it comes from, thereby trying to exempt itself from sacrificial dynamics while reproducing them, it is necessary to vindicate the violence opened up by the revolt that, however, suspends the sacrificial violence that, time and again, does nothing more than exert its mythical death power. It is not a matter of aestheticizing it, but to assume the materiality with which it denounces the injustice of the current state of affairs, exposing sovereign power to the nakedness of its nothingness.

A revolt is never welcome. Crowds don’t know whether to laugh or cry in front of it. They don’t know if it happens for better or worse, precisely because it does not obey any telos or any guarantee to the extent that it exposes the fragility of our bodies before history’s elements. But a revolt never comes in a uniform shape or mode, but is always different, multiple and intense. It is also unpredictable. All efforts to identify its causes always come to a limit. Knowledge goes bankrupt. And suddenly, everyone remembers the thousand reports that kept on showing the misery of our conditions. But at such a moment, we wonder: if the conditions were already there, why did the fuse light at this moment? Why not before or after? Between the conditions and their outbreak, something key always takes place: a murder, an act of radical injustice against certain bodies, committed by the exercise of State violence.

In the Arab Spring, the immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi in front of the police station was the imaginal operator that triggered the revolt. In Chile on October 18, thousands of high school students who had evaded the Metro turnstiles were brutally repressed by the police force. Five days after the proclamation of the State of Constitutional Exception, accompanied a nightly curfew apparatus, national and international Human Rights organizations were counting the death toll by State agents as the fierce way in which sacrificial violence was being deployed in the streets of a flooded city.

The revolt breaks out in various ways, an organization can take over — such as the one articulated today by Unidad Social. Like the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising, which articulated a minimum organization during the 1987 Palestinian intifada, Unidad Social could also become an “agency” (a “support” according to Judith Butler) [12] born out of the revolt itself to keep its work alive and not to confiscate it in a dead and completely bankrupt representational apparatus. Because, in the midst of the bankruptcy of a state model violently implemented in 1973, we are witnessing a beginning. 

We do not know what will happen or how events will unfold. But in the face of the devastation wrought by the dictatorship and later by the transition, directing its efforts to separate bodies from their potency, lives from their images, in a neutralization process, the revolt restored their intensity. Faced with the neoliberal body confiscated by the company form — turned “to prey”, said Guadalupe Santa Cruz — the revolt restored a body potency. The fascination experienced by the participants in a political process such as this is entirely linked to the surprise that awaits the conscience — that poor counselor — of what a body can do, what bodies can do. Because the revolt throws us into this: a hand-to-hand combat.

We never imagined what our bodies could do, we were never aware of it. How could we be, if consciousness — that representational apparatus — does nothing more than instill fear in us and push us to calculate our every movement? The revolt is aneconomic precisely because it does not calculate and always runs at a loss. We have already lost comrades in struggle, eyes, academic calendars, international events (APEC-COP 25) and we will continue to lose. Everything has been suspended, then, as Furio Jesi saw: unlike a revolution, a revolt implies the “suspension of historical time.” [13] A suspension that brings with it a radical loss, an unconditional expenditure that is impossible to foresee, but also the opening of a beginning in which we can re-imagine another historical era. It is precisely that beginning that we must embrace today with all the forces of history. Without it, we will not only be left without a future or a past, but above all we will be stripped of the heat of a present.

Rodrigo Karmy Bolton’s The Future is Inherited is now available in English from les presses du réel

Images: Tomas Munita

Notes

1. First published in El Desconcierto on November 27, 2019. 

2. Victor Jara (1932-1973) was a Chilean theater director, actor, playwright and folklore researcher, but generally known as a singer-songwriter, who actively participated in the Popular Unity’s presidential campaign. He was arrested after the coup in 1973 and was sent to the “Estadio Chile” (currently called “Víctor Jara Stadium”) where he was tortured and killed by the military. One of his most relevant songs was “The right to live in peace”, which Jara wrote inspired by Ho Chi Min and the Vietnam War. This song was massively sung during the recent protests along the country. —Editorial note.

3. Jorge González was the leader of Los Prisioneros, one of the main musical bands in recent Chilean history. Formed during the 1980s, they became a critical voice to the political and social order established by the dictatorship. One of their key songs was “The dance of those left behind”, which was massively sung during the protests in Plaza Dignidad. —Editorial note.

4. Originally published in Ficción de la Razón on October 29, 2019, as part of the special dossier “Estado generales de emergencia” coordinated by Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott and Mauricio Amar.

