via anarhija.info

The anarchist comrade Anna Beniamino (arrested in September 2016 in the framework of operation Scripta Manent, currently detained in Rebibbia prison, Rome) has informed us (2 April 2018) that “the inevitable loudly comments”, made during the ongoing trial for the aforementioned operation, “earned” her and Marco Bisesti (detained since 09/2016, too, currently in Alessandria prison) a couple of disciplinary reports, commuted to a few days of solitary confinement.

Both comrades are laughing at “punishment”.

Solidarity and affinity with Anna and Marco, and with comrades imprisoned in Ferrara.

via anarhija.info

High court in Prague confirmed acquittance of all 5 anarchist defendants as result of appeal hearing on the 27th of March.

These are good news for sure and it also means that we overcame some part of “Fénix”, which meant something different to all of us: long months in prison, deprivation of anonymity or exhausting solidarity campaign, to put it shortly. Nevertheless, we shouldn’t make illusions about winning against repressions legally in courts, ever. Also High court’s decision doesn’t bring any kind of certainty for future, and already now we can see the top of other pile of police shit coming over horizon or even closer, a.k.a. Fénix 2, which literally is desperate attempt for revanche, an effort to get something against our comrades and restore a bit stinking idea of legitimacy of police and prisons, in czech context at least.

SO! Stay tuned. Solidarity is our weapon!

via act for freedom now

Fundraising for legal defence in Hamilton in the wake of conspiracy charges.

To Donate via e-transfer, please contact thetower@riseup.net

In the early morning hours of Friday, April 6th, police raided a home associated with some of those involved with organizing The Hamilton Anarchist Bookfair and The Tower. The door was kicked in, a flash grenade was thrown into the house, and a full SWAT team entered with assault rifles drawn. Three people were detained, and one person was arrested.

Cedar, our cherished friend, a solid comrade, and well-known local anarchist organizer, was arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit an indictable offence (unlawful assembly while masked) in relation to the so-called “Locke St. Riot”. Conspiracy charges are notoriously ambiguous and have a long legacy of being used as a tool of political repression – as we have seen recently with the case of the J20 defendants, who were arrested for resisting Trump’s inauguration last January.

After several days of stall tactics from the Crown, Cedar appeared in court on Tuesday, April 10th for a bail hearing. Much to our dismay (and the shock of every lawyer we’ve spoken to), Cedar was denied bail. While we do not use this term lightly, the court proceedings can only be described as a political witch-hunt. In the end Cedar was, in part, denied bail because of their self-affirmed and proud anarchist politics. Until the bail hearing is appealed, Cedar will remain in jail.

This will likely be a long and costly legal battle, and we’re going to need help to fundraise in order to cover all of the associated costs. We love Cedar and can’t stand the idea of him remaining locked in a cage. Whatever amount you can spare, however big or small, would be greatly appreciated.

http://fundraising.the-tower.ca/

From Libcom

Miguel Amorós interviewed by Rubén Martín for El Informador (Guadalajara)

A March 2018 interview in which Miguel Amorós discusses his anti-development concepts, the global trend towards mega-urbanization, the destructive tendencies of capitalist development, Latin American populist governments and their social basis, the civil society movement, and perspectives for a movement to create a better world.

Miguel Amorós interviewed by Rubén Martín for El Informador (Guadalajara, Mexico—November 2017)

According to Amorós, many of the changes that are supposedly taking place, only seem to be taking place. For this anarchist theoretician, society is confronted by a situation that requires the dismantling of the entire capitalist system in order to create new ways of relating to one another.

Listening to and reading the works of the libertarian thinker Miguel Amorós, allow direct access to the most lucid and radical critical thought; the experience is like being on the receiving end of a hail of hammer blows against beliefs and assumptions that purport to question modern society. Amorós repeatedly dismantles positions that claim to be critical of capitalism: sustainable development, de-growth, the alternative based on the workers movement, not to speak of the “civil society” platforms or the weak thought that arose from postmodernism—none of them, according to him, leads to a way out of the capitalist catastrophe. Modern capitalist society is a machine that produces harmful phenomena from which it is only possible to escape by dismantling the whole system and creating other social relations.

Amorós says that a subversive movement capable of bringing about revolutionary changes must have an anti-development, anti-state, de-industrializing and autonomous orientation. The big cities must undergo de-urbanization; the contemporary metropolis is a territory that produces “accumulations of solitary masses” who want security, but are incapable of winning freedom. The subjects of this possible revolutionary transformation will no longer be the working class masses and their allies, but those who have been marginalized by the State and capital, as well as the traditional peasantry and the indigenous communities of the world.

The critique that Amorós offers is a total critique of capitalist modernity, and this critique has its roots in libertarian thought, in the unorthodox theoreticians of the left, in the contributions of those who are critical of the capitalist technological system, in the Situationist International, and particularly in his own past and his participation in the struggles of the Spanish workers during the late 1970s, as well as in the anti-nuclear and environmentalist movements; the synthesis of these factors took shape in the Encyclopedia of Nuisances collective, in which Amorós participated with Jaime Semprun, among other militant thinkers, during the early 1980s.

The ideas of this Spanish anarchist historian and militant, who was born in Alcoy, Alicante, in 1949, fell like seeds on fertile soil when Amorós visited Guadalajara this past November, under the auspices of the Cátedra Jorge Alonso, co-sponsored by the University of Guadalajara and CIESAS [Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social—Center for Advanced Studies and Research in Social Anthropology]. His most recent book, Contra la nocividad. Anarquismo, antidesarrollismo, revolución [Against Nuisances. Anarchism, Anti-Development, Revolution], was published by Grietas Editores, affiliated with the Centro Social Ruptura of Guadalajara, on the occasion of his visit.

***

Rubén Martín (RM): You have said that we live in a world dominated by the crisis of “industrial-development oriented society”. How is this crisis manifested?

Miguel Amorós (MA): In the latest phase, the crisis is global; it is manifested on every level: it is an economic crisis, an energy crisis, an environmental crisis, a demographic crisis, a crisis of culture, a political crisis…. That is, it is a multifarious crisis. It has various facets. It is generalized.

RM: You have also said that modern capitalist society has become a producer of things that are harmful. Could you elaborate on this?

MA: Look, the alleged benefit conferred by the commodity always has another side, its concealed harmful effect, and harmfulness is always the dark side of the commodity. What happens is that, at a particular moment of capitalist development, the productive forces become destructive forces, or they are more destructive than productive, and this is when the harmfulness becomes manifest. Harmfulness was our translation of an English neologism adapted to French, nuisance, which means anything that is harmful, bothersome, irritating. Harmfulness means: the harmful effects on the natural environment, on the human personality, on the way we live together, on cities….

