Written by Blade Runner– first published by Plan C, an anti-authoritarian communist organisation based in UK

___

The year began with fresh bloodshed in Iran and Syria, adding to the ongoing catastrophe in Gaza. The Middle East, as Abdullah Öcalan—ideological leader of the Kurdish movement in northeastern Syria—has argued, is the cradle of nation-state civilisation. From the Sumerian ziggurat to today’s capitalist modernity, the region has long seen patriarchal, hierarchical structures emerge, deeply embedded in state power. The Kurds, who have experienced genocide in their history, state-less, now face another looming threat in Rojava, where Turkish-backed jihadist militias operate with impunity. In Iran, a youth- and middle-class-led uprising is being brutally crushed by the Islamist regime, with Kurdish-majority areas paying the highest price in blood.

These developments expose a broader split in the Western left: some emphasise grassroots liberation struggles from below, while others focus on geopolitics and great-power alignments. Still, both camps acknowledge the surge in militarisation—rooted in the agendas of white men in power, securing their castles as the world burns.

Trump’s version of fascism, built on brute-force governance, gave new expression to an old white supremacist worldview: domination as virtue, state violence as default. In the US, vulnerable communities are under attack both in law and daily life, while federal institutions are being hollowed out and reshaped by far-right actors exploiting the left’s strategic collapse. As capitalism slams into ecological and resource limits, elites double down—playing the fascist cardas their system fractures alongside the ecosystem.

Much of the Western left remains trapped in a framework inherited from the postwar compromise—where revolutionary potential was traded for social peace and welfare became the terrain of struggle. This strategic vacuum continues today. 

How did we get here? 

Capital’s restructuring since the 80s through digitalisation and financialisation detached life from collective decision-making. Based on a drastic technical shift, the neoliberal political design enforced the merger of state and capital into a hierarchy-preserving machine, that protects the pyramidic structure of economy and power while producing dependence to it.

The neoliberal assault to the working class under the ‘less state’ marquise staged a spectacle on which the unions negotiate in the midst of a raging social war waged on the lowest classes. There is a deeper continuity here that remains protected—the very architecture of the welfare state is tied to capital accumulation and state sovereignty. Reforms, however welcome, cannot do much to erode its core functions for discipline, control and population management.

Welfare, even at its heights, never enabled autonomy. Today, we find ourselves defending scraps—yet unable to replace the model with bottom-up infrastructures not based on extraction or obedience.

A great shift towards consumerist abundance has taken place: smart phones, branded clothing, laptops, vehicles, traveling, are now accessible to wider strata than ever before. Or at least this is the promise that has been built upon decades of urban gentrification and the expansion of the services economy. Middle classes are deeply invested in this materialistic social contract, so much that leisure time is willingly being replaced with commercial entrepreneurship. For many activists of the white middle class, the boundaries between “the struggle” or “the action” and a paid relationship with charities or NGOs is becoming increasingly blur.

This new reality has been conditioned as ‘freedom,’ to justify the installation of the core-zone insulation through militarised borders and technocratic management. Welfare state and the promise of consumerist abundance is not a function of solidarity anymore—it is a cushioned internal border, mirroring its reverse spiky version from the outside.

In this context, the mainstream narrative frames the uprisings of the 2010s as relics or cautionary tales. But the uprisings led by Gen Z across Asia, Africa, and Latin America is a reality check: mass militant street action not only remains possible—it continues to erupt as the clearest threat to regimes when electoral politics stall. This signals a shift from demands for inclusion and integration, to anti-hierarchial participation, to construction of new autonomous spaces. Forms of resistance not aimed at improving state functions, but bypassing or replacing them.

Genocide at the bordersⁱ

The fractures in today’s Western left echo the deeper planetary divide. The neoliberal information age sharpened the separation between the fortified Western citadel and the militarised periphery. In the global South, war is a reality for many, and its toll is most brutally felt by women—those raped, enslaved, executed by jihadists and warlords. Patriarchal terror that feels like time travel to the Dark Ages thrives under structures propped up by the liberal West.

That terror arrives at the beaches of Fortress Europe. Tens of thousands of immigrants die every year attempting to reach safety, mostly at sea. Over 10,000 people died in transit to Spain in 2024 alone. The real number is likely far higher, since undocumented movement is difficult to trace. In 2023, the Greek Coast Guard allowed more than 600 people drown in a single shipwreck—a direct result of the informal pushback policy. Deadly incidents as a result brutal push-back operations are reported every year. Frontex—Europe’s ICE—has become the EU’s most heavily funded agency, with its own ships, aircraft, drones, and weapons. Its 10,000-strong Standing Corps is the first and only pan-European armed force, operating with a budget that rivals those of small countries.

But border violence is only one face of the system’s breakdown. Behind it lies a deeper contradiction: capitalism has always emerged from a largely peasant and rural society. The agrarian question remains structurally unresolved: how can capital dismantle, discipline, or absorb peasant production while preventing rural populations rendered surplus from becoming a source of instability? What happens to land, labour, food systems, and social relations when profit demands endless expansion in a world of finite resources?

As ecosystems collapse and agriculture fails, more and more people are forced into motion—some fleeing drought and desertification, others pushed by floods, fires, or rising seas. Climate displacement is here and will become increasingly a major factor in global migration. The uneven impact of eco-collapse mirrors and reinforces the divide between the fortified Western citadel and the militarised, expendable periphery. It is overwhelmingly the poorest who are forced to move, while the wealthiest retreat behind borders, flood walls, and drone-enforced no-go zones.

In a way, rivers of people returning to the source close an infinite loop, further sharpening the divide between resurgent nationalism and emancipatory politics. And there is no ‘new world’ left to colonise with Europe’s so-called ‘dangerous classes’—its surplus poor, displaced, and radicalised. Increasingly, capitalism’s only remaining ‘solution’ appears to be mass death. The systematic slaughtering of migrants on Europe’s shores is not a malfunction but a structural expression of a dead end. 

The farmers in Europe have felt that dead end too, that they are among those slated for sacrifice. Greece, among other countries like France, Spain, Portugal and Belgium, saw one of the largest agricultural uprisings in years as farmers face soaring fuel costs, livestock disease, and decades of rural neglect. Their demands go beyond subsidies, asking for the reversal of the whole neoliberal EU agricultural design. The repression has been severe and has been met with widespread solidarity from workers, students, anarchists, and local communities. The agricultural sector is another frontline in the wider collapse of extractive economies under the state/capitalist-created climate stress.

Genocides are becoming a permanent tendency in a system that, having exploited the planet to its limits, now turns inward, consuming its own surplus population in a futile attempt to stay alive. Neocolonialism delayed this reckoning by exporting social conflict and looting the periphery to build welfare at the core. This pacified the working classes of the West. But immigration undoes this arrangement, reverses the flow, and brings the contradictions home.

Fascism has returned out of necessity—from the ruling class’s need to retain control when the old arrangement no longer works. Social democracy is entirely unfit for the current moment, stuck in domestic redistribution politics while the global system itself rots. Electoral results across Europe confirm this irrelevance.

What was always a fragile compromise is now in terminal decline. The migrant genocide is not just a consequence—it’s an expression of this slow breakdown. Western foreign policy increasingly centres on keeping immigration contained at the source. Governments can’t resolve the global agrarian question. And so border violence, genocide, and militarisation all flow from the same unresolved root.

The system is now operating at boiling point. Rising mass radicalisation at home has led to escalated repression. Dissent is criminalised, disruptive direct action is proscribed as domestic terrorism, and zero tolerance becomes doctrine.

Militarisation, then, becomes the new organising logic. The Cold War’s ideological veneer has melted. What remains is open competition, brute force, and intensified suppression of disagreement. The logic that obliterates Gaza and threatens the Kurds in Rojava, is the same logic that drowns migrants in the Mediterranean, assassinates them and their supporters in the US, demonises migrants in Britain, criminalises dissent, and elevates white supremacist narratives.

What can we do?

All state actors—despite tactical differences—ultimately reinforce the same oppressive capitalist modernity. They align in their efforts to crush any alternatives. Our task, as the libertarian anti-authoritarian communist tendency, is to expose this machinery and stand with those at the front lines of resistance—from London to Minneapolis, from Iran to Sri Lanka, from Gaza to Peru, and beyond.

The US may soon lose its role as the lead architect of the world system—and it will not fall quietly. For us, this may also be an opportunity. Our role is to articulate and express a libertarian communist perspective: the destruction of the state and the creation of horizontal cooperation among communities from below. Taking action means embracing a diversity of tactics, supporting those targeted by state surveillance and carceral violence, and building bonds of trust with communities under attack. We must carve out spaces of refusal where strategy can be shared and disagreement doesn’t splinter solidarity. We need local defence and mutual aid structures rooted in everyday life, rather than reactive pursuits of far-right narratives and media spectacle.