5. José Joaquín Brunner. Democracia, violencia y perspectivas futuras. Online here.

6. Joseph De Maistre. Tratado sobre los sacrificios. México, Sexto Piso, 2009, 24-25.     

7. Walter Benjamin, “On the Critique of Violence.”  

8. Paul W. Kahn. El liberalismo en su lugar. Santiago, Universidad Diego Portales, 2018, 112. 

9. The English edition incorrectly renders “destitutes/destituent” throughout as “dismisses.” —Note added by Ill Will.↰

10. Georges Bataille. Lo que entiendo por soberanía. Buenos Aires, Paidós, 1996. 

11. Carl Schmitt. Teología política. Cuatro ensayos sobre el concepto de soberanía. Buenos Aires, Struhart y Cia., 2005. 

12. Judith Butler. Cuerpos aliados y lucha política. Hacia una teoría performativa de la asamblea. Buenos Aires, Paidós, 2017.

13. Furio Jesi. Spartakus. The Symbology of Revolt, Translated by Alberto Toscano, Seagull Books, Ch. 2. Online here. 

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SOURCE: IllWill

The post Fragments of a Chile in Revolt- Rodrigo Karmy Bolton appeared first on Void Network.

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One more death of a black person by the police. One more state murder. One more time the streets are filled with a raging demand for justice. One more time justice has a name -Justice for George Floyd…

But the demand is also faceless, generic, universal in the most concrete of senses. For the face is enmeshed in the numbers, the obnoxious body count, without being reduced to a statistic; a universal figure emerges, the figure of the oppressed, the downtrodden, the subaltern, the underside of every state’s and every empire’s narrative of law and order. In the United States the story is age old and known. Strange fruits once hanging in the trees, segregated in the South, marginalized in urban ghettos, turned into an underclass and left to kill each other or drug themselves to death. But also black bodies reverberating with dignity, bodies that have never stopped resisting, mobilizing, fighting, screaming out loud that their lives matter; bodies that have refused to be objects of law and have become subjects of justice. America likes to remember the civil rights movement, but it has been forced to recall also its long hot summers, in our age of new movements and new riots.

Decades of affirmative action, of well-meaning or not so well meaning reforms, attempts to integrate. Things have improved, they say. Yet, things also remain the same; the streets continue to fill with blood and dead bodies and then with rage, again and again and again. It does not take a political scientist to see that the violence the black population suffer is systemic and institutionalized or that their marginalization and exclusion is embedded to the operations of the capitalist system. Class and race merging to create bodies that can be killed; but also bodies that revolt. Conservatives will call them criminals; liberals will call them misguided; a few leftists will feel they are justified but will still prefer to sing vacuous praises about the “force of non-violence” or make a virtue out of victimhood. But for the downtrodden of history, riot and fire has always been one of their ways of enacting justice, of becoming justice. It may be neither solution nor revolution. But by making nights brighter it lights the path towards a different future.

It is not our job or to our taste passing judgments from up high on bodies that fight for their lives. Nor are the images of riots foreign or exotic to us; bodies are also exploited and marginalized all over the world; bodies encamped, criminalized, but also killed.

George Floyd shouted

I CAN NOT BREATHE-

Now all of us we shout

WE CAN NOT BREATHE

The revolt in Minneapolis does not have “our sympathy”, it inspires us.

FIGHT THE POWER!

Solidarity to the Minneapolis uprising against police violence and institutionalized racism!

VOID NETWORK [Theory, Utopia, Empathy, Ephemeral Arts]

ATHENS / LONDON / NEW YORK / RIO DE JANEIRO

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READ MORE:

Minneapolis: Now This Fight Has Two Sides

What the Riots Mean for the COVID-19 Era

https://crimethinc.com/2020/05/28/minneapolis-we-have-crossed-the-rubicon-what-the-riots-mean-for-the-covid-19-era

The post VOID NETWORK- Justice for George Floyd … and Justice for all appeared first on Void Network.

1. I would like to begin by asking about the title of your book, or rather, its subtitle: “interrupting the destruction of the world.” Since the 19th century, and for quite some time, the tradition of the communist movement has thought of revolution as, in Marx’s words, a “locomotive of history.” In other words, that human emancipation was somehow inscribed in historical development itself. Walter Benjamin reversed this formula, suggesting that revolution would rather be “the act by which humanity aboard the train applies the emergency brake.” You seem to be more in line with this latter filiation. What are the issues at stake for you of such a paradigm shift? And how are they linked in particular to the current ecological disaster? 

Jérôme Baschet: I’m quite happy to accept your Benjaminian reading of the subtitle. Let me add something about the term “destruction,” which seems to me to be characteristic of a third age of the critique of capitalism. If the first age focused on exploitation, and the second on alienation, the third now focuses on destruction. Although it was certainly anticipated here and there, this shift in dimension is now clearly becoming dominant, as ecological devastation – in the broad sense of Guattari’s three ecologies – now comes to the fore. This does not mean that the other dimensions of critique – and the other aspects of capitalist domination they pointed to – are somehow invalidated; they must simply be reformulated in a new context where capitalist barbarism reaches such a degree that the very possibility of life on Earth is potentially called into question.