RM: The destruction of social bonds….

MA: Yes, that is a clear instance of harm; so is the bureaucratization of the world, the development of nuclear power, and especially everything that is harmful to our health. But ultimately harmfulness is a broad concept that was used precisely to characterize the principal feature of modern production.

RM: What kinds of harmful conditions are produced by the modern capitalist mega-city?

MA: The world we live in is in the process of becoming 100% urban, that is, the whole population is being concentrated in urban systems, in megalopolises. Like Shanghai. It’s an enormous metropolitan region, no one knows where it ends; or Mexico City, or Tokyo, or Sao Paolo. The cities are constantly growing, they are no longer cities: they are non-cities, instead; the more or less collective kind of life that they once made possible has disappeared. More than ever before, they are gigantic machines that waste energy, squander food, and require an enormous supply network for everything; at the same time, however, they are the perfect places to conduct business. In global capitalism a city that has fewer than 100,000 inhabitants is not viable, economically it is a wreck. Then these small cities become satellites of other, larger, cities. You can no longer speak of a city within 40 kilometers of a metropolis, for example, here, in Guadalajara, let’s take as an example, El Salto; look, it’s a city in which the sociability that once existed, no longer exists, there is no social fabric. There is an accumulation of solitary masses. There is atomization, and along with atomization the typical psychological effects are produced: people get sick, the absence of communication gives rise to psychoses, neuroses, depression. There has been a dramatic increase in the incidence of this kind of illness. And then there is industrial food: now we know what food additives contain, detergents, the new kinds of gasoline, the new fuels, because we breathe them, we eat them, and then we pay for it with cardiovascular disease and cancer. In the not-so-distant future almost everyone in the “developed” world will die of cancer, of a heart attack or from a stroke, when they don’t die in car accidents or take their own lives. This is the death sentence that has been proclaimed against us.

RM: And, because the cities are privileged spaces for accumulation and private profit, can they also be privileged spaces for emancipation and freedom?

MA: No, the city as it currently exists cannot be a space of freedom. A space of freedom is a space that is capable of self-government, of exercising autonomy; its minimum condition is that the people who live in that space are acquainted with each other and interact with each other. This does not happen in a large city, but it was once true of the neighborhoods of the cities, and that is why the working class cannot be understood as a class unless one also takes into account its life in its various neighborhoods. Today, low-income neighborhoods still preserve a community spirit—even if it is strictly oriented towards survival, and not always. But, in general, the way people behave in a big city is totally anonymous and isolated. What is being produced is a lack of empathy, that is, a total indifference towards other people. If you see someone suffering, it makes no difference to you. You don’t suffer with that other person. This is a new phenomenon. Human beings are characterized by humanity, and empathy was the form this humanity assumed: when you see pain, you feel pity. Today the law of the jungle rules: it’s not a class war, it’s a war of all against all. This is not what happens in communities, quite the contrary, but this is just what is happening in today’s cities. Not a hundred percent, and of course not to the same extent in Latin American cities as in European cities or as in Japan, where it is even worse. Phenomena associated with anomie of this type are becoming more widespread, more intense, and this makes a city that is, from the standpoint of physical and mental health, unviable. This sensation of suffocation, of loneliness, is not experienced in the rural areas, it is experienced in the cities.

RM: Politically, this has an enormous impact, because this absence of empathy and bonds facilitates the work of domination.

MA: That’s right. Look, those who are lonely are afraid. They value security, not freedom. They only know a private, atomized life; they cannot even imagine a public, collective life that is really lived in common and is based on solidarity.

RM: What do you think about the series of progressive governments in Latin America in the early 2000s?

MA: Capitalist development was impossible under the traditional oligarchy; so these populist governments guaranteed the survival and development of capitalism, which they made compatible with a certain amount of investment in the welfare of the popular classes, which have been the beneficiaries, within capitalism, of more government social programs, financial assistance, education, healthcare, etc. The State and its social services were modernized to conform with the prevailing capitalist standards. The oligarchy could not have done this. This new autocratic caste, when it is in power, divides and controls the popular classes by co-opting their representatives, and then it becomes a civil service-technocratic caste, which is the leading caste of these progressive countries, oriented towards capitalist development, and which really lives on exports—like the others, the old oligarchy. But they aren’t exporting coffee or beef: hell, they’re exporting minerals, wood pulp, fuels, soybeans, etc. It is an extractivist caste that is playing the same role that the oligarchic bourgeoisie of the past once played, but, except for Venezuela, with better results. The political model of the old oligarchy had become obsolete, so this caste opted for this approach. This political caste furthered the modernization of Latin American capitalism.

RM: In response to the failure of liberalism and of the orthodox/vanguardist left, purportedly civil-society oriented political tendencies have emerged. You have criticized them. Why?

MA: The economic development promoted by extractivism (the intensive exploitation of the territory) increased the buying power of certain sectors of the population; it eradicated—or mostly eradicated—hunger; it created, or actually expanded, the middle class. A middle class that, above all, was derived from the bureaucratization of the state, from the civil service, from the public employees of large enterprises and banks, etc. While this middle class accounts for between 30 and 35 percent of the working population in Latin America, in Europe it is 80 percent. Here the middle class is still small, it is still developing, and is on the side of the popular classes. This middle class is populist. It is not conservative, like its counterparts in France and Germany, for example. This middle class is leftist. Of course, its leftism is a lie. The middle class is never really leftist, it does not want any kind of revolution, it does not even want a profound change within the present system. What it wants is to preserve its level of buying power, so that it will not be affected by the current crises as it was by the mortgage crises, the crises of the real estate sector, and the bank crises in Europe. The solution based on neoliberal policies condemned these intermediate sectors to starvation, as in the time of the rise of the Nazis, when the impoverished middle classes formed the base of the fascist party. This is the base of the new social democratic parties, the ones that I call “civil society” parties, because they speak a language that has nothing to do with proletarian language, with classes, with socialism, with expropriation, with self-management: they don’t use that kind of language.

RM: With respect to the case of Podemos, in Spain, you have said that “instead of changing everything, they have reinforced everything”. That is, they have instilled a breath of fresh air of legitimacy into the political system.

MA: Yes, they criticized the system on television, but they have gone on to become part of that system and they are proving it. What Podemos is doing—and this is what Syriza [in Greece] is doing, and what the Portuguese left coalition and Mélenchon in France are doing—is striking poses and demobilizing. The core group of Podemos is Stalinist, but quite a few of its new militants are unemployed professionals who come from the neighborhood movements, the movement against evictions, activism “lite”, moderate environmentalism….