Some tendencies on the left continue to back authoritarian regimes simply because they oppose the West. But true anti-imperialism isn’t about choosing sides in a geopolitical chess match, but supporting the poor, the colonised, the non-binary, the femmes, the non-whites, the children, the underdogs that suffer under any regime. We need to keep grounding our efforts in the lives and resistance of the displaced, the exploited, and the exiled. To build trust in our communities, we must come as allies and co-conspirators against the enemies at the top. And we need to rethink the ideological habits that isolate us and make us appear like a lifestyle cult rather than a political force.

There is a persistent tendency within both liberal and radical activism to treat issues like Palestine or climate collapse as isolated causes, each with their own branding, tactics, and acceptable narratives. In Palestine solidarity spaces, mass marches are welcomed—rightly—but dissenting tactics are often policed. Protesters who reject pacified, choreographed action get framed as threats to “unity,” exposing a vanguardist obsession with respectability and non-violence. Meanwhile, in environmental campaigns, urban symbolic action that leads to arrests—with minimal strategic impact—has popularised a model of low-barrier, media-friendly protest. This spectacle has come at a cost: hundreds jailed, public support thinned, and long-term grassroots organising sidelined. For all the visibility, the material impact on emissions, extraction, or capital flows remains negligible in the face of accelerating ecocide.

Palestine Action was proscribed because its targeted, disruptive tactics—like shutting down weapons factories—began to seriously impact arms production. Similarly, in Germany, Ende Gelände’s mass blockades of coal infrastructure have repeatedly disrupted mining operations and transport, forcing coal phase-out into the political mainstream. What gets criminalised is often what works.

We will not be passive observers to suffering and collapse. The system is cracking. Our task is not to patch it—but to resist with a variety of tactics—and build the ground beneath us before it falls.

___

NOTES

i This section refers to info and arguments from this post: https://mronline.org/2025/06/18/the-migrant-genocide-toward-a-third-world-analysis-of-european-class-struggle/

The post This world is cracking- We need to start building appeared first on Void Network.

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.

No crystal ball could have predicted that three years later, the example they set would lead to the wholesale arson of Nepal’s government buildings, its parliament, and supreme court. Nepal’s Gen Z hurricane-force uprising makes Sri Lanka’s Aragalaya (The Struggle) appear tranquil, even moderate, although at the time the Rajapaksa family were so frightened by protesters that both prime minister Mahinda and his brother, president Gotabaya, went into hiding, the former on an isolated naval base, the latter on a naval vessel.

The term ‘economic crisis’ does not do justice to the indignities Sri Lankans suffered in 2022. Daily blackouts, fuel shortages, high unemployment and debilitating inflation–to say nothing of food shortages–plagued the nation at the same time as the elite enjoyed multiple luxury estates, staffed by servants even when their bosses were away for days at a time. Is it any wonder that young people screamed ‘Go Home Rajapaksas!’ and ‘Go Home Gota!’ As the movement built its momentum, their refrain became ‘Victory to the Struggle!’ (Aragalayata Jaya Wewa), showing how a revolt against perceived injustices was transformed into a revolutionary desire for a new reality.

Little did it matter that two decades previously, scarcely half the country had electricity, that schools, jobs, and basic healthcare had been largely unavailable. The growing gap between young people’s expectations in 2022 collided with the deadly misery crafted by elite politicians until an explosion was the only rational solution. Silent candlelight vigils overnight turned into hundreds of people swarming the president’s house on March 31, 2022. What had been a peaceful, spontaneous protest was then attacked by police firing tear gas and water cannons. The next morning, the president released a statement declaring that ‘extremist’ elements were trying to import the ‘Arab Spring’ to Colombo. The government declared a ‘state of emergency’ and mobilized the military and police to defy constitutional protections of free speech and assembly. Pro-Rajapaksa forces attacked young protesters, leading to a chain reaction of retaliations, a spiral of violence that engulfed even the homes and offices of the rich and powerful. Fishers, cricketers, carpenters and contingents of women all joined students in the protests. Even a nightly curfew and brief social media blackout failed to stop the movement.

Occupation of the Galle Face Green provided protesters with a 24/7 base of operations. The government countered with a mobile phone signal jammer, hoping to isolate resistance, but people refused to back down until the president resigned. Similar to Occupy Wall Street camps, the occupation of Galle Face swelled in both services it provided and supporters who rallied to the cause. Celebrities arrived to serenade the beleaguered demonstrators. By the end of the month, more than 1,000 unions staged a one-day support strike. Led by university students, people surrounded parliament and demanded resignation of all members as well as for the Rajapaksa clan to return their stolen money. “This is our country, not your ATM!’ was one of many placards.

On May 9, Mahinda Rajapaksa organized his supporters to massively assault the Galle Face Green. As police watched, more than one hundred people were beaten so badly they required hospitalization. The attackers’ brutality immediately turned the country against ‘state sponsored terrorism.’ That very same day, Mahinda was compelled to resign as prime minister. Riots against Rajapaksa loyalists proliferated. Many of the buses that carried the mob to attack Galle Face were torched. Politicians who supported Rajapaksa’s attack were beaten on the streets, and more than a few of their homes were torched. Insurgents’ violence was well targeted. They burnt to the ground the home of Sanath Nishantha, the man who had led the attack on Galle Face. The Rajapaksa museum was torched, a statue of the brothers’ father was destroyed, and two family homes were destroyed. A family-owned hotel was burnt along with a Lamborghini, a Hummer, a Cadillac and Ferrari parked there. When it was thought that Mahinda was hiding at the Trincomalee naval base, people surrounded it and demanded that he be arrested. To stop the escalating retaliations, president Gotabaya Rajapaksa ordered the military to take charge of the streets with ‘shoot on sight’ orders and authorization to detain people for 24-hours.

Two months of ongoing protests and repression culminated on July 9. After protesters began to surround his house, president Gota fled on an Air Force jet to the Maldives, later to Singapore. People swarmed the president’s residence and made it into an open house for days. Security forces enjoyed taking selfies along with thousands of citizens who came to marvel at the luxurious home. The presidential secretariat, the prime minister’s official residence as well as his private home were all occupied. Two weeks of uncertainty ended on July 13 when thousands of soldiers and police stormed Galle Face in a pre-dawn raid to close the camp. The occupied buildings were next.

Although ‘order’ had been restored by the military, protesters won their main demand, removal of the president, who fled along with more than dozen other clan members. By November, lines for gas and fuel all but disappeared, inflation cooled, and citizens enjoyed the satisfaction of having broken the Rajapaksas’ grip on power. Today, the nation continues to struggle with the legacy of Rajapaksa pillaging of state coffers.

No knew it at the time, but by massively confronting its corrupt and power-hungry elite and forcing them from power, Sri Lanka’s heroic populace set an example that would be followed within years. The recent synchronization of revolts in Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Nepal reveals a phenomenon I named the ‘Eros effect’ to understand the global proliferation of revolutionary movements in 1968. Since then, other instances of simultaneous protests are evident in the global disarmament movement of the early 1980s, the Arab Spring and the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011, the alterglobalization insurgencies from the Zapatistas to Seattle, and most importantly, although less well-known, the chain reaction of Asian uprisings in the Philippines (1986), South Korea (1987), Burma (1988), Tibet, Taiwan, and China (1989), Nepal and Bangladesh (1990) and Thailand (1992).

The example set in 2022 by The Struggle in Sri Lanka prefigured subsequent uprisings in Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Nepal. They all contained surprisingly similar characteristics. None involved centralized leadership nor involved traditional political parties. All had students at their centers. Each erupted suddenly, without governments’ having a clue about the turmoil ahead. Each targeted leading politicians’ homes and offices. All targeted ostensibly ‘democratic’ regimes that failed to offer any avenue for popular participation other than street protests. Their spontaneous emergence and the success of anti-corruption uprisings have put entrenched elites everywhere on notice. ‘Behave well or you may be next!’

____

* George Katsiaficas is the author Asia’s Unknown Uprisings. He is a retired professor from Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston. His web site is www.eroseffect.com

The post Sri Lankan Youth: Look What You’ve Started!- George Katsiafikas appeared first on Void Network.

Written by Blade Runner

On Saturday 13 September, more than 110,000 people turned out in central London, travelling from across the UK, in a mobilisation framed as a defence of “free speech” but saturated with white nationalist, Islamophobic, and anti-migrant rhetoric. It is said to have been the largest far-right protest in history.

The social media influencer who called the mobilisation, Tommy Robinson, was joined by international supporters: Elon Musk appeared by video link, calling for the government to be removed and parliament dissolved, while Éric Zemmour, the French far-right politician, invoked the “great replacement” myth in openly Islamophobic terms.

Saturday’s counter-protest drew up to 20,000 people, organised by local trade unions and grassroots groups. After a rally, they marched and ended up behind the far-right stage, where they were surrounded and effectively kettled for hours, with hostile crowds pressing against police lines. A small black bloc was at one point trapped behind far-right lines before withdrawing to the left bloc. Beer bottles and other projectiles were thrown at both police and anti-fascists.