“Interrupting the destruction of the world,” then—although I might as well have said, even if the wording may seem strange, “interrupting the world of destruction.” For it is indeed a question of interrupting the course of this world of destruction, which crushes and annihilates so many manifold worlds. To interrupt the destruction of the world, in short, can only mean ending the world of destruction. And this world is the world of the Economy – a world dominated by economic tyranny and animated by a productivist compulsion that is the direct source of the present ecological and human devastation.

This insight implies a “paradigm shift” in our conception of the revolution and, more broadly, of historical time. It has recently been said that there is a major cleavage within the thought of emancipation. For some, it is necessary to preserve, or rediscover, the classical parameters of modernity, and in particular a conception of History understood as a triumphant advance of Progress. It certainly seems increasingly difficult to uphold such an image; yet some persist, in spite of every obstacle, in pushing this line, defending “accelerationist” theses according to which, to exit capitalism, it is necessary not only to continue “in the direction of history,” but even to move as fast as possible by intensifying the most advanced technological and organizational characteristics of capitalism. Full speed ahead, comrades! On the other side of the dividing line are all those who, following Benjamin, consider that we must completely abandon an untenable modern-progressive conception of history. To the arguments that Benjamin put forward in 1940, many others have since been added; and today it is ecological destruction that visibly and dramatically transforms the glorious march of Progress into a mad dash towards the abyss.

All this has important implications for the way in which a possible revolutionary process is conceived, but also, more broadly, for the relationship between present and future, or between past and future. We no longer have History on our side; we are no longer messengers on behalf of any sense of History that would inexorably lead us to salvation. There is a whole swath of representations wrapped up in this that need to be overcome, many of which have been highly effective at the level of organization, even if it is easy these days to recognize their fictitious and illusory nature. But it also means that another vision of history, of collective action, and of the intertwining in the present of the living memory of recollected pasts and the anticipation of possible futures, must be entirely invented.

2. Let’s turn now to the Yellow Vest movement, and your book about it. You insist that an essential trait that characterizes the movement lies in its refusal of representation, the refusal to be “recuperated by politicians” and normalized by the classical forms of politics. It is certainly striking to observe that, whereas many if not most of the mass movements of the previous cycle of struggle paved the way for parliamentary parties claiming to embody their “political outlet” (Podemos in Spain, Syriza in Greece) yet producing only renewed forms of social democracy, the Yellow Vests have so far deviated from the rule. How should we explain this? Whence this deeply rooted refusal of political representation and traditional parliamentary games?

The Yellow Vests uprising has blown apart the frameworks of classical politics, based as it is on the principle of representation, whose center of gravity turns around political parties locked into electoral competitions over control of the State apparatus. Of course, we have seen the inverse tendency too, here and there, with people attempting to play the role of spokespersons for the movement, acting as self- proclaimed negotiators with the government. There have been attempts by far-right or left-wing militants to infiltrate and steer the movement. But what has been most impressive is the collective intelligence deployed by the various groups of Yellow Vests, most often successfully, which has detected all of this and prevented the takeover of the movement by political sects or trade union activists. The more militant leftist characters that have been allowed to move among the Yellow Vests have generally only been able to integrate provided they abandon their usual speeches and attitudes and adapt to a collective dynamic that breaks with the parameters of classical politics.

No one can predict what will happen, but it is unlikely that parties such as Podemos will manage to assert themselves in France as a “political outlet” for the Yellow Vests uprising. On the other hand, the preparation of the 2020 municipal elections could be an opportunity to rebound on some of the concerns expressed by the Yellow Vests. If it were then a question of entering into the game of classic politics, for example by integrating candidates branded as “yellow vests” among the lists of parties or personalities already in place, this would not make any more sense than the anecdotal lists that emerged during the

European elections. Conquering town halls and then claiming to develop forms of participatory democracy would also have obvious limitations and would only superficially modify the frameworks of classical politics. On the other hand, the municipal elections could offer a pretext to relaunch the formation of popular assemblies at the county or district-level, which could take charge of the organization of certain aspects of community life. In the event that they had the strength, the Yellow Vests could try to seize municipal offices as a means to extend their capacity for action, while transforming the elected officials therein into mere executors of the decisions of the assemblies. Such a process would not be easy and would come with many risks. But we cannot a priori exclude the possibility that the local anchoring of the Yellow Vest movement and the concrete solidarity networks it has created may be consolidated and extended by taking advantage of the space opened locally by the municipal timeline. While this may seem paradoxical, it would not necessarily signal a return to classical forms of politics, provided that the focus and attention do not center on municipal administrations but rather on the popular assemblies, which could then engender genuine counter-powers.

3. I have a follow-up question: the Yellow Vests did not simply criticize representative democracy, but also experimented with the implementation of new forms of collective organization “from below,” in particular by multiplying so-called “popular assemblies.” According to you, the latter prefigure instances of self- government and echo other experiments in political emancipation both past (the Paris Commune) and present (Chiapas and Rojava, in particular). What connects these different experiences, and how are the Yellow Vests inspired by these other revolutionary sequences?