RM: From the movement of May 15, 2011?

MA: No, 15M was students protesting because they were going straight from school to the unemployment line. The protesters in 15M were complaining because the parties did not represent them, they wanted a party that would represent them. Podemos presented itself as their party, the party of the citizens, of those who prefer casting a vote to engaging in struggle, but all it did was to simply entrench itself in the pseudo-parliamentary regime, attracting all the adventurers who were on the rebound from the other parties, including anarchists. Generally, they followed the course of accommodation. Now they have advanced from fighting against the political caste to fighting only against the right-wing party, the People’s Party; now they are themselves part of the political caste.

RM: What is the basis of radical critical thought in these grim times?

MA: There is no shortage of ideas. We have a lot of ideas, not only the classics—Fourier, Mikhail Bakunin, Karl Marx, Peter Kropotkin, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Landauer, Rosa Luxemburg, Anton Pannekoek, Karl Korsch, Georg Lukacs—there is a long list of anarchist, socialist and Marxist thinkers who have played a role, and I am not saying that all of their work is directly applicable today, but they have formed a part of this emancipatory thought, in a way, so to speak, that connected the working class with reality.

RM: And the contradictions, the social conflict, the class struggle….

MA: Sure, the contradictions and so on. When the social movement was in decline, thought did not disappear. It continued in two directions: one, artistic, by way of expressionism, Dadaism, surrealism, situationism (the last of the great vanguards); and on the side of sociological critique and philosophy, the Frankfurt School, Lewis Mumford and the whole American school of urban planning, Günther Anders and Walter Benjamin, philosophers and thinkers who have appeared, who have been concealed, and who are not classifiable in schools, like Jacques Ellul, who is very important for the analysis of technology and its function. We certainly possess enough theoretical resources to educate ourselves sufficiently. The problem is that these people are thinkers whose work remained isolated from a workers movement that was too weak to appropriate it and use it. A few anthropologists, like Marcel Mauss and Pierre Clastres, carried out major reevaluations of the experiences of the indigenous peoples. But what is lacking is a unitary view. These ideas evolved in isolated institutions, they was disconnected from the social movements. The social movements have been colonized by the obsolete ideas of a previous era: by doctrinaire anarchism, by Leninism, by Stalinism, by nationalism, ideologies that are dead but that force, that make the movements more pragmatic and also more sectarian when the time comes to define themselves.

RM: A contemporary revolutionary project should no longer posit the working class as the central subject. “Today the worker is the basis of capital, not of its negation”: these are your own words. What would a revolution look like? If such a thing is possible.

MA: Look, I think that there are subversive elements; I won’t say revolutionary elements, because there is no revolution without consciousness, and it will take a long time for the masses to arrive at a way of thinking that is presently far removed from them. What is lacking is the mediating organizations, debates, publications, speakers, journalists, writers; we still need educational thought, and, above all, we need readers and organizers who won’t let themselves be bought. But it is clear that there are two factors that must be taken into account for the creation of a revolutionary subject that would take shape in a separate world within this world: those who have been excluded from the labor market, or the self-marginalized; those who, although they have not been excluded, abandon the labor market and choose to live on the margins; and the non-industrialized peasant classes. The traditional peasant classes, not just indigenous peoples, but also homesteaders or settlers, those who till land in common, or simply farmers, the landless, or those with land, with only a little land … they are the fulcrum of the defense of the territory, the class struggle of the 21st century.

RM: They are your revolutionary subjects, but what contents will a radical revolutionary project have at the present time?

MA: I would use the word orientation, rather than contents. A revolutionary, anti-development movement must have a decolonizing orientation, it will have to be directed towards the locality, it will have to have an anti-statist, de-industrializing and autonomous orientation. That is, it must reinforce, during this phase, a horizontal, integral society in the sense that all activities will form part of a whole (politics, economics, education, culture…). Therefore horizontal, autonomous, integrated, fraternal, balanced, egalitarian, anti-patriarchal and decentralized.

RM: Are you optimistic with respect to the possibilities of achieving these goals, despite the barbarism within which we are now immersed?

MA: There are people who are optimistic. I am inclined to think that there are collectives that are susceptible to moving in this direction. Of course, when you talk about resettlement, de-industrializing, ruralizing or de-urbanizing in an abstract sense, it’s hard to make yourself understood. And I don’t say that the change will take place overnight, but simply point towards an orientation: we should move in the direction of reestablishing an equilibrium between the cities and the countryside, dismantling the urban agglomerations, industries, extensive distribution networks—this would imply alternative types of production and supply—means of mass communication, repressive and judicial apparatuses, administrative bodies…. These are processes that are contrary to the prevailing dynamic, and they will take place during a period of transition, because capitalism has destroyed so much, that rebuilding an equitable society in freedom, without a Market and without a State, will be a very costly endeavor.

***
Interview published online on March 1, 2018

Translated in March-April 2018 from a copy of the Spanish original obtained from Miguel Amorós.

A copy of the Spanish text is available online at: http://kaosenlared.net/entrevista-de-miquel-amoros-por-ruben-martin/

Last Tuesday morning, March 20th, 5 people with ski masks, armed with baseball bats and pepper spray entered a squat on the ZAD. They beat the people present, and took one of them, hogtied, with duct tape over his eyes and mouth. They put him in the trunk of a car and left. Further on, they beat him again, breaking an arm and a leg, before abandoning him on the sidewalk in front of the psychiatric hospital.

His "error" was to have acted concretely against a State sponsored project, in a way which wasn't aligned with the dominant strategy of the movement. That strategy being to invite the regional head of police, cops, and politicians onto the ZAD to negotiate with them.

We are long past the phase of trying to say nicely to certain groups that they are going too far, that they should put themselves into question, etc. We also find it just as problematic that there has been hardly anyone taking public position after this disgusting operation by some wannabe cops. In comparison, when some journalists invited by the ACIPA (local liberal group against the airport) got hit with a bit of compost, a bakery went on strike, the general assemblies had to change meeting place, people had their internet cut off, etc.

One part of the movement wants to win points with the State by doing the work of the police. They are giving offerings that they think the will motivate the State to give them presents in return. This repressive operation shows that no matter where repression comes from, it comes down to the same thing:

Punishing those who get in the way, threatening those who could. Taking advantage of police impunity by being part of dominant groups, better organized, and with more resources. Defending the interests of the State and privileged citizens with violence and rapports de force.