The sheer scale of the crowds overwhelmed the under-resourced police force, which had otherwise been fully prepared to arrest hundreds of supporters of the proscribed Palestine Action. By the end of the day, the Met reported 26 officers injured—four seriously—and at least 25 arrests for assault and violent disorder, mostly of far-right attendees attempting to break through cordons. Anti-fascist blocs were eventually escorted out through narrow corridors in the middle of hostile crowds.

This mobilisation followed a summer of racist outrage, coordinated online, amplified particularly by Labour politicians, and legitimised by media coverage. Already in June, London had hosted a mass rally under the “Football Lads Against Grooming Gangs / For Our Children” banner—another openly racist march where a small anti-fascist bloc was kettled “for its own protection.”

Unlike previous eruptions in Britain, today’s racist outrage is consistently organised. Protests are rapidly mobilised, digitally coordinated, openly backed by political forces and legitimised by mainstream media, who push the myth of a “migrant invasion threatening a decaying country.”

This is part of a broader domestic and international counterinsurgency embedding the far right within Western societies. Fascists present themselves as defenders of working-class communities, co-opting the language and aesthetics of protest, all in service of white supremacy. Clashes with police are disciplinary theatre—reinforcing state power, not challenging it.

Anarchists and the anti-authoritarian left often appear disconnected from local communities, with little presence in the neighbourhoods or direct connections to refugees. We arrive as outsiders, sometimes facing kettling, harassment, and arrests.

Mainstream accounts frame the far-right surge as a backlash to left failures—neoliberal betrayal, cultural elitism, identity politics “gone too far.” But this obscures the deeper truth: Western societies long ago abandoned ideological politics, and whatever radicalism remained was absorbed and neutralised by social-democratic parties acting as pressure valves. Today’s political irrelevance is the result of decades of co-option and betrayal.

The gap between consumerist comfort zones and excluded populations has become an unbridgeable chasm. Digital natives grow up immersed in a technologically curated reality. Inside the citadel of the wealthy Global North, most can meet their basic material needs, while outside survival itself is precarious. Yet on both sides of the wall, the capacity to imagine life beyond the dominant narrative is vanishing.

The new middle classes function as highly specialised technicians and computer operators in a fully automated dystopia that extracts and destroys at unprecedented levels. Those who fail to adapt are rendered expendable. Genocide and ecocide advance hand in hand—perhaps the bleakest picture humanity has painted in civilisation’s history. Both the left and the right struggle to confront this reality in its full scale.

Governments steer reactionary domestic fronts—claiming to counter far-right drift while pushing anti-migrant policies. Repression is intense, with AI-driven surveillance defining a new society of control and feeding into a global shift toward a de facto wartime economy driven by the military–industrial complex. Militarised, racialised social orders prepare for war abroad and repression at home.

The far-right resurgence in the UK mirrors trends across Europe and the US. It is fuelled by wealthy donors and business interests, unfolding amid post-colonial restructuring. Nationalist militarism is global capitalism’s go-to strategy for managing its own contradictions, demanding a compliant, racist, and surveilled population in exchange for hollow “security” and “sovereignty.” War restructures society through displacement and discipline, always along racial lines.

New migration waves toward the citadels will continue, driven by deepening inequality, war, and ecological collapse. Migrants will remain scapegoats for crises they did not cause.

In the Middle East, this scapegoating turns genocidal. Palestinians—once a key source of precarious labour in Israel—have been rendered surplus. Racism so dehumanising it treats them as disease-carriers underpins the ongoing offensive: erasure of an indigenous population to consolidate a Greater Israel aligned with US interests and settler-colonial permanence.

The same logic that obliterates Gaza demonises migrants in Britain, criminalises dissent, and elevates white nationalism. Racism and xenophobia justify both foreign aggression and domestic repression. Liberalism cloaks this in the language of rights—but its function remains control. The UK’s Public Order Act 2023 claims to preserve safety and democracy while criminalising protest and expanding police powers, wrapping repression in procedural fairness.

The left, meanwhile, clings to illuminated vanguardism and backs authoritarian regimes simply because they oppose the West. Reviving the ideological zombies of Marxist orthodoxy and party-line praxis will not get us out of this nightmare. The revolts of this century were announced as joyful majority movements grounded in the lives and resistance of the displaced, exploited, and exiled. Building trust in our communities means abandoning the ideological habits that isolate us and reduce us to joyless, miserable lifestyle cults.

Palestine, climate, migration—these are not separate struggles. Internationalist solidarity must stretch across all fronts. Our enemies are not only abstract “isms” or tanks and cops, but also patriarchy, borders, data centres, and propaganda systems—left and right—that sustain the global war economy.

As global restructuring accelerates, the left–right binary fades. Direct action beyond ideology and party politics gains traction among a new generation. We must revive revolutionary imagination and resist the cynical pessimism of rigid orthodoxy.

We don’t need to reinvent the wheel—but we do need to joyfully rise to the occasion. Grassroots counter-information and deep community engagement remain as relevant as ever.

And we must have honest conversations with our leftist friends and allies: there hasn’t been a single uprising in history that left leaders didn’t betray. Disappointment will follow hollow promises for a “better” party.

The spectre of revolt from the past decades still haunts the elites and this reactionary wave is their effort to stop it from taking form again. Our task is to crush the snake eggs before they hatch—to build bonds of trust, create spaces of refusal, and confront not just fascism but the system that breeds it. What it fears most is our capacity to live ungovernable.

The post Far-right eruption in the United Kingdom 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.

It’s hard to refute the facts: the home is a site of disproportionate sexual, physical, and mental/emotional harm. It’s a model that serves capitalism by naturalizing the reproductive labor of parenting and home maintenance that enables workers to get ready to go make money for a boss. It becomes an easy out for the state to use in place of actual change — rather than give everyone healthcare, for example, spousal benefits are incentivized; to maintain the barbarousness of borders, marriage is heralded as an upstanding path to crossing them. And as many activist writers have noted: the benefits of marriage destroyed the radical momentum of the gay liberation movement. Relatedly, marriage creates a moral center, which the state weaponizes to construct and punish the outlying “deviants.”

We also know that two people are not enough to raise children, and that, as Sophie Lewis puts it, children are part of a “lottery that drops a neonate arbitrarily among one or two or three or four individuals (of a particular class) and keeps her there for the best part of two decades without her consent.” If you are born into generational wealth and parental mental wellness, you will fare well; the rest of us are expected to pull ourselves out of our conditions by the proverbial bootstraps.

It’s easy for me to get excited about family abolition because the conclusion is a dreamy vision of queer worldmaking. Family abolitionists (usually) don’t say any of us need to give up our blood kin if we don’t want to, but rather that we ought to imagine real community care. That we ought to build the kind of world that doesn’t wed a child’s success to the current financial or emotional state of a couple adults, and one that allows for the work of tending —to our old, our young, our sick — to be a shared task by entire circles of people, not just whoever lives close with shared DNA or legal tethers. It’s ambitious and often out of reach, but, as queer communities have demonstrated for centuries, “chosen family” is possible.

Family abolition has its critics, and not just from the pronatalist, family-values Right. In Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, bell hooks pushes against the feminist analysis of family as the primary site of oppression as a glaringly white conclusion: “…many black women find the family the least oppressive institution.” Hooks continues: “Devaluation of family life in feminist discussion often reflects the class nature of the movement. Individuals from privileged classes rely on a number of institutional and social structures to affirm and protect their interests. The bourgeois woman can repudiate family without believing that by doing so she relinquishes the possibility of relationship, care, protection. If all else fails, she can buy care.” I write regularly about the way growing up poor taught me more about community care than any radical text, so I’m in firsthand agreement with hooks’ call out here. Not to mention that the idea that the state is motivated to keep families together flies in the face of the experience of poor families (disproportionately families of color) whose children get stolen from them by Child & Family Services, or immigrant families who get torn apart by ICE.

Still, family abolitionists like Lewis, M.E. O’Brien, Shulamith Firestone (and others) are also right: the nuclear household is not a sustainable model.

In addition to being immersed in this literature, this week also brought the following: learning that a student’s undocumented father would not be able to attend her graduation because of the Real ID Act; learning that another student’s parents were refusing to accept their daughter’s gender transition; having a horribly high-conflict experience at a meeting that could generously be described as part of my radical “chosen family”; getting excited to make brunch for my bio-family for Easter; and, feeling legitimately haunted by this image of migrants in New York in an article about the necropolitical hellscape that is the US.

I couldn’t shake this scene. The holding, the head leaning, the exhaustion that found refuge in beloveds’ arms. The love the love the love; the family. That’s all I kept thinking: the love, the family.

I have no conclusion to the mess of this, other than to say the state is the enemy of care. The state is the enemy of love. The state is the enemy of whatever version of family is worth holding onto.

_____

Written by Raechel Anne Jolie

Continue reading her amazing posts for free in the Substack app

The post The State is the enemy of the Care- Notes on family abolition appeared first on Void Network.