I think it’s important to underline the positive dimensions of the Yellow Vest uprising. At the same time as they have radically rejected classical politics — that is, politics from above, centered on state power, parties, the political class and “experts” in public affairs — they have also sought to experiment with another form of politics, which emerges from below, in situated places of life [lieux de vie] through the ability of ordinary people to organize themselves and begin making their own decisions. It is this rejection of the politics from above and this choice of this politics from below that creates a deep affinity between the Yellow Vest uprising and the other experiments you mentioned, such as the Paris Commune, Rojava, Chiapas, or others. This overlap seems highly important.

However, I don’t think it’s quite precise to claim that the assemblies that have emerged as part of the Yellow Vests movement ‘prefigure instances of self-government’. This is only one possible future, particularly if one takes into account the Call by the Commercy Yellow Vests to form popular assemblies everywhere, by means of which “to reclaim power over our lives.” But it would be an exaggeration to suggest that the assemblies of the Yellow Vests necessarily tend towards forms of self-government, as if this formed their natural horizon. As for the Paris Commune, Rojava, and Chiapas, these references have appeared sporadically, and it is fortunate that they have never been invoked as models, which they cannot be.

That said, if we seek to give a politics from below its full strength and to push it to the point where it would be able to destitute politics from above, then it is indeed appropriate — perhaps as part of a generalized movement of blockades — to initiate instances of popular self-government. In other words, instances of self-organized communal life. In this regard, it must be recognized that the Paris Commune and Zapatista autonomy are particularly inspiring experiences. The call by certain currents of the Yellow Vests to increase the number of popular assemblies could be one way — necessarily singular — of sketching such practices of popular self-government.

4. Another important aspect of the Yellow Vest movement has been the centrality of the blockade as a form of action. Today, as capitalism extends its domination beyond the productive sphere and tends to encompass all aspects of life, the strike seems insufficient by itself to sustain a real balance of power. Hence the necessity, as you indicate, that an “articulation of multiple struggles” take place, a coordination of different social subjectivities in accordance with a logic of “generalized dispossession.” Among other examples, the blockade of the Rungis logistics center has seen the emergence of a practical alliance between yellow vests and the more combative nuclei within the unions. Similarly, some organizations in working-class neighborhoods, such as the Adama Committee [against racist police violence in the suburbs] were quick to join the Yellow Vests and affirm their solidarity with the movement. How do you view these attempts at crossover, and does the next step depend on a possible strengthening of these alliances?

Such crossovers do indeed seem important to me, and to be able to give them more strength would certainly be decisive. I devoted a whole chapter of my book to the question of blockades, as it has been one of the central forms of action adopted by the Yellow Vests. From this point of view, I suggest that we attempt to expand this notion of blockage to include all of its possible dimensions, in the hopes that they might be combined, rather than seeking to oppose one to another. This includes blocking flows and infrastructures, i.e. the sphere of circulation (of people, goods, and the flow of information). But also the blocking of consumption (in addition to the axes of communication, the Yellow Vests have often targeted the distribution centers on which supermarket chains depend); blockades that develop inhabited territories directly in the path of large-scale, harmful, and useless megaprojects; blockades in the sphere of social reproduction (e.g., climate strikes by the younger generation, which call into question social reproduction, of which schools are only one vector among others), as well as blockades in the sphere of production itself, through strikes.

On this last point, it is obvious that the strike has lost the centrality it enjoyed throughout the history of the labor movement. First, because the reorganizations of the work world in the neoliberal age have done everything possible to make it less and less possible, and less and less effective. But also because the work world can no longer be considered as the only sphere — or even the sphere par excellence — in which the relations of domination that constitute capitalism are exercised. This domination goes far beyond work, and when it comes to producing docile citizens and avid consumers, it quickly penetrates the “free” time of leisure and consumption, permeates all aspects of life and moulds subjectivities trained to competition in an increasingly direct fashion, resulting in a cult of success oriented around the quantitative evaluation of everything. In the classical age of capitalism, it might have seemed like the Capital/Labor opposition condensed its fundamental antagonism — and again, this would still be to risk overlooking both gender domination and colonial domination, both of which were and remain essential to capital’s affirmation. In the age of neoliberal capitalism, without the question of labor or strikes disappearing entirely from our radar, the fundamental antagonisms of the world of economics must be rethought more broadly, to encompass the multiple modalities of the dynamic of generalized dispossession: the dispossession of the meaning of one’s work, accentuated by the insatiable pressure toward maximization; the relegation to social nonexistence through unemployment, precarity, and exclusion; despoliation of territories through the multiplication of infrastructural megaprojects and the acceleration of commodification; the impossibility of safety for women continually exposed to gender violence; the dehumanization and discrimination experienced by racialized populations; the curtailed enjoyment of a consumerism transformed into subjugation by the weight of debt; the pervasive feeling of political dispossession in the face of collapsing representative democracies; the dispossession of our experience of time by the tyranny of unending ‘emergencies’; not to mention the most serious of all: the ongoing ecological devastation that deprives us all of the possibility of a dignified life. On the one hand, then, there is antagonism, everything that contributes to our generalized dispossession, itself associated with pure and simple destruction; and on the other hand, everything that seeks to oppose it, in an ethical leap to save the possibility of a dignified life for all human and non-human inhabitants of the Earth.