A lot of different individuals can be threatening to power, but repression is adapted to social class. People who are well connected, well liked, won't end up in the hospital- just have pressure put on them, insults, humiliation... But for someone who's more vulnerable. They are reproducing repression, even in its classist aspect. And even worse, the victim is put on trial that very evening in the general assembly of the movement.

By leaving the person in front of the mental hospital, the able-ist component is added. The psychiatric hospital is the place for the people who are bothersome. Either the people who did it didn't care about the risk he would be forcibly hospitalized, for example if he had had prior time spent in mental health facilities, or it would have made it easier to get him out of the way.

Reactionary forces in all their splendor. The crazy part is that there are still people who pretend that on the ZAD we try to organize without police or the justice system. That here is a "Commune", that here we're revolutionary.

For the legal team, this act represents what we've always fought against. We would like to make a reminder that a movement of struggle is not sheltered from relationships of inequality or oppression, even in their most violent expressions. We invite you to reflect and act, to avoid that in other struggles certain people take control to re-establish the power of dominant classes, and of the State.

signed:
-the legal team
-copains des bois

From Pray for Calamity

The world was white. From ground to sky the white was constant, and etched in it were the vertical brown streaks of tree trunks. Stepping outside on the first day of spring the forest around my house was gone, entombed in snow. Ice came first, so that when the snow followed for several hours it sheathed every branch and twig. Heavy with now frozen leaves, the smaller beech are bent downward, tips touching the ground until all of these young trees become arches, man sized croquet wickets frosted and strewn about the land.

On the barest winter day, I can look to the southeast and make out the shape and color of my nearest neighbor’s house through the foreground of maple and poplar. Today there is just the solitude of white.

The unseasonable eight-inch snowfall was followed days later by highs in the sixties, which retreated to nights below freezing, and only days later shot back into the seventies with beaming sun, to land once again in the cold of the thirties. The entire month of April has been a mix of glorious spring warmth and bouts of freezing rain and snow. Apple trees are budding, hyacinths are donating flashes of pink and purple to the landscape, and trout lilies are breaking from the leaf litter in such densities as to make the forest floor look like it has a carpet of grass. Then a quick layer of ice will fall in the dark of night to test them all.

—

In early April the House of Commons Library detailed how the richest one percent of the population is on track to own two-thirds of all of the world’s wealth by the year 2030, should trends maintain as they are. Oxfam reported prior to this that eight billionaires have as much wealth as the poorest half of the global population – 3.6 billion people. All of the land that is being gutted and made uninhabitable, and all of the laborers the world over who stoop and heft and daily erode their bodies through exertion and chemical exposure are part of a great machine that exists to send a steady stream of excess to a small handful of individuals.

Capitalism was supposed to have corrected the contradictions and failures of feudalism, and it seems to have done so by creating a class of people with no loyalties, no fidelity to place or people or principle other than a berserk lust for profit. Capital and its controllers float freely over the borders that cage the underclasses. Money and power write and erase laws, and at whim wage war against the peasant class and nonhuman life with a cold business class gusto.

Centuries ago, the edicts of lords could only reach so far. Kings and their vassals had broad power of life and death within the ringed walls of cities. This power held sway in the nearby villages and hams, but dissipated at the edges of settlements until the commands that they bellowed were shorn of all pomp and circumstance in the reality of the wilderness. In the wild there is no king and money buys no quarter, a truth so bare that the masters of civilization have tried to destroy any incarnation of wilderness the world over with visceral contempt.

The wild suffers no man’s stories. The order of the world was set in the rock and soil long before any human named them, and the immutable simplicity of this order is visible in the golden sunlight that beams through a forest canopy, in the sweep of a raptor’s flight as it falls upon its prey, and in the stinking decay of a maggot eaten animal slowly returning its flesh to the ground.

We are invited to walk within this order, to find humility in the gifts and tragedies of nature. Conversely, if we try to subjugate this order to our own narratives, then we are invited to suffer and die. The lords of capital, who worship a god named production, have chosen the latter. Technocratic full spectrum dominance casts eyes over the entirety of the planet.

Where are we to escape to?

—

This past week French police came in a force of thousands to evict the ZAD, a sprawling piece of farmland crisscrossed with hedgerows that has been occupied by anarchists and recalcitrant farmers for years in an attempt to prevent the construction of an airport. Previous eviction attempts always failed and sparked waves of tumultuous protests in the cities. In January the French government finally abandoned plans to build the airport, and this latest attempt to boot the anarchist squatters was the most intense.

Blockades were built and fire bombs thrown in response to police concussion grenades and tear gas. After days of battling the residents of the ZAD, which included the wholesale destruction of many of the homes and structures they had built there, the state finally backed off, unable to break the will of the occupants. The victory of the Zadists is not total however, as police currently hold a piece of the land under their control, and have thousands of officers stationed in the region. Barricades are being rebuilt, and the future of autonomous life in the ZAD stands on a razor’s edge, as does the success of people around the world who attempt to carve out a space for themselves to freely exist.

For the Zapatistas in Mexico, the Kurds in Rojava, and even all of the people camped out on a pipeline easement in the backwoods of the rural United States, danger abounds for those who dare shuck off the rule of the wealthy.

If the wilderness is gone, we fight where we stand. Instead of escaping to an unseen frontier, let us invite the wild in. Let it consume civilization from the inside out.

—

Eight clouds arise. The eightfold fence of Idzumo makes an eightfold fence for the spouses to retire. Oh! That eightfold fence.

-Kojiki, “Records of Ancient Matters”

In James Clavell’s novel, “Shogun,” the character Mariko explains to Blackthorne that in a world of paper walls and crowded spaces, that to avoid going mad and killing one and other, they rely on a type of mental compartmentalization, hiding their true selves deep within a mental maze. She refers to this as the “eightfold fence.”

In a world of facial recognition technology, big data, electronic tracking of the movement of nearly all people in some regard or another, are we not pushed deeper and deeper within the fence complexes of our minds? As civilization and its capitalist architecture demands more and more of our time, our effort, and our attention, less and less remains for us to keep for ourselves. Interests and hobbies are commodified as advertising opportunities. Free time is gig time, driving around strangers for a few extra dollars. The precious moments of our lives are harvested by corporations to be sold back to us as monetized Instagram “lifestyle” posts.