When I was writing my review of Vincent Bevins’s If We Burn, I thought that I would end by comparing the Bevins and Nunes. Like Bevins, Nunes’s theoretical tract is a “response to the cycle of struggles that began in 2011” but unlike Bevins, Nunes does not think that the failures of this cycle of struggles can be attributed to ideology alone. While he does offer a critique of “horizontalism,” like Bevins, he recognizes that this ideology is, in part, a response to certain underlying material conditions that remain, for better or worse, unavoidable. The nature of capitalist society has changed and so, therefore, has the nature of class struggle. Leaving aside whether this would be desirable or not, attempting to turn back the clock to an era in which unions and parties and other formal organizations mediated class struggle is itself ideological, an expression of left melancholy that needs to be overcome.

So what is it that has changed? The place to look for answers is in the heart of the book, “Elements for a Theory of Organisation 1.” As Nunes writes, “the idea of horizontality” emerges for three reasons: “an increased awareness of the interconnectedness brought about by capitalist globalization; the discovery of the organizing and mobilizing affordance provided by the internet; and the inspiration coming from autonomous movements in the Global South, especially the Zapatistas in Mexico and those that emerged in Argentina in the wake of the 2001 crisis.” In other words, while the “idea of horizontality” may be ideology, what it responds to are very real changes in the nature of society: globalization, information technology, and new form of class struggle emerging in response to these. Note how different this account is from Bevins, who attributes horizontalism—or the idea of horizontality—to ideology alone. As he writes later in the chapter:

Today’s revolts emerge from a conjuncture marked by the convergence of four historical trends that, at least for now, appear irreversible. The first is the increasing mediatisation of everyday life, and specifically the use of digital platforms that generate an enormous potential for what Manuel Castells dubbed “mass self-communication.” The second is the vertiginous drop in organising costs resulting from that, which enables complex collective coordination on a scale that in the past could only have been achieved through mass organisations. The third is the crisis of the “post-political” centrist consensus dominant in most countries since the end of the Cold War, which has intensified a long-running loss of confidence in liberal democratic institutions across the world. The fourth is the decline, in membership as well as political relevance, of most mass organisations that played a central role in convoking and organising popular struggles in the twentieth century.

Only reason 3 is a matter of ideology—the others are material changes in the nature of contemporary life that are irreversible except through other material changes. Fighting against the ideology of horizontalism without addressing these underlying material conditions is quixotic because these new forms offer both potentials and drawbacks. The easiness of networked organizing outcompetes formal organizations time and again, and therefore one must accept that, for the time being, this will be a big part of the mix, even if one imagines, as Nunes does, an important role for formal organizations. The result of this recognition is that Nunes suggests we stop thinking about organization as formal organization alone but look at “organisational ecology” which includes both formal and informal organization. In fact, Nunes argues that since the 1960s and 1970s this ecological perspective has been implicitly adopted by movements where a leading formal organization was lacking, such as “Autonomia” or “the movement of ‘77” in Italy and the Gay and Women’s Liberation Movements.

This brings us to some of the most important points of the book, with regard to contemporary debates about organization. Today there is a tendency to treat organization as a quantity which can be measured—organization is something which class struggle today lacks, either in whole or in part, and therefore the problems confronting us are problems of “disorganization.” But for Nunes organization is just what there is, and what some people describe as disorganization is simply a different form of organization. This is a point that has been made many times before, including by me. What people describe as spontaneous, reflexive, and disorganized is often, in fact, quite organized. Riots don’t lack organization, though they do typically lack formal organization. Contemporary movements are, in fact, a kind of fractal—when you zoom in on the disorganization of the riot what you find are, in fact, planned, conscious actions that merely appear disorganized in aggregate. This insight applies the other way, too. When one examines the behavior of a formal organization, what often appears highly organized in aggregate is often quite spontaneous, unplanned, or chaotic when one zooms in, since all kinds of decisions taken within organizations are done so informally. “Spontaneity” is therefore a particularly problematic concept.

Nunes also offers a criticism of another concept, “self-organization,” that is often used by the ultraleft to describe the power of informal organization. But what is the self of self-organization? What we call self-organization is often not really very self-organized but rather in response to some kind of other-organization. In class society, and in struggles against it, there is no real self-organization, since that would imply full autonomy for the self-organized group when, in fact, what we describe as self-organization is a reaction to heteronomy—to the fact of being organized by bosses, cops, unions, and parties.

The critique of self-organization that Nunes offers is gotten at by way of the discourse of cybernetics, and particularly second-order cybernetics. Cybernetics is, in some senses, a study of self-organization. It defines animals, people, machines, and even organizations by their capacity to act on and regulate themselves through circular causality. But any organism deemed self-organizing is always in relation to whatever is outside the self, from which it derives energy, resources, etc. Even though the human body self-regulates it isn’t really self-organized since it is partly produced by forces outside itself, hence second-order cybernetics. This is a useful framework and one of the best aspects of the book is the way it takes ideas from cybernetics and shows their utility. As much as this discourse has been used by capitalism to naturalize economy and society, there are some important truths contained within it, and for better or worse, we can’t get away from the language of “emergence” when it comes to describing society and its class struggle. Without the notion of emergence, it becomes hard to understand how things happen without anyone intending them. Though the Hegelian dialectic is another way to get at this, “emergence” is here to stay and helps explain how movements always surprise us and how they unfold in ways that are beyond the control of individuals

In a subsequent chapter, I will offer some criticisms of Nunes, and indicate some of the problems with his approach.

I wanted to indicate why I think the Nunes book is important, useful, and underrated. Now I want to spell out some of my criticisms of the book.

My first criticism is that I think the account which we get in the book of the emergence of the “network paradigm” lays the emphasis too much on technological change, and the internet in particular. Of the four causes that Nunes gives for this emergence—information technology; cheaper organizing via information technology, the crisis of centrism, and the waning of workers’ parties and unions—the fourth is, in my view, the most important, whereas Nunes’s book lays emphasis on the first two. (I should add that I think 1 and 2 are the same, and 3 not a real thing). But we can easily deduce that the fourth is the determinative cause since the examples he gives of “organizational ecology” date from the 1970s and not the 1990s. If the ecological view emerges with the Women’s and Gay Liberation Movements or the “area of Autonomy” in Italy in 1977 and not the networked, alter-globalizing Zapatista Liberation Army, then we cannot attribute it to digital technology primarily. The crisis of the parties and unions—or what Endnotes and others have described as “end of workers’ identity” of the “end of the workers’ movement” or “programmatism”—emerges much earlier than digital technology, and is therefore determinative.

Furthermore, some of what Nunes attributes to the network paradigm has been a consistent feature of class struggle for as long as we have examples. Informal organization—aggregate action—has always been part of the mix, and we can find recognition of this “self-activity” in Marx, Luxemburg, and others. Nearly every revolution has begun as a consequence of informal organization with formal organizations playing catch up. Since the 1990s, digital technology has acted as a multiplier for this kind of informal organization, but the decline of formal working-class organization is, in my view, far more consequential. Adopting an evolutionary framework, Nunes argues that informal organizing now out-competes formal organization as a result of the low levels of initial investment digital technology affords—anybody can, potentially, reach millions with a single tweet or TikTok. In a fascinating moment in the text, Nunes suggest that, rather than an era without vanguards, digital technology has allowed nearly anyone to become a vanguard, such that the leadership function, rather than having disappeared, has been distributed more widely. Anyone who has participated in contemporary social movements will recognize the truth of this assertion, even if when, we trace things back to their origins, we often find the actions of vouched groups rather than scattered individuals. Aggregate action (informal organization) and collective action (formal organization) are always co-present. It’s not that intentional, deliberate action has disappeared—in fact there is more of it than ever, it’s just that now it’s in the hands of more people.

In assigning relative weight to these various causes, we should place emphasis, however, on the inability of formal organizations to “get the goods” and downgrade the lower investment allowed by digital technology. The affordances of the digital are not, in this regard, all that different than print—or graffiti, for that matter—which is why we see the “ecological” paradigm emerging in the 1960s and 1970s and not the 1990s. In the era of the classical workers’ movement—let’s date it from 1871-1968, for convenience—the unions and parties which were able to assert partial leadership over social movements did so because they were able to deliver tangible benefits to participants through bilateral negotiations with the state and capitalists. But today we live in an era in which, to put it bluntly, due to weakening growth, elites are much less willing to negotiate. There is no longer a compromise position and class struggle has become much more zero-sum. As such, the fruits of formal organization are diminished as a function of investment in such organization, and it is this which explains their decline, and the preference for informal organization, not some deleterious ideology emerging from the Port Huron Statement and sent around the world. It’s not so much that informal organization has become cheaper but that everything else has become more expensive.