It is this broad understanding of the multiple forms of dispossession induced by the world of economics that lends credence to a strategy based on intensifying blockades, understood in all their various forms. “Let’s block everything” is a perfectly sensible way of opposing the dynamics of capitalist domination and its extension across every domain of life. Finally, it should be stressed that the blockade in all its forms is a perfectly concrete response to ecological urgency. Is it not the most direct way to stop the destruction of the world, by “turning off the tap” of greenhouse gas emissions, as well as other pollution responsible for the collapse of living things?

5. As concerns the insurrectional “acts” of November/December 2018, you write that we were “on the brink of a situation over which the authorities might in fact lose control.” That for the first time in a long time in France, the destitution of power appeared to be a “credible” perspective… in the end, what was lacking, to make this overthrow effective? And what lessons can be learned for the future from this critical moment?

In the early days of December, the ruling class genuinely feared a popular uprising, which is something that had not happened for quite some time in France. The full deployment of law enforcement was nearly overtaken and those in power half-heartedly admitted that the Macronian five-year period was on the line. When they were first heard only a few days prior, the calls to destitute the Head of State had still appeared as a sort of pious wish. In short, power seriously faltered.

One may of course wonder what the departure from Macron could have produced in the way of change. The destitution of a president is still a far cry from the destitution of state power as such. And this limitation is surely linked to the tendency to present this or that politician in particular as the principal enemy. It is true that the hatred that Macron magnetized served as useful fuel for the uprising, but we can only agree with those Yellow Vests who insisted early on that another president would do no better and, even more so, with those who pointed out that, once Macron leaves, he must not be replaced.

What was missing? What prevented the situation from tipping over completely? Some have suggested that it was the refusal of the central trade union organs to throw themselves into the fray. But could we expect anything other than a posture of suspicious distance from a movement that has so often presided over the decline of the very forms of organization they embody? A massive strike wave by the more combative trade union bases could certainly have been important. A broader alliance with the struggles of marginalized people from the hood, which has only seen furtive attempts, could certainly have changed the situation as well. By and large, it was one fraction of the working classes that rose up — the one rooted in the near hinterland zones that ring the major cities, who for the most part have regular jobs, own homes, and are by and large white. Of those segments of the larger working class who live in racialized neighborhoods, and more often victim to exclusion and precarity, only small numbers joined in the insurrection. In general, everything is done to ensure that these different segments of the working classes remain divided and even hostile toward each other, a process intensified by the sort of racism that invigorates the extreme right. From this point of view, the fact that so many in the Yellow Vest movement succeeded in rebuffing and rejecting the grip of racism and of the extreme right and, quite pointedly, avoided scapegoating “immigrant” or “migrants” is very encouraging, at least from the perspective of a broader rapprochement that might be possible down the road. The involvement of certain organs of neighborhood struggle is likewise a cause for optimism. But we are still far from the conditions that would really draw together the two halves of the working classes, beyond all that tends normally to divide them. Finally, the movement suffered the absence of certain more “militant” formations, whose mistrust of any movement in which the extreme right is presence tends to arouse mistrust, and critiques of “impurity,” being too-far removed from the forms of organization that their militant affiliation had accustomed them to consider legitimate.

Whatever else was found lacking, a powerful legacy is nonetheless being forged. It shows the kind of power that the sudden appearance of unforeseen popular mobilization can engender, even in the absence of any pre-existing logistical support networks common to the broader left or political groups. A new and widely shared perception of what can be done has emerged. The effect that this collective experience and shared perception of possibilities can have in subsequent uprisings should not be overlooked.

6. On a more strategic level, you take up some of the insights already offered in one of your previous books, Adieux au capitalisme (La Découverte, 2014). We agree that today the seizure of state power can no longer be a regulative aim of emancipatory politics, and that communism must be understood less as a horizon to be reached than as a process that unfolds in the present. The material foundations of such a process are what you call “liberated spaces,” that is, immediate forms of experimentation with a post- capitalist reality within the very heart of the contemporary world. There is a tendency, quite perilous from our point of view, to consider these liberated spaces as community refuges, harmless margins, in short to neglect their “antagonistic dimension,” thereby leaving the structures of domination intact. For this reason, we prefer to speak of instances of “counter-power” as a way of indicating a clearer connection between “building” and “fighting.“ How can we avoid this tendency to ghettoize liberated spaces (whatever their scale)? How can we preserve a link between prefigural positivity and the destructive function?