Our eightfold fences shall guard our hidden wild. Within us we can foster vast wildernesses and let them grow fecund and thick. Loving the smell of woodsmoke and the bitter cold of a stream clinging to our ankles, the wind pressing on our faces and our lover’s breath on our necks. Detesting the rich with contempt for their pathetic pleasures while desiring so entirely to watch the failure of their industrial projects. When the wilderness is rooted deeply within our thinking, safe from being uprooted by contact with the madness of the world, we can safely expose it to one another, and foster a wild amongst us.

They have worked very hard to make commerce the primary human relationship. We cannot cede the space between us, the last space, the space where all potential for rebellion to their false order exists.

We must let each other know that we have no love for this false narrative. We must make it safe to declare that our allegiance is to life, not to the dreams of wealthy men. The wilderness can be reborn between us, and there give us refuge.

—

A chill blew across the land with the gray dawn. Diagonal rain falls on my daughter and me as we walk past the barn to tend to our morning chores. Mayapples seem to have all decided that this was the morning to reveal themselves. They line the drive like sentries, somehow already inches high where yesterday they were completely hidden beneath the soil. Dark pink flowers are blossoming on the tips of the jane magnolia, daring to brave the cold air that feels entirely out of place.

We are invited to take our place within the order of the world. Or we are invited to die.

From zadforever

On Monday morning, 9 April 2018, shortly before the French police offensive, some friends on the ZAD (Zone á Défendre) circulated this text on the platform lundi.am

For five years we’ve been preparing for this, despite taking steps up until now to make it impossible. Nonetheless, we are now at the dawn of another large-scale police operation whose scope and duration is unknown. The State had to get even, there had to be a rematch. Everywhere in the country, people who have visited the zad are asking themselves how far Macron will go to put an end to one one of the most beautiful collective political adventures of the last decade, to the possibility of a space for seeking other forms of life.¹ While barricades take shape again on the country roads, everyone here is huddling close and wondering what will exist tomorrow, what will remain of the trembling heart of our existence from one day to the next. Most of all, our embraces say this: five years after Operation Caesar, we will have to confront the invasion, stand our ground at all costs, and make sure, yet again, that the future remains open.

We’ve just gone through a tumultuous period after the State’s abandonment [of the airport project], one rife with tensions and the temptation to retreat to one’s own turf or indeed to simply give it up. But for many of us this period has also been marked throughout by the ongoing search for the outlines of a common way forward. It has been rather painful at times in these last weeks to see how widely a single binary and depressive narrative could spread. In this moment of truth, we prefer to recall what even now makes it possible still to think in a shared, collective way. Before the storm blows through here again, the following is a way to communicate why we still find it vital to continue the defence of the zad. Here, on the terrain where each of us will be in the coming days. And in the coming months as well, since Caesar 2 will certainly not bring what we’re doing here to an end.

Image: source https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DaiDnJ4XUAAnYec.jpg

What Negotiating Is Not About

After the government’s abandonment of the airport project, the movement has indeed decided to enter into dialogue in order to negotiate its own vision of the zad’s future. This sequence of events has forced us to tackle new issues. We have been guided by objectives at once clear and extremely complex:

• Neutralise the quasi-absolute necessity of state vengeance on the zad (in the form of the eviction operation) and so keep the inhabitants of this territory here, in all their diversity.
• Preserve, as much as possible, the margins of autonomy that have given this experiment its meaning while, at the same time, securing the stability desired by many of those planning to stay here.
• Maintain and amplify the collective responsibility for the fields of the zad and its links to other ongoing resistance struggles.

In this period, there was never a choice for us between negotiating OR fighting. We have never assumed that we could get what we wanted immediately within government offices. Negotiation is only one of the levers that the movement has chosen for itself after the abandonment, and it relies on a relation of forces produced through years of resistance. It is these same forces that will be able to think an offensive negotiation, and organise a gathering in front of the prefecture when the State’s responses are unsatisfying. These forces have, in the course of the last few weeks, led a juridical and political struggle against all expulsions, organised a demonstration in Nantes on this issue with collectives of refugees and the ill-housed, and they will also be the ones that physically resist on the ground when the State attempts to evict sites within the zone.

Given the fear of losing the zad’s edge, it was hardly an obvious choice for the occupiers to throw themselves into the gamble of negotiation. But for other segments of the movement, there was nothing obvious about postponing the outcome of the post-abandonment period and putting the urgent decisions it would require into the hands of large and heterogeneous assemblies. These risks and the reciprocal assumption of responsibilities are precisely what have allowed us to keep moving together as opposed to deserting or isolating each other. In this case, we firmly believed that it was necessary to make an attempt to engage at that time so that we could also continue to go beyond this, whenever the negotiation showed its limits.

For years, the capacity of the anti-airport movement to compose and recompose itself has been a real nightmare for the government. The possibility that the movement should persist beyond the abandonment was extremely disagreeable to them. Consequently, at the beginning of negotiations, one of the first objectives of the government was clearly to explode the form of common delegation we had chosen. It also had to hinder our will to bring forward the future stakes of the struggle transversally: from the refusal of evictions to the movement’s collective responsibility for the land, in firm opposition to the return to classical agricultural management, without forgetting the question of amnesty. The prefecture has accordingly attempted to select its interlocutors from among us and to summon them to be part of a strictly agricultural steering committee. In every segment of the movement, and in the assemblies, the debate was long. One must not underestimate the force of these lures and the energy that the prefecture has deployed in order to avoid being rebuffed. The framework that we had slowly constructed could almost have broken into pieces, but the prefecture’s manoeuvre failed. The Acipa [Association Citoyenne Intercommunale des Populations concernées par le projet d’Aéroport de Notre Dame des Landes] has declined the prefect’s invitation while the Confédération paysanne called for a gathering opposite the steering committee and decided to bring the movement’s message in.² The common delegation has held. The prefecture had to cede ground immediately and accept the delegation as interlocutor. Where initially only agricultural activities were to continue, the offer now concerns ‘para-agricultural activities broadly speaking’ and it is already almost certain that several hundred hectares of saved and collectively-maintained lands, in addition to the lands of the historicals [i.e. the ‘historical farmers’, those who were present before the movement began], should remain dedicated to projects linked with the movement. It is an important first step, but one that does not resolve the outcome of the struggle over the habitats, and the need, already present in this transitional phase, to gain collective responsibility over the property so this collectivisation can be made permanent later on.

Resist Selection

During this first negotiation phase, the prefecture announced its ambition to order and separate us according to unacceptable criteria. Those who wanted to stay legally were given notice to apply for individual agreements and to quickly register with the MSA [social security for farmers]. Some, impassioned by defeat and unable to scan the horizon without preconceived schemas, immediately prophesied betrayals: some would inevitably get their place in the sun at the expense of others. Indeed, at any point during the last few weeks nothing could have been easier than for individuals to save themselves through a few simple emails and administrative procedures. That was precisely what the prefecture expected. But in truth, and despite much pressure, nobody fell in that trap.