The other problems with Nunes’s approach might be described as formalism and monism. Nunes offers us a theory of “political organisation” and not a theory of revolution or communism. As such, its strengths (its lucidity about organisation) rest on weaknesses. In its Spinozism, it defines organization as the “capacity to act” and “produce political effects” but are all capacities and effects equal? While Nunes states that his aim is a theory of political organization rather than organization as such, it’s hard to see how his definition is specific enough to emancipatory, revolutionary, or communist organization—ie, the forms of organization we care about. Doesn’t this definition work for fascist organization as well? Doesn’t it describe the organizing forms of the state and capital? Are those not “political”? A related problem is that (revolutionary, emancipatory) political organizations are usually described and analyzed in the book without any reference to antagonist organizations. But the goal of communist organization is not just to multiply the power of such organizations but to negate the already-existing organizations by which proletarians are always already organized: the organizations of capitalism and the state. In other words, the theory of political organization we get in Nunes’s book lacks negativity and does not sufficiently distinguish emancipatory from counter-emancipatory organizations. This is because its definition of organization is formalist or perhaps functionalist but is missing “content,” missing a sense of what such organization is for, ultimately—ie, the production of classless, moneyless, stateless society. It is possible that such a society can be defined as a kind of organization but the book does not do so.

Marx’s definition of communism as a state of affairs in which “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all” shares something with Nunes’s definition of organization as “capacity to act” but contains some additional predicates. Development is not only capacity to act but capacity to cultivate new capacities and experiences. In other words, we can’t define organization formally but must think about content, about what people want and what people are. This is something which Nunes resists, given the post-Althusserian and antihumanist theory he relies on, but I don’t think it can be avoided if we want to develop a theory of emancipatory organization.

____

SOURCE: https://jasperbernes.substack.com/p/organization-and-its-theories

The post Organization and Its Theories- by Jasper Bernes appeared first on Void Network.

I think we can simplify these questions in a way that may provide some perspective.

Which future would you rather face?

Having to spend between one and ten years in prison

OR

not going to prison, but living in a world in which:

• you and most people you know will, by the age of 50, probably get cancer, heart disease, diabetes, an auto-immune disorder, or a painful chronic illness that no one understands (with all the suffering and likelihood of death that accompany those conditions)
• you, your immediate family, and your closest friends will have a roughly 10% – 50% chance of experiencing a high death toll extreme weather event or acute famine, and possibly dying in it
• if you have family and loved ones from outside Europe/Australia and North America, they will probably face a 50-99% chance of having to face lethal weather events and famines multiple times, killing many of them
• any natural area that you have ever loved will be forever altered by mass extinction, mining, drought, or other causes
• you would have to sit by and watch as the political institutions, financial institutions, and corporations most responsible for all this suffering gain ever more power over your life and your surroundings, never being abolished, never being held accountable in any meaningful way.

Now let’s assume that the bad things described above—relating to death, disease, extreme weather, mass extinctions—are going to happen no matter what. In fact, yes: let’s assume that. We’re not speaking hypothetically right now. This is a realistic assumption. All the scientific models that have been validated and refined over the last decades predict that we are on a collision course for that level of suffering and death, or worse. In the parts of the world that are on the cutting edge of the apocalypse, those conditions already pertain.

So now let’s come back to our hypothetical scenario. First, the scenario’s realistic foundation:

Every year for the foreseeable future brings with it the grim certainty of skyrocketing death rates, disease, famine, mass extinction, loss of habitat, and the disappearance of entire ecosystems.

Now, the choice. Would you rather:

• face all this harm and suffering, within the approximate probabilities named in the first bulleted section, but also
• take illegal actions against the structures and institutions responsible for all this suffering, and by doing so assume a less than 50% risk of one to ten years in prison
• know that with all the other people also taking forceful action, ecocide and genocide become less profitable, and those in power lose some or all their power, whereas the rest of us, as well as the generations to come, gain a partial or complete ability to organize our communities and tend to our ecosystems in a way that prioritizes healing

OR

take no action other than symbolic protest, avoid the risk of prison, but also do nothing to diminish the power of the world eaters. With nothing to hold them back, the apocalypse becomes even more brutal, and the future you face includes:

• hundreds of millions of humans dying every year from famine, lack of clean water, pollution, extreme weather events, and genocidal warfare resulting from these scarcities occurring within a competitive politico-economical framework
• you and everyone you know facing a significant decrease in life expectancy, as the entire human population decreases between 10%-80%
• the likelihood that you and the people you care about the most have to survive or are excruciatingly killed off by famine, cancer, diarrhea, tropical diseases, heart disease, untreated infection, wildfires, floods, or warfare
• having to obey the increasingly dictatorial authority of the political and economic institutions that are directly responsible for all this suffering, or even worse dictatorships that arise as society falls apart but people just watch it all passively

In the above scenarios, which offer simplified but accurate versions of the hidden choices we all face every day, what does the risk of prison have to do with the apocalypse and how extreme it gets?

Actually, everything. To understand why, there’s some official history that needs to be refuted.

When we learn the standard history of civilization, revolutions are never mentioned until the Age of Reason and the supposedly reasonable revolutions of slave owners, colonizers, military officers, and businessmen in France and North America. Prior to that, we may hear of quite a few earlier civilizations that mysteriously collapsed. Or, we may get spoon fed a tale of continuity from Mesopotamia through Egypt to Rome and the Holy Roman Empire and Spain and then modernity, with everything beyond the shadow of the State (or in the latter version, beyond the shadow of so-called Western states) completely ignored.

In the years I was doing the research for my book, Worshiping Power: An Anarchist View of Early State Formation, I could not find a single example of a statist society that collapsed, that just fell apart from some logistical inefficiency, spiraling warfare, or local ecocide perpetrated by the ruling class. I did come across multiple “mysterious” collapses that were quite clearly caused or at least helped along by lower class revolutions, and after these revolutions people’s quality of life usually improved. As for the other collapses that do remain mysterious, in every case I came across evidence—inconclusive but nonetheless strong—that popular uprisings combined with massive abandonment (back in the day when there was a frontier beyond which State power did not reach) helped tip the balance of power. Yet the vast majority of academic sources I plowed through—historians, archaeologists, paleoecologists, and anthropologists from fifty different decades, twenty different countries, and a dozen different schools of thought—refused to even mention the concept of revolution or to portray the lower classes as a group capable of agency or even thought.

So: revolution. It’s been with us as a possibility as long as the State has. Accordingly, in our present scenario, I am talking about us rising up against the power structures responsible for ecocide and genocide, and taking effective action against the institutions and infrastructures that cause us the most harm.

The question of the law, obviously, is a joke. The law is a weapon in the hands of the ruling class. They only follow it or deploy it when it suits their interests. And if we take effective action against them, they will try to punish us regardless of whether our actions are technically illegal.

So I’m not strictly talking about taking illegal action: I’m talking about saving ourselves from immense harm, which most people would consider an ethically valid basis for action.

For now, let’s leave aside the ethical question of, how many people complicit in mass murder is it okay to kill, provided they are still engaged in mass murder and we’re not punishing them for harms that are no longer ongoing. (I might pick that question up in a future newsletter.)

At the moment let’s just imagine the destruction of things that have no feelings and no existence outside of their status as tools for extraction, domination, and despoliation: pipelines, mines, highways, airports, prisons, mansions, drilling installations, facilities related to the police and military, cash crop and monocrop operations, golf courses, grass lawns, cell phone towers, useless-shit factories, chemical and automobile and weapons manufacturers… the list goes on and on.

We know from past experiences that sabotage campaigns are exponentially more likely than protest to lead to the cancellation of new oppressive infrastructures being built. Sabotage campaigns together with protests are even more effective, especially if those protests focus on blockades and the total rejection of those in power rather than the overtures to dialogue. Regardless, protests, blockades, and sabotage all put us at risk of arrest and imprisonment.

About that risk though. I tossed out the figure of a 50% chance of going to prison. That was intentional, because I think if we are going to take big risks for a revolution, it is much healthier and more sustainable if we face up to those risks and assume the worst will come to pass. If we can imagine ourselves dealing with the consequences and surviving, prison and the police will already have lost most of their power over us. But realistically, the actual risk is closer to, and probably below, 1%, if we follow some basic security practices. Significantly, the actions that may feel the safest if we are inculcated in all the delusions of a liberal democracy, are actually the riskiest.

This has certainly been true for me. In my life, I have been arrested four times. Those four arrests earned me (in order)

• six months locked up in county jails, maximum security prison, and minimum security prison, where I faced various forms of violence from guards and snitches;
• a weekend in a temporary detention facility in conditions that technically qualified as toxic;
• a week in jail, a deportation process lasting two years in which I had to remain in the country and check in at court every two weeks but was not legally allowed to work, and the whole time I was under the threat of a permanent ban, which would mean never being allowed to return and see loved ones;
• and a quick night in jail, respectively.

The first three arrests—the ones with the worst consequences—were for some of the most peaceful actions I have ever participated in. The first was civil disobedience, the second was a legal protest (in fact it was the mass arrest that was illegal, and if I’d had the patience to follow up with some noncommunicative lawyers I would have gotten a huge payout a few years later, in part for the illegal arrest and in part for the toxic site where the holding pens had been set up). And the third was also a legal protest, though it took two years on provisional release and a court case to prove it (there was, um… some disagreement about what constituted “public disorder” and what constituted an “explosive” in the eyes of the law, and it took a good lawyer and favorable witnesses to win that dispute).