Exactly. What I call “liberated spaces” [espaces liberés] should not be construed as protected islands, where it we live out a charming life in the midst of the surrounding disaster, but as spaces for combat. “Free space” implies that we must free ourselves from something, from what oppresses us or causes us to slowly die; it implies that there is a struggle. In reality, these spaces are not entirely liberated, but only in the process of being so: they are not free of what oppresses and attacks them, nor consequently of the need to fight against them. At the same time as they are building from now on a different, clean reality, escaping as much as possible the norms of the economic world, they also have an intrinsically antagonistic dimension.

To affirm, as some do, that in order to exit capitalism it’s enough to simply stop reproducing it, without having to face off with it, is to ignore the antagonistic dimension of what could also be described as an interstitial strategy of openings. And I would add that the theories of collapse, at least in the version offered to us by “collapsology,” seem to me to induce a movement of flight, sometimes with panicked feeling, to shelters where it would be a question of learning, individually or in small groups, to survive the disaster. In this sense, it seems to me that there is a fairly strong opposition — perhaps even a polarization destined to appear with increasing clarity in the years to come — between the perspective of the liberated spaces, heard in their antagonistic dimension, and the reactions that collapsology elicits in the face of an allegedly inevitable and already ongoing implosion.

Of course, liberated spaces can take very different natures and scales. The most modest and discreet of them, by no means contemptible on this account, probably come into less direct conflict with their systemic environment than those who reach a certain dimension and who, in their process of creating their own reality, are led more openly to flout the norms of commodity society, or even to engage in a process of secession from state institutions, as in the case of Zapatista autonomy. As for the liberated spaces linked to the fight against large, harmful and useless projects, these cannot help but enter into direct conflict with the forces that sustain the world of the Economy and find themselves immediately threatened from them.

That said, it is often the enemy who succeeds in reminding liberated spaces of their antagonistic character, by attacking them variously and forcing them to defend themselves. But this reminder of a defensive antagonism is not enough. To build and multiply liberated spaces is certainly a positive way to contribute to the emergence of a world free of capitalist tyranny. But we cannot conceal the fact that these spaces encounter considerable difficulties, not only on account of the attacks they weather, but also because of the spirals of division and internal disintegration that often undermine them from within. Under these conditions, it is reasonable to think that they can only prosper if a broader struggle is able to attack the power of capitalist synthesis. This is why a concern for the survival of liberated spaces should lead us not to withdraw into the process of their construction alone, but to link it up with the broader fight against the world of the Economy. The liberated spaces can then be designed as bases for building bridges to other struggles and intensifying the offensive against the enemy.

For example, we might develop strategy that combines the multiplication of liberated spaces with generalizing blockades. To the extent that the liberated spaces are capable of deploying their own material resources and technical capacities, they can serve as decisive nodes on the basis of which it becomes possible to amplify the blockade dynamics at key moments, in various forms. The more liberated space we have, the more we should be able to extend our capacity for blockades. Conversely, the more widespread the blockades become, the more they promote the emergence of new liberated spaces.

Another dimension of such a strategy consists in deepening of links between existing liberated spaces. This is an important point, the urgency of which is no doubt widely felt, but on which too little progress has been made. Taking up an idea already launched earlier, the Zapatistas have proposed in a communiqué this past August to resume discussions surrounding the creation of a global network of resistance and rebellions. Numerous initiatives could and should exist that move in this same direction, and it would certainly be valuable if the various rebel territories could meet more closely, get to know each other better and exchange proposals, experiences, and concrete forms of mutual support for one another. In any case, for the Zapatistas, it is clear that the creation of autonomy in their territories in Chiapas, however important it may be for the concrete lives of tens of thousands of people, is not an end in itself; it only makes sense in combination with a global struggle against what they have called the capitalist hydra. And that is why they have never stopped organizing international, or even “intergalactic” meetings…

7. A complementary question: if the liberated spaces multiply and carry with them a genuinely antagonistic potential, it is obvious, as you say, that “the rulers of the world and those who serve them will not hand over their privileges voluntarily.” There is therefore also a problem of self-defense and the disaggregation of the enemy’s forces. How can we envisage this today, given the militarization of policing and the development of law enforcement technologies?

We always come back to this point: liberated spaces are places of collective construction; but they must also be defended. The scale and radicality of the liberated spaces that we are capable of building is directly proportional to the collective power at our disposal — and in particular to the capacity for self- defense that we are able to bring into play. In this regard, it should be recalled that the construction of Zapatista autonomy would certainly not have been possible without the armed uprising of January 1, 1994. And even if autonomy has taken on a civil character and has developed by dissociating itself from the Zapatista political-military organization, it has probably only been able to persist until now because it has enjoyed the protection of weapons (the Zapatistas have renounced the offensive use of weapons, but have kept them for defensive purposes). More broadly, it must be noted that today, the two liberated territories that were able to push the construction of autonomy the furthest, Zapatista Chiapas and Kurdish Rojava, are both linked to contexts where armed struggle plays or has played a certain role.