Nobody sent separate applications to be examined for selection, nor did we agree to filter ourselves on the authorities behalf. On the contrary there was a firm, political refusal of these injunctions and we maintained the demand for a protective collective framework and a comprehensive agreement for all the movement’s land. This real solidarity has upset the prefecture in at least two ways: it couldn’t pursue negotiations in the manner it initially wanted to impose, and it undermined the legitimacy of its selective expulsion operation.

In spite of this united front, we hear a lot about the divide between ‘radicals’ or ‘hardliners’ on one side and quitters on the other, the latter supposedly impatient to negotiate or to normalise their farmland. It is remarkable how much mainstream media, the prefecture and the preachers of a fantasised radicality all love this fiction. But for most occupants, those who fought for the zad, who inhabited it and cultivated its groves during the past years, this divide is pure fabrication. Among those who share a common line of negotiation AND struggle, among those who wish to remain here and genuinely maintain the zad as a shared space, there are in fact individuals and groups from each segment of the movement: farmers, young and older squatters, ‘historical’ inhabitants, members of the Acipa, neighbours, environmentalists, comrade unionists, passionate hikers, Coordination activists… If we envision the zad as continuing to unfold and to spread, then the idea that everything should be legal or remain illegal are two faces of the same (bad) coin. Both options are ideological fetishes, each one as sterile as the other, when it comes to pursuing struggles on the ground. The people who’ve really participated in the unfolding of the movement over the last few years, rather than simply commenting on it online, know well that these univocal visions – ‘legalist’ and ‘illegalist’, the ‘violent’ and ‘non-violent’ – have never corresponded to our real force and to what allowed us to make the State give in. These labels are as inappropriate today as they have been throughout the movement, inadequate to articulating the differing horizons present in the movement and the objectives that we have given ourselves with the ‘6 points’.

The aim was never to march into a normalisation process with our heads down, but to determine what concretely would allow us to hold on to the totality of our spaces of life and activity in this reconfiguration of the situation. To do this, it is necessary to determine step by step what will best help preserve margins of autonomy and support, in order to avoid the isolation and constraints imposed by all forms of commercial and industrial production. What’s at stake here are very real practices, within a concrete relation of force with a powerful enemy, and not visions of an ideal world. We can place our trust in the attachment we have developed, over the years, to the meaning found in the free reinvention of our relationship to what we produce. That should be enough not to let go of it easily.

Image: source http://bigpicture.antifa-net.fr/wp-content/uploads…

Enough with the Road D281 Mythology

As active, physical resisters during the weeks of Operation Caesar in 2012, we know that the general defence strategy of the zad has never depended centrally on Road D281, which was barricaded by a single isolated group, and still less on the nostalgic obsession with this apparatus outside periods of attack. This road, however, has always represented to us the possibility of blocking strategic access when the time comes, and holding the ground with a wide range of methods and support from within and without. Unfortunately it is this very possibility of a wide range of resistance that the recent fixation with the road puts at risk.

For months we have fought to avoid any political breach that the State could deploy to evict individuals. This gamble paid off many times over the past years, and we thought it was still worth taking after the abandonment, despite the Prime Minister’s threats. To materialise these threats, the prefecture needed an appropriate story. It needed people who could embody the infamous ‘ultra-radicals’ in the most caricatural manner. Some have performed the role that was expected brilliantly, in particular around the question of Road D281, reducing the struggle to stakes and claims that became incomprehensible to anyone, whether they be comrades in struggle, or neighbours, or more generally those following things up close or from afar. By blocking construction workers the first time, certain people – not to be confused with local inhabitants nearby the road – have in fact justified the police presence which we had to put up with for weeks, enabling them to make gains on the ground. The destruction of a few strips of pavement at the end of the works programme was a big blow. The police could have retreated and let the situation clarify itself, and we could finally have worked on finding our common strength again. Instead this managed to throw into despair many of those who have shown unfailing support confronting threats of eviction. Since the local authorities refused to open the road under these conditions, the evictions finally had a major justification and so became almost inevitable.

Stand Together No Matter What

The strength of this struggle has always lain in the way it counters the banalities of both so-called ‘radical’ identitarian ghettos and classical citizen activism. For this very reason it has often clashed with those who shut themselves up within either of these polarised positions, forcing those who have wanted to join it to rethink everything. The struggle has hereby found its own way and laid the foundations for a united front, at once anchored, offensive, and popular. For many of us, this simple fact has been a transformative political event and the driving force in a historic defeat of the State. Nevertheless, it is hardly surprising that the advent of another phase brings new questions with it, new hopes but also ideological fossilations. The sequence that follows on from a victory is certainly a moment of truth that discloses the real tenacity of those who fought for it. In this tense phase, there have been two closely related and typical ways of sabotaging our common commitments and the movement: by blocking the work on the road, OR by publicly dissociating oneself from a meeting organised by the movement to oppose the steering committee and support a transversal delegation. The sad truth is that certain people did prefer to weaken the movement by curling up around obsessions that to the rest of the movement seemed indefensible, while others were just as quick to forget our common ‘red lines’ under government pressure. Some set to work brilliantly justifying a partial eviction, placing those targetted in as isolated a position as possible. Others have remained almost completely silent as the eviction came closer. These bitter assessments could be rehearsed without end, and we could leave it at that. However, another and much more radiant truth is that up until this point and in spite of everything, across all segments of the movement most of those who have formed the core community of this battle over the years, braving dangers and trials together, have remained faithful to the promises they gave themselves. It is this very truth to which we now must hold fast to if we are not to perish in self-fulfilling prophecies of the inevitable fall of autonomous spaces and collective adventures.

Despite the backlash which without a doubt has weakened the movement and its legibility in recent weeks, there can be no question of letting the government proceed with their evictions without a fight. Whatever the traps we could for a time have fallen into, the actual foundation of the zad and the hopes it continues to inspire did not fall apart during a few weeks of lamentation. We can feel this in the forces remobilised on the eve of the expulsion operation: in those who, whatever their doubts, made a call and immediately hit the road; in the last minute assemblies, on all kinds of barricades erected against the armed forces of the State and against the story that the government is getting ready to tell…

We will have to go through a violent ordeal that may well reshuffle all the cards. But we do not doubt that the zad will survive Caesar 2. What we will continue to carry forward will not be a showcase of docile alternatives or a radical ghetto. It will remain a granary of struggles and a common good of resistance, a place where people as different as they are unexpected live and meet, a territory that makes you want to organise seriously, to live fully, a permanent building site for wondrous constructions and waking dreams. We always need places where it is very visibly both desirable and possible not to rely on the economy and institutional management. And we need these places to last, even if they’ll take their share of impurities and hybridisations. Because the spaces that excite us most compel us to recompose and put our received political ideas into question. We believe that this basic character of the zad is what will continue to put tens of thousands of people across the country in motion.