The fourth one actually was an illegal protest in which a number of neo-Nazis and cops got assaulted and even injured, and some property got smashed. My friend and I weren’t assuming any additional risks aside from going with the flow, but going with the flow is its own risk, and we didn’t hightail it out of there fast enough when the signs made it clear that that was the move. However, police couldn’t pin anything on any of the people who got cornered and mass arrested. It was too difficult for them to gather specific evidence, because of the chaos factor, because people weren’t civil, because of all the movement and pandemonium plus a modest amount of destruction. Of course, police don’t needevidence to lock people up in prison, but in a democracy they do need to calculate how much they can stray into the legal terrain of the state of exception. In this case, it would have been harder for the pigs to sell since there wasn’t enough disruption for the media to create a major political scandal or mobilize fragile bourgeois sensibilities enough to justify locking up anyone who had anything to do with the protest. So they let us all go.

Now let’s talk about all the things that aren’t showing up here, all the risks that never resulted in arrests. Or, more appropriately, let’s talk around them. There is an unavoidable inequality between civil disobedience, on the one hand, and on the other the continuum of sabotage, collective self-defense, counterattack, and insurrectionary action. The State will go to far greater lengths to repress or eliminate those they suspect of carrying out forceful actions, and also those who vocalize their support for such actions and the revolutionary culture they belong to.

What’s more, the State proactively organizes society to preempt the capacities we need in order to struggle wisely, like the ability to tell stories and create collective memory. We are shaped as isolated individuals dependent on the dominant institutions for any sense of history. More often than not, they just spoon feed us entertainment to fill the hole where our sense of history should be. And as we know, repression skews sharply in favor of nonviolence: it is far riskier to tell the stories of sabotage, of insurrection, of combat. I won’t be sharing any such stories in this newsletter. Immediately, I can hear in my own head the cynical insinuation that I’m probably just some hypocrite who only writes about this stuff. Which is okay. We need to learn to deal with far worse forms of baiting and harassment.

The most important thing is on the one hand not to respond from a place of ego, not to worry about curating a reputation for being a daring revolutionary, and on the other hand to pay close attention to anyone who mocks or belittles others in a way that would encourage a culture of people having to show off or insinuate their illegalist credentials. And always remember the maxim: you don’t have to be a cop to do a cop’s work. (Don’t spread rumors about people you suspect of being infiltrators or snitches: the cops themselves benefit from rumorology and often spread false accusations against others; instead, share constructive criticism of harmful forms of communication and conflict/avoidance.)

Stepping back from our individual egos and sinking into our collective body, what any one of us can attest to is that there have been tens of thousands of banks and cop shops smashed or burned, pigs and fascists beaten up, government buildings attacked, pipelines and mines sabotaged, construction and clearcutting equipment destroyed, research facilities torched, labs liberated, secrets leaked, useful or valuable goods stolen, and frauds committed, and those who have done prison sentences can best be counted in the hundreds,1 with many of those being people who got framed but didn’t actually do anything.

In other words, we are often the safest when we play it dangerous, as long as we are careful, as long as we use precautions or make smart interventions during chaotic moments, as long as we discourage a culture of bravado, self-isolation, rumor-spreading, or snitching.

And to zoom out for a moment, no one on this planet is safe until we can nourish an ethos of collective self-defense against the institutions that are threatening and harming us, smashing their gears so they cannot function anymore. What use is it to speak of survival if we have no practice of fighting back against those who are killing us? There is room for all of us, but we need to figure out what we can contribute and what it is we still need to learn in order to be a vital part of the webs of solidarity and mutual aid.

Thanks for reading Surviving Leviathan with Peter Gelderloos! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

A revolution is not comprised of tactics alone. If we let ourselves get turned around by impatience, desperation, avoidance of criticism, loss of historical memory, if we divorce our strategies from our goals, our visions, and our ethics, we quickly become our own worst enemies. Nonetheless, it doesn’t hurt to proliferate certain tactics, to imagine what a better place we would be in if people realized it’s well worth the risk to attack the infrastructures that are spewing out death, poisoning our futures and our present. What a better place we would be in if people responded to our learned helplessness, to this hegemonic hopelessness, with a thought, a certainty: how many miles there are of unprotected power grids and pipelines! How many bulldozers, construction sites, and offices of evil institutions have no more protection at night than a camera that will log nothing more than a time and a masked figure, unidentifiable! How many of us there are, and how hard we are to surveil when we leave our snitches at home, when we don’t take our phones and other tracking devices out of the house with us!

How powerful, when we realize that we are powerful. How frightful, when we remember that we can be vengeful. How grounded, when we learn to integrate our need to fight and to heal. How inspiring, when we understand that all the walls and cages and cameras and militarized police forces of this whole prison society are there to protect the powerful… from us.

Sooner or later, the odds will flip, and our probabilities for health and survival will begin a slow ascent, and the odds on the plutocrats and police will face a sudden plummet. That moment? Collectively, we decide when it arrives.

1

The approximation—tens of thousands of actions, hundreds of imprisoned—is based on, roughly, the last ten years in the half dozen countries I’m most familiar with.

_____

SOURCE: https://petergelderloos.substack.com/p/ethics-risk-apocalypse

The post Ethics, Risk, Apocalypse- Peter Gelderloos appeared first on Void Network.

In January of this year, while eco-justice activists were redecorating the Mona Lisa at the Louvre to protest climate change, French farmers besieged several French cities in protest against a range of policies threatening the material foundations of their way of life. In response to recent increases in agricultural costs due to the war in Ukraine and a drop in prices due to free trade policies implemented by the EU, tractors blocked the A6, a major highway leading into Paris, and in the south, farmers dumped manure and other agricultural waste on the front steps of city hall in Toulouse. The protests followed several months of protest at the end of 2023, and were echoed a month later by further protests in February of 2024.

The following article from Lundimatin seeks to provide some historical and existential context for the revolt, and to challenge some of the reflexes and assumptions of the left’s response. The article is of interest to us for two reasons. First, it helps explain the material basis of resistance to the mega-basins by organizations like Soulevement du Terre as well as the larger division between urban and rural workers in France. Second, it provides an excellent example of the kind of gap between contemporary leftist political categories and reflexes and the experience of rural workers that continues to provide an opening to the right wing, both in France and elsewhere. We take it to be the responsibility of partisans everywhere to find ways to close this gap and hope this article will make some contribution to that effort.

Charlatan Revolutionary Group

published in lundimatin#413, January 30, 2024

In recent days, we’ve seen prefectures covered in manure and set on fire, mutual insurance companies set ablaze, “foreign” trucks turned over by tractors and their food distributed to Restos du Cœur or burned on the asphalt. There are calls to surround Paris, others to rename the Élysée “Le Lisier” and a government particularly concerned not to add fuel to the fire. A ready-made media narrative, coordinated by both politicians and FNSEA representatives, has led us to view this movement solely from their point of view, i.e., their interests: agribusiness is allegedly engaged in a tug-of-war with the State to recoup a little cash and exert pressure against ecological regulations that are squeezing their margins. All this in a brown, reactionary and conservative atmosphere. Good. The Groupe Révolutionnaire Charlatan has sent us this text, which aims to approach the question by way of a completely different axiom: trying to understand revolt from its historical and ethical coordinates.

Lenin against the Muzhiks

“We have learned how to overthrow the bourgeoisie, how to suppress them, and we are proud of the fact. But we have not yet learned how to regulate our relations with the millions of middle peasants, how to win their confidence, and we must frankly admit it.”

– Lenin, speech to the ^8th Congress of the CPSU

In public school history curricula we’re given all the great stages of “progress”–the Industrial Revolution, the rural exodus, the Republic–as a single uninterrupted series of pliant modifications, useful amenities, and welcome improvements to the lifestyles of backwards populations, thanks of course to the philanthropic efforts of an intrepid urban elite trained in the school of economic rationality. It’s this vision–not too far off from the one behind the colonial project–that we have in mind today when we talk about the peasant world.

The reality of primitive accumulation, the forced displacement of populations, and the obliteration of the rural world–the land, the languages and the peasant way of life all included–is still seen in many left-wing circles as a positive and necessary stage that, with all the promise of mechanization, is supposed to bring about an egalitarian society, free to decide on its modes and methods of production; in short, industry as a necessary step in the socialization of our means of existence.

After killing their boyars and dividing up their lands equally, the muzhiks registered thousands of grievances with the Petrograd Soviet and voted for the socialist-revolutionaries in droves, unaware, however, that with the ideological confusion that was Bolshevik modernization, a tsarless Moscow was still scheming against them. All they needed was 100,000 tractors to get the peasants out of the way of the only real historical struggle, that between the proletariat and bourgeoisie. The rest of society, their ways of life, their revolutions, were much less important; and a decade later they could be put to death by the thousands, at least those of them branded “kulaks”—anyone with the misfortune of owning two cows, an unconscionable sign of allegiance to the petty-bourgeoisie.