It is not a question of advocating armed struggle – which is something that the Zapatistas have been careful not to do ever since their public appearance in 1994. But it does highlight the rather direct link between the size of the liberated spaces and the necessity of a capacity for self-defense. There are of course many forms of self-defense that do not involve the use of weapons. Many struggles are experimenting with this, as was seen, for example, on the ZAD in Notre-dame-des-landes during Operation César in 2012. But this implies a successful conjunction combining a broad capacity for mobilization, collective physical commitment, unrelenting determination to defend that which is we hold dear, tactical intelligence and inventiveness, and of course the material, logistical and technical resources that go with this. To be sure, the more the enemy increases the level of repression and the means placed at the service of “policing” and the extension of the world of the Economy, the more difficult it becomes to defend liberated spaces. There is no simple formula for these matters, but it is clear that there is no other option than to increase our collective strength on all the points I have just mentioned (and probably others still).

In conclusion, I should reiterate that we have been plunged into a structural crisis such that the capitalist system can reproduce itself only at the cost of ever-increasing difficulties for both us and for it – and, first and foremost, at the cost of ever-increasing ecological and human destruction. We can already foresee that the antagonism between the world of Economics — which has proven itself ready to do anything in its power to perpetuate itself, to feed the quantitative hypertrophy of value, and to preserve the privileges of a few — and liberated spaces marked by multiple and conjoint ruptures with the ongoing devastation is bound to intensify. If this wager is even minimally correct, it would probably be a good idea to begin getting ready for it.

Jérôme Baschet is a historian currently teaching at the Autonomous University of Chiapas in San Cristóbal de Las Casas. Author of several books on medieval history, he has also published Défaire la tyrannie du présent. Temporalités émergentes et futurs inédits (2018) et La Rébellion zapatiste (2019). His book on the Gilets Jaunes is out now: Une Juste colère. Interrompre la destruction du monde 

Translated by Kieran Aaron

source: MetaMute

The post HISTORY IS NO LONGER ON OUR SIDE: an interview with JÉRÔME BASCHET appeared first on Void Network.

In accepting the ideology of victimization in any form, we choose to live in fear. The person who painted the “Men Rape” graffiti was most likely a feminist, a woman who saw her act as a radical defiance of patriarchal oppression. But such proclamations, in fact, merely add to a climate of fear that already exists. Instead of giving women, as individuals a feeling of strength, it reinforces the idea that women are essentially victims, and women who read this graffiti, even if they consciously reject the dogma behind it, probably walk the streets more fearfully. The ideology of victimization that permeates so much feminist discourse can also be found in some form in gay liberation, racial/national liberation, class war and damn near every other ‘radical’ ideology. Fear of an actual, immediate, readily identified threat to an individual can motivate intelligent action to eradicate the threat, but the fear created by the ideology of victimization is a fear of forces both too large and too abstract for the individual to deal with. It ends up becoming a climate of fear, suspicion and paranoia which makes the mediations which are the network of social control seem necessary and even good.
 
It is this seemingly overwhelming climate of fear that creates the sense of weakness, the sense of essential victimhood, in individuals. While it is true that various ideological “liberationists” often bluster with militant rage, it rarely gets beyond to that point of really threatening anything. Instead, they ‘demand’ (read “militantly beg”) that those they define as their oppressors grant them their ‘liberation’. An example of this occurred at the 1989 “Without Borders” anarchist gathering in San Francisco. There is no question that at most workshops I went to, men tended to talk more than women. But no one was stopping women from speaking, and I didn’t notice any lack of respect being show for women who did speak. Yet, at the public microphone in the courtyard of the building where the gathering was held, a speech was made in which it proclaimed that ‘men’ were dominating the discussions and keeping ‘women’ from speaking. The orator ‘demanded’ (again, read “militantly begged”) that men make sure that they gave women space to speak. In other words, to grant the ‘rights’ of the oppressed–an attitude which, by implication, accepts the role of man as oppressor and woman as victim. There were workshops where certain individuals did dominate the discussions, but a person who is acting from the strength of their individuality will deal with such a situation by immediately confronting it as it occurs and will deal with the people involved as individuals. The need to put such situations into an ideological context and to rent the individuals involved as social roles, turning the real, immediate experience into abstract categories is a sign that one has chosen to be weak, to be a victim. And embracing weakness puts one in the absurd position of having to beg one’s oppressor to grant one’s liberation–guaranteeing that one will never be free to be anything but a victim.
 