Now we have to stand together!

Common Voices

Footnotes

via Freedom News

Based in Nottingham, the Sparrows’ Nest is a key archiving project for the literature of the British anarchist movement. Freedom talks to the collective.

Could you say a bit about how you got started and what sort of things you collect?

We started in 2007 after visits to libraries and archives in Europe which have emerged out of the “social anarchist” tradition. We wanted to establish something of a high standard in Britain for historians of anarchism, activists and anyone just interested in finding out more. We started with our own private archives and the works of key anarchist thinkers, and built from there helped by generous donations and cost-price purchases from Freedom, AK, Active Distro, Kate Sharpley and other anarchist publishers. We now curate the archives of the Anarchist Federation and Solidarity Federation and their previous incarnations. Large parts of our collections have been entrusted to us by people in the movement who have often spent years or decades building up collections and approached us to look after them properly and make them accessible.

We have almost complete runs of publications by important historical groups/papers such as Anarchy, Organisation of Revolutionary Anarchists, Freedom, Class War and Black Flag, and left-communist groups such as Solidarity, Subversion, Wildcat, Workers Playtime and Careless Talk. We also have thousands of pamphlets, little-known journals, etc.; snapshots of what anarchists have been thinking and getting up to since the 1940s. We hold significant collections of publications which flourished in the late 1970s and 1980s, such as punk fanzines and the papers of local anarchist groups.

These sorts of materials are available to anyone in our public archive. We also carefully “keyword” items and annotate the catalogue entries to make it easier for people with particular interests to search.

As well as this, we hold hundreds of books and radical papers relating to struggles in our area, working closely with the People’s Histreh project in Nottingham.

What have been some of your most important additions? And your favourites?

The most important would be those which are uniquely preserved, such as internal documents relating to some of the groups above. We are particularly fond of the archive of the Syndicalist Workers’ Federation because of how seriously it took the preservation of its own internal documents.

Other favourites would include what appears to be an original of issue one of a key anarcho-punk fanzine, Kill Your Pet Puppy, which we will digitise soon. We will always be very attached to Issue 38 (1964) of Anarchy, which took Nottingham as its theme and connects us to local legend, the late Ray Gosling (who gave a notorious lecture at the Nest), and which we which put back into circulation in the city by reproducing it.

What’s involved in the digital archive you’re building, what are you prioritising?

There are already a couple of thousand documents available online in our Digital Library. We prioritise things which are unique and unpublished, not digitised elsewhere, which we use as part of our own personal research, and which are falling to bits. We are always happy to be led in our digitisation efforts by the requests of visitors. Much of our Digital Library has been built up after someone was doing some research and we digitised items for them.

How is the project organised?

We are a small collective of five or six people with support and advice from various others, are funded entirely by small donations from individuals, and from the Anarchist Federation and Solidarity Federation for our work for them, and would like to involve other people who get what we are doing.

We would like to be able to open more regularly and do more outreach work. Most of all, we want to work with people who are pursuing their research projects. We have realised that people often simply don’t know just how much is actually possible and how much we have to offer. We would also like people with specific knowledge to help us curate and interpret our holdings, e.g. contributing to the data stored in the catalogue as they are working with the documents. People have also used documents for art exhibitions and even found old protest songs to inspire whistling choir compositions.

What next?

In 2018 we are organising more events (meetings, talks, discussions as well as displays) given that it will not only be our tenth anniversary, but also the other anniversary of big historic events, so we want to organise events e.g. regarding critical interpretations of suffrage (1918, 1928), or the events and repercussions of the movements of 1968. So, please join our mailing list to find out more, and even better, offer to come and give a talk and give us an excuse to display lots of related materials.

There is something else of importance to say about anarchist archives. Projects like ours aren’t just set up by book nerds or people avid about anarchist history and ideas (although we are all of these things!). The point is to provide a platform for the contribution of ideas, examples and experiences to the future. To help our movement access materials which it can use to shape the future.

This article first appeared in the Winter 2017 issue of Freedom Anarchist Journal

The following text has been distributed in late March, during a protest against evictions in Caen. While serving as a prior contextual insight on it, it predates the recent aggression in the ZAD against anarchists...

"All the parties, unions and their bureaucracies are oppressing the proletariat. As much as the bourgeoisie."
- Committee for the Defense of the Occupations (CMDO), the original.

THIS LAST JANUARY 17th, the Macron government has decided to put an end to the Notre-Dames-des-Landes airport project. As one instance is not the custom, major project was stopped by its opponents. Which is not saying that "Manu" was conquered in his heart by the virtues of the bocages being saved from masses of concrete. His friendships and interests lie somewhere else entirely. Only that, there is, here, a strategic opporutnity to seize; that of disarming a movement of solidarity around the lives and imaginaries, that are inhabiting the space more than the bocages are.

And this, while normalizing a space where a struggle - of opposing much further than just an airport- has taken roots for a number of its protagonists. Sadly, and as it is often customary in such circumstances, some fringes of the movement have decided to positively answer to this normalization.

In the hours that followed the government's announcement, the movement's Assembly decided authoritatively de bend over to the prefecture's recommendations by clearing the way for a military occupation of the site, in accepting to clearing up the road blocks and other obstacles on road D281. And this, while evicting, against the inhabitants, two occasionally-occupie, more or less permanent shelters. Rapidly, troops of mobile Gendarmes took hold of the sites. Drones, video cameras and directional mics have invaded the landscape.

If this assembly has, in a six-points text, asserted to be willing to maintain the unity of the components in struggle, to oppose all the evictions and to take care of the future of the movement, its first gesture have been to "liberate" a portion of the ZAD to give as offering to its new partner, the State; and second, by negociating with power. So on March 19th, the Assembly was calling for a gathering in support of "a delegation that includes the entirety of its components - residents, peasants, elect officials, naturalists and neighbors." representing supposedly the whole of the movement. Once again the old adage prevails, that in politics we must always judge by the acts instead of the talk.