Of course this loaded history has no parallel with the contemporary situation in France, where the peasantry has all but disappeared. But it is indicative of how deep the left’s blind spots can cut, and of the plethora of social groups that still coexist in complete ignorance of one another. We firmly believe that a “revolutionary,” if such a thing exists, is whomever brings about revolution, regardless of his or her background or beliefs; anyone who, when society reaches the point of no return, takes a resolute stand for a new world.

It therefore seems useful to give a brief overview of the rural world in modern France, in order to better evaluate its current political situation. Revolutionary theory does not make abstract proclamations from on high, with the overarching goals of an outmoded theoretical system; it descends into the masses, tries to make sense of the clandestine promises of emancipation and the repressed desires for an egalitarian world that dwell in the heart of each individual—and, putting this secret discourse into a system, giving it a vocabulary, it extends the means to speak the language of revolution to everyone.

The peasant world since the second world war

“The man sitting in the iron seat did not look like a man; gloved, goggled, rubber dust mask over nose and mouth, he was part of the monster, a robot in the seat.”

“The driver sat in his iron seat and he was proud of the straight lines he did not will, proud of the tractor he did not own or love, proud of the power he could not control.”

– John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, 1939

In so far as it is possible to describe the peasant as the land’s most literal inhabitant–living off the earth and giving direct expression to the social and cultural singularity of his region through his customs, dialect and way of life–it should be made clear from the outset that this is not how the right sees them. This peasant–who is no longer with us–lived in their own civilization, with its own languages, traditions, ingrained particularities, as well as its own symbolic and religious systems. This dense web of particularisms was an obstacle to the projects of the State–the tax inspector and the soldier alike. How could they make their way in a world that spoke its own language, where the land was farmed as the people saw fit, and whose inhabitants may or not have given themselves family names–that could change from one village to the next?

The eradication of this incongruous race was therefore an integral part of the modernization effort, nullifying its particularities, mapping its lands, turning the father into the de facto representative of the group, and conscripting its sons to die in wars. But the earth has a thick skin, and it wasn’t until after the Second World War that this unification effort reached its final phase.

The material and social foundations of this very particular world were swept away during the Marshall Plan era by a series of structural modifications and intensive mechanization: hedgerows were cut down, ditches filled in, and gigantic plots marked out to be plowed by tractors driven by a new generation of farmers trained by Jesuits and Dominican modernizers in agricultural technical schools. The state invested billions in this project. In 1954 there were 230,000 tractors in France; by 1963, 950,000. The consequence of this acceleration was the definitive decapitation of a large part of the farming population, unable to expand and mechanize, and thus unable to compete.

A competitive labor market, productivity gains, crushing competition from small businesses, all of which ensured solid growth and consumption as a means of redistribution: nothing too harmful, as any liberal economics textbook will tell you.

But what became of the man on his iron machine? With all the family farms gone, all his neighbors became agricultural laborers or fled to the city, and he was left to feed the monster: to stay competitive in a capitalist economy, you have to keep moving. More land, more fertilizer, more machines. There are few subjects the various ideologies of modernization agree more on: working the land is a kind of bondage, a thankless task that weighs on the individual, confining him to his plot of land and the shadows of the pre-enlightened world. As it turned out, the technical and economic needs of the luminous modern world were leading the planet to its doom, and in the meantime creating a class of wage-earning consumers with a dull, repetitive existence, probably not that different from that of the workers of yesteryear–the kind of same dependence, only with gadgets and processed food. The modern farmer found his own new form of bondage in agro-industrial techniques.

This new technological dependence has three faces: dependence on the enormous debt amassed from the purchase of machinery and land; dependence on the agro-industrial networks that manage all stages of production and control all regulatory bodies; and dependence finally on the machine itself and its dynamics. After all, if your neighbor can buy a bigger tractor, buy smaller farmers off their land and fertilize to excess, how could you possibly beat his prices? With competitive markets and private property, farmers became each other’s executioners, just like the rest of society.

This logic only intensified with France’s entry into the European Union and the Common Market. Although the early days of agro-industry had a certain kind of success in France–i.e. increased competition–this situation came to a standstill in the 1980s, when the European market was flooded with cheaper products from other countries, while the creation of the WTO and the signing of several treaties ratified the end of customs protections.

Article 135 of the Treaty of Lisbon straightforwardly prohibits social harmonization, making it impossible for member countries to demand Europe-wide standards for labor rights. That would hardly be in the spirit of competition!

Modernization can therefore be summed up as a mixture of interdependent elements: land consolidation, a reduction in the number of farmers, an increase in the number of industrial farms, the dominance of monoculture, dependence on machines, inputs and chemistry.

All of this contributed to the current situation: from 2,500,000 farms in 1955, only 400,000 remain today, and the new European standards will cut large swathes out of that number too. The decline is first and foremost that of peasant farming, swept away in the progress of a system that has conquered French soil, and which feeds the misfortune and destitution of thousands of farmers everyday.

Agribusiness and the FNSEA

As with the cops, the same people we see in the media capitalizing on the number of suicides in the profession are often the same who instigated the working conditions and modes of sociability that caused them; a reactionary union like the Alliance Police Nationale–just like the FNSEA, in fact, defender of corporations and large-scale cereal production in the north of France–is only really there to boost careers, keep the dirty laundry in house, and maintain a lobby on behalf of the institution’s least scrupulous members. The FNSEA is particularly mafia-like in this respect.

But the transformation of agriculture into an institutional and corporatist structure is at least as complicated as the tidal wave-like upheaval of the mental and physical universe of those caught up in its gears. The left’s feverish eagerness to round things up into its own categories reveals a profound inability to grasp the social dynamics of certain sectors, and the prevalence of ideas and relationships to the State that differ from their own.

What does this eagerness tell us? That its contemptuous (and contemptible) ignorance of the agricultural world, with all its fractures and contradictions, keep it from attaining any real grasp on current events that doesn’t fall back on the truncated categories of a moralistic, urban leftism.

Let’s be clear: the FNSEA is still a powerful force, with many high hopes behind it and with its hand still on a number of levers. But when it comes to revolution, and all the more so in an age that’s lost all sight of class politics, union membership and electoral politics don’t tell us much about the real, concrete political dispositions of different groups. A number of past struggles have already revealed the inability of the Left’s intellectual software to comprehend the desires, sensitivities and pain of those belonging to certain social categories. This has long been the case, for example, with the suburban youth.

For city dwellers ignorant of the agricultural world’s many “faces,” it’s difficult to differentiate between the small-plot farmer, the large landowner and the “peasant” businessman. The figure of Arnaud Rousseau makes this flagrantly clear whenever he tires of running the same corporations behind the agro-industrial system, and goes on television to defend the interests of farmers, only to end up demanding measures to protect the economic model he himself profits from.

This powerful agri-business is the necessary consequence of the economies of scale required by land consolidation: by establishing gigantic monocultures to avoid paying for a larger variety of expensive machinery, we no longer have the resilience of a polyculture and end up with only two or three types of products to send to market. The only outlet for our production is the food industry. Scale up this pattern and here we are, irrevocably dependent on the logistics and chemical sectors, seed and livestock suppliers, slaughterhouses and so on. Over-specialization necessarily leads to dependence on industry at several levels; and as the FNSEA dominates the chambers of agriculture, it falls into a mafia-like arrangement between all the industrial sectors involved, from suppliers to supermarkets, to extract maximum profit from the farmer.

The farmer, on the other hand, is now an entrepreneur-worker saddled with debt–200,000 euros on average. A paradoxical double-bind: proletarian arms on capitalist shoulders, bound to technology and global commerce at the same time as a world experienced as rural and remote. Proletarianized in Marx’s sense because dispossessed of the means of production, in Wallerstein’s sense because blocked off from any possibility of buying and selling locally, and in Debord’s sense because deprived of a way of life. The disintegration of local communities reached the countryside and created, as in the rest of modern society, a decline in direct solidarities, the rise of consumer individualism, careerism and the middle-class, with the knowledge to boot of a fleeting population, only aggravating the sense of social isolation.

It is essential to understand the collapse of this world and the moral shock and the resulting sense of abandonment, if we are to fully comprehend what the farmers are asking for. The Gilets Jaunes stood at the periphery of the middle classes: people who had been promised the same lifestyle as upper-class consumers, particularly those living in cities, and who bitterly saw these hopes swept away by the economic slump. Farmers come from that same world, but with very different working conditions: after all, if it’s possible to set a human being to the cadences of a salaried routine–cities, with their traffic, commercial districts and giant dormitories are there for just that–it’s difficult to impose the same rhythm on the land. Even when industrialized to death, agriculture remains dependent on a host of natural and biological parameters that are difficult to adapt to the needs of the Market and Government–even if many engineers see it differently in their sick dreams.