Like all ideologies, the varieties of the ideology of victimization are forms of fake consciousness. Accepting the social role of victim–in whatever one of its many forms–is choosing to not even create one’s life for oneself or to explore one’s real relationships to the social structures. All of the partial liberation movements–feminism, gay liberation, racial liberation, workers movements and so on–define individuals in terms of their social roles. Because of this, these movements not only do not include a reversal of perspectives which breaks down social roles and allows individuals to create a praxis built on their own passions and desires; they actually work against such a reversal of perspective. The ‘liberation’ of a social role to which the individual remains subject. But the essence of these social roles within the framework of these ‘liberation’ ideologies is victimhood. So the litanies of wrongs suffered must be sung over and over to guarantee the ‘victims’ never forget that is what they are. These ‘radical’ liberation movements help to guarantee that the climate of fear never disappears, and that individuals continue to see themselves weak and to see their strength as lying in the social roles which are, in fact, the source of their victimization. In this way, these movements and ideologies act to prevent the possibility of a potent revolt against all authority and all social roles.
 
True revolt is never safe. Those who choose to define themselves in terms of their role as a victim do not dare to try total revolt, because it would threaten the safety of their roles. But, as Nietzsche said: “The secret of the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment of existence is to live dangerously!” Only a conscious rejection of the ideology of victimization, a refusal to live in fear and weakness, and an acceptance of the strength of our own passions and desires, of ourselves as individuals who are greater than, and so capable of living beyond, all social roles, can provide a basis for total rebellion against society. Such a rebellion is certainly fueled, in part, by rage, but not the strident, resentful, frustrated rage of the victim which motivates feminists, racial liberationists, gay liberationists and the like to ‘demand’ their ‘rights’ from the authorities. Rather it is the rage of our desires unchained, the return of the repressed in full force and undisguised. But more essentially, total revolt is fueled by a spirit of free play and of joy in adventure–by a desire to explore every possibility for intense life which society tries to deny us. For all of us who want to live fully and without constraint, the time is past when we can tolerate living like shy mice inside the walls. Every form of the ideology of victimization moves us to live as shy mice. Instead, let’s be crazed & laughing monsters, joyfully tearing down the walls of society and creating lives of wonder and amazement for ourselves.

From “Anarchy: A Journal Of Desire Armed” issue #32, Spring 1992

source: https://finimondo.org/node/381?fbclid=IwAR2j1U0QAeSxjRnmFoUf1Ss3dofOJREXIC3OPVe5_W_fpf2XtwU0StCdj3M

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APOSINTONISMOS
& CREATIVE SPACE
PRESENTS

FRIDAY THE 13TH NOVEMBER
FREE PARTY

TEI PEIRAIA
(PETROY RALLH & THIVON)
STARTS 22:00

DUBSTEP
ELECTROTECHNO
BREAKS

DJS :
DYNAMONS
KERNELCOREMODE
D-JAHSTA
DIRECT CONNECTION
MOBTHROW
SISSY STARDUST
HIGHPNO

Void Network announces the participation
of d.j. Sissy Stardust
(with her unique experimental dubstep sound)
and d.j. Highpno(with his space out dub sound)
from Void Network
in the free party organized
by two very important underground groups
of cultural activists
and experimental artists Aposyntonismos
and Creative Space…
We believe that all the collectives have to offer
their best efforts to keep universities open
for the public during nightime,
to defend the asylum and create conditions
that will bring thousands of people in the university campus,
people that will transform them in real public spaces

Το Κενό Δίκτυο ανακοινώνει την συμμετοχή
δύο djs από την κολλεκτίβα μας στο Free Party
που διοργανώνουν
ο Αποσυντονισμός και οι Creative Space,
δύο σημαντικές ομάδες πολιτισμικών ακτιβιστών
και καλλιτεχνών της πειραματικής ηλεκτρονικής
μουσικής της πόλης…
Από το Κενό Δίκτυο θα εμφανισθούν
η d.j. Sissy Stardust
(με τον δικό της experimental dubstep ήχο)
και ο d.j. Highpno
(σε ένα space out dub set)
Πιστεύουμε ότι όλες οι πολιτικές ομάδες
και οι πολιτισμικές κολλεκτίβες πρέπει να
συνδράμουν με όλες τους τις δυνάμεις στην προσπάθεια
να υπερασπιστεί κοινωνικά το άσυλο,
να μένουν τα πανεπιστήμια ανοιχτά κατά την
διάρκεια της νύχτας και να φιλοξενούν
κάθε είδους πρωτοβουλίες και εκδηλώσεις
χωρίς ένα κεντρικό γραφειοκρατικό μηχανισμό
αδειοδότησης και ελέγχου
αλλά με την απλή συμβολή των τεχνικών
και των φυλάκων των σχολών για την ομαλή
διεξαγωγή της εκδήλωσης.
Πιστεύουμε ότι αυτοί είναι σημαντικοί τρόποι
έτσι ώστε το άσυλο να λειτουργεί κοινωνικά,
να δημιουργούνται συνθήκες που θα φέρνουν
στους πανεπιστημιακούς χώρους
χιλιάδες ανθρώπους και θα μετατρέπουν
το πανεπιστήμιο σε αυτό ακριβώς που
πρέπει να είναι, πραγματικός Δημόσιος Χώρος
ανοιχτός για όλους.

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