Part of the left is trying to make up for this by replaying the old figure of the “model” working-class proletarian. There are thus good workers and bad bosses; the good, unionized “rank and file” ready for revolt, and the ever-scheming reformist “leadership.” And then there’s the inevitably reviled National Rally vote, but that’s for the wealthy elites to take care of, because, as we all know, good conscience always comes at a price.

On the institutional left, masters in the art of recuperation, it’s on the theme of Euroscepticism that the problem lies. With criticism of the European Union having been largely abandoned to the sovereigntist right, and part of the far right too, the institutional left is forced to limit its arguments to the demand for food security and better agricultural wages. The European Union pays subsidies to 8 out of 10 farmers–400,000 out of 500,000. The progressive plan relies on the Chambers of Agriculture, the national agency for agricultural management created a hundred years ago. In short, the aim is to make something of a reserve force for the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy, subsidizing the few farmers that remain with redistributive policies implemented at the national level, and all this against a backdrop of a downward trend in the number of European farmers.

From the Gilets Jaunes to the Garbage Riots

Our aim in this text is to demonstrate that it’s no surprise that the minority factions of the ultra-left are systematically ultra-confused in the face of an event like this, incapable of grasping its meaning and scope; and that certain basic facts need to be reviewed if that faction that calls itself revolutionary is to live up to its own task. We won’t even mention the helpless gesticulations coming from the parliamentary left, who’ll try anything to seem like the defender of a people who no longer recognizes it. Their constant state of alarmism with regards to the far right is nothing more than the desperate discourse of electoralism, still trying to sell us the prophecy of a defiant electoral victory as the only way to save ourselves from the threat they pose. As far as we’re concerned, the real obstacle to mounting a counterattack is precisely the disempowerment of the citizen that comes from the vote itself.

What’s happening on the road blockades escapes both this electoral logic and the usual workings of social dialogue and its intermediaries–despite their being undermined by Macronian politics. François Purseigle is missing the point whenever he mentions the sociological differences between farmers and the Gilets Jaunes. Whether or not the former are closer to the upper sociopolitical categories or the lower is of no interest to us: what does matter is that yet another sector of the population is starting to refuse the institutional monopoly on politics.

The comparison with the Gilets Jaunes can only go so far: the revolt in winter 2018 was not a redundant occurrence, destined to be repeated, but the start of a whole new sequence in French politics. It shows a cruel lack of imagination to identify and compare events without recognizing the evolution taking place from one to the next. Nothing repeats itself; trends emerge, evolve and modify themselves. This is the only context in which comparison is really of any use, otherwise it does little more than feed a defeatist fetishism like that which took hold of the Champs-Élysées recently–which is not to be totally discarded, but it doesn’t represent the best use of our time and energy. The strength of the Gilets Jaunes movement lies in its capacity for constant renewal, its ability to pop up anywhere. Need we remind you?

The only repetitions in this case are the failure to confine the unrest to the union mold, to sort those causing the trouble into a few predefined factions, and to harness the movement with a few recognized spokespersons and watchwords. Just like the early days of the Gilets Jaunes, the movement is becoming autonomous, starting from a trigger point and broadening in a haphazard way towards a general feeling of exasperation. This vague but powerful sentiment is a very important indicator: it reveals the system’s inability to reproduce itself, a contradiction that has reached a point of unsustainability. We know that part of the population can no longer live as it used to; but what’s even more radical is that it can no longer imagine living as it used to–quite a shocking shift to come to terms with.

To go back to the events of 2023, we said in a text from the time that the shift we were seeing in strategies and in the widespread feeling of upheaval was struggling to produce a shift in minds and discourse.^[1] What made the Gilets Jaunes so powerful–the shared feeling of having to start from scratch in order to succeed, the revolt that was unleashed as soon as a desire to regain control of our lives was born, the constant inventiveness, the revival of old, outdated forms of struggle–the Garbage riots failed to capture. Everyone recognized something new in the events that took place at the Place de la Concorde, instinctively understanding the new possibilities looming in the shared feeling of frustration with our passivity; a huge swathe of what hitherto had been impossible ceased to be so. It was the opposite of a crisis, the opposite of a stalemate: it was momentum. Hence the chaotically scattered marches, the new slogans, the unexpected convergences, the enormous sense of motivation.

What drained this momentum was the impossibility of translating it into everyday language, into the way we talk to each other about the situation.

This new situation existed only in embryo, in the collective unconscious. The repressive routine of union marches and the politicking of central government officials, who moved the dates around, blocked the coordination of strikes and riots, and prevented the prolonging of strikes. It was only by accident that any of these tactics were undermined in the first place. All this was overcome only by accident. What was missing was an awareness of the opposition between two irreconcilable positions, that everything should change and that nothing should change; neither of which were clearly articulated on either side. Had there been a serious attempt to translate this new situation into words and action, its explosive potential would have tripled.

But the atavistic mental software of the left was still stuck 30 years in the past, repeating the same banalities, rehashing the same repertoire. Without critically rethinking the role of the unions, the usefulness of their practices and the relevance of their slogans, we fell back into apathy less than three weeks after the start of this magnificent sequence of events. There’s a lot of collective responsibility for this; unable to pull their heads out of their asses, the “revolutionary” faction continued to repeat its slogans over and over again, drooling over the riot videos and tolerating the presence of members of parliament who only sought to calm the protest in order to better exploit it. No one with any sense of these shortcomings even tried to bring them to our attention.

What this tells us about the current situation

“But especially: the exposition of a revolutionary perspective must still consist of describing and explaining what takes place day after day, and is never satisfied with the ridiculous, abstract proclamation of general goals.”

– Guy Debord, Letter to Afonso Moteiro

We must not underestimate the farmers’ capacity for struggle; they have always been apt to mobilize in spectacular fashion. Blockades with tractors, manuring town halls, releasing pigs on the freeway: nothing is totally new here, only the tempo of the mobilization. The FNSEA is being torn apart, the movement’s going on the offensive; what we’re seeing ever since the Gilets Jaunes movement, and increasingly so, is that the people know how they should talk to the state.

A certain pattern from the Gilet Jaunes playbook might seem familiar: mobilization on a scale that seems trivial to a left that is totally disconnected from this fringe of the population; slogans that demand a better quality of life on the broadest of scales, which make the rest of the population vibrate in unison; partial convergence; and a critical distance from the unions. Other sectors then begin to feel they have something in common to express; as in many recent movements, we quickly see the rest of the population feel concerned by the struggle of a single sector, as soon as it frees itself from the usual institutional and media framing. It’s this automatic shift towards something collective, this informal feeling of a collective struggle to be waged, that revolutionaries need to work on; it’s where they ought to put their pens.

What’s happening now is an attempt by politicians of all stripes to fit the protest into their own categories, and a temporary silence from the watchdogs of the State and the FNSEA, who are carefully waiting for the situation to evolve in a direction more likely to lead to decay. They’re stalling, not sleeping: as with the post-Concorde riots, their stupor will only last until they figure out how to seize on the slightest moment of weakness to roll out their rhetoric of a return to order and send in the troops to ensure it.

In the face of all this, we might fear that the revolutionaries will stick to their old habits, lining up empty ideological formulas without trying to understand how to take advantage of the situation. Despite some positive developments since 2018, we remain incapable of changing our modus operandi and even our way of understanding society and its uprisings.

Yet it is precisely the task of revolutionary activists to reflect on the current situation, to anticipate it, to give it a language, to understand its invisible motivations and its grandiose possibilities. As a press release from Action Antifasciste Paris-Banlieue rightly put it, militant enquiry is a primary means of action within everyone’s reach: communicating, investigating, gathering testimonies, delivering observations. This facilitates both overall understanding and communication with the different factions engaged in the struggle.

Against Convergence

This is neither a call for support nor an injunction to rise up. The agricultural world expects nothing from us, and we expect nothing in return.

What the Left describes as the convergence of struggles refers to an artificial coming together of distinct movements, collectives and social groups; artificial because rather than abandoning the kinds of categorical separations produced by the system, the proposed convergence simply lines them up alongside one another, ultimately reinforcing the fundamental divisions. The convergence of struggles relies on the existence of a centralized organization responsible for carrying out a programmatic synthesis of the specific interests of the separate categories: students, wage earners, farmers, agricultural workers, artisans, civil servants, etc. The old Leninist way of doing things is safe and sound: the party owns the working class, formulates its interests and dictates its conduct–the party is everything.

We have little interest in the pious hopes of convergence and the politics of recuperation they struggle to conceal. Nothing will ever emerge from a left so stuck in its ways, be they institutional or extra-parliamentary. We have no illusion of influencing the political sensibilities of anyone on the ground, no matter how many surveys are carried out. But still we refuse to remain passive spectators of the growing grievances and the prospect of the mobilization being surpassed by other sectors of the population–truck drivers and construction workers in particular. If we can’t be the movement itself, we need to be there to understand the nature and scale of what’s happening.

The Charlatan Revolutionary Group

January 2024

SOURCE:

https://territories.substack.com/p/the-left-progress-and-the-peasant

The post The Left, Progress, and the Peasant- French Farmer’s Revolt 2024 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.