WHEN IN 2012, THE STATE ORDERS OPERATION CAESAR to be launched against the ZAD, it was not expecting to bite and chew on a bone.

In the space of a few days, the eviction mires itself in this damp zone before about 50,000 people decide to reoccupy the lands and build shacks. This day, where the political, nonprofit and union militants were invited to roll back their respective flags, marked a prelude to a massive and resolved resistance, the famous "kyst" of Manuel Valls.

In this corner, there's been plenty of struggles in the past, of ties between peasants and industrial workers, from '68 to the anti-nuclear struggles against the powerplants of Carnet and Pellerin. Fragile yet rich complicities that did not fail to be sewn, taking root in past struggles, just like a strong sentiment of sharp resistance from the occupations of a few years back.

Only, after the years and successes of this struggle, the legitimate complicities sewn within this resistance have paved the way for a strategic and instrumental way to approach the struggle: composition.

AS OPPOSED TO THE IMAGE that some did not stop short of spreading, the conflicts have always existed on the ZAD and through the movement against the airport. Conflicts on the ways of living the occupation on daily basis, between the herders and the anti-speciest, between antifeminists and feminists, etc. But equally on the ways to live the struggle between the proponents of direct action and civil disobedience, between institutionnals and autonomous, between the assembly people and the affinity people, between the pro-mediatizaton and the anti-media, between the "Against the airport" and the "Against this world". What is beng lived over there was built on a juxtaposition of logics.

The slogan "Against the great useless projects" was already covering at the origin totally opposed intents and operational modes. The Far Left sees an economic gabegie in it; to EELV, it's a green capitalist project that is hardly compatible with them; to the farmers, it's land they are stolen from; the primitivists, it's an attack against a sanctified nature; and to some radicals, one of the many accomodations of our existence by capital and the State. The first three are wishing for a development of the territory by the State and capital in a way that suits their desires, and the last two desire, for reasons that are sometimes incompatible, to end territory development altogether. As a matter of fact, some are managers, while others are promoting horizontality and self-organization.

What held everyone together, it is that every single person has needed the other for the struggle to continue. The ACIPA of the zadistes for occupying land targeted for being destroyed, the zadist farmers and organizations, to serve them as shields and to legitimate their struggle. The ties that bind these groups together are thus by now only relations of interdependance that tie by an instrumental mode. Even if of course life and the struggle are knowing much more fun moments than that.

Behind the vehiculated image of unity are hidden deep antagonisms only demanding to resurface every time the moment presents itself, like during a stoning of cops. There will always be a Julien Durand of ACIPA to denounce, like a Bové (an old activist famous for chopping corn fields as a form of civil disobedience, now a figure of satire for most zadists) or a Mélenchon, those dangerous "irresponsives" populating the doomed bocage, ou a team of the Green Party to sign the opening of a house equipped with boots bought the same morning in Montparnasse. Like the many cases where it happened, like during the protest in Nantes in February 2014 where Durand, as spokesperson of ACIPA, was playing acrobatics by dissociating himself from the rioting while avoiding to condemn the rioters... so to say, to mark disapproval while attempting to maintain unity with the occupiers of the ZAD that he still needed. In the months that followed, the pacification business will consist in refusing any new protest in Nantes. An injunction to which a portion of the "zadistes" will not fail complying to.

This composition organizes around components that keep piling up acronyms. ACIPA is one of the historical anti-airport associations. The coordination of opponents which reunites the organizations. The COPAIN (ironically the equivalent of "Friend") réunites agro-farmers tied to the Peasant Confederation. Then there is the Assembly of the Movement, initiated by the occupiers.

"For long, it remained a space for debate and commoning of ideas and projects from different sides, without pretending to any unitary decision. To me, the "movement" was connected to this creative space where different tendencies inform themselves and answer, assert and criticize, and without denyig their own autonomy of initiative. I believe that this is what some have started calling "composition", anyway this is where I heard the word for the first time. At first, I didn't bother too much, as they were talking about the "movement" and its "components". Later on, I realized that the concept of composition was more akin to a way of pacifying the situation, to talk about it through seductive words without letting conflict or contradiction leak through. Hence, well, to put us to sleep. As far as impoverishing this boiling up by continuously looking for a "middle way", and that in "movement" we end up forgetting the surprising diversity, in order to make us a mass that moves "all in unison".

- "Testimony, the Movement is dead, long live... the reform! - A critique of the composition and its elite", February 2018, by some insignificant grouping.

WE NEVER RUN OUT OF SELF-PROCLAIMED STRATEGISTS, revolutionary like reformist, who in the name of unity, of pragmatism, of urgency are imposing a direction and unicity to the movement. The leaders have finally emerged out from the occupiers, mobilising their material forces, their networks, their power... not only to the benefit to the entire community, but for structuring their ideological hegemony on the Zone and its struggle. Along with the "institutionnals", they have condemned actions... like the attack on the car of a journalist. But equally the one where an electoral conference by France Insoumise (the eco-socialist party of Mélencho) at the Vacherie (an occupied house on the ZAD) was sprayed with a jet of manure.

Their vision of composition translates to shutting down the divergence and impose a discipline on the movement. To the manoeuver is the Comité pour le maintien des occupations (CMDO) along with a few accomplices, sanctimoniously baptised as such in reference to its eponymous situationnist ancester of '68. An ancester who did not fail at the times to mark a crippling distance from the entirety of the labor union and leftist bureaucracies. In this committee of old glories of autonomy who do not hesitate to make themselves spokerspersons to the media, to acitvate complicities with bureaucrats of all kinds, to play the card game of negociating with the State. Hence, to become managers of the struggle.

These same glories, from the fact of their class origins, are monopolising ressources and discourses, systematically disqualifying their adversaries, insulting, threatening them. Those last remaining incontrollables who had not deserted the Assemlies of the movement, ended up quitting, in disgust.

THE COMPOSITION ENDS UP REVEALING ITS LIMITS once the objective has been reached or the struggle is defeated. If a six-points text officially calls for the management of the ZAD by an instance from the movement, the components of the movement are essentially looking for negotiation. For as much as, for the moment, the State won't let go of anything. An Assembly of Usages had remarqued during the few previous months the matter of thinking beyond the airport. On this ground, some like ACIPA and COPAIN had progressed already. The proximity of many of their protagonists from old timers from the Larzac struggle have allowed them to agitate a few old recipes. Those of a normalized Zone, under lease with the State, co-managed by the Paesant Confederation and the State's ecologists.

It is this option that José Bové, EELV activist, friend of Hulot and Julien Durant of ACIPA, has been promoting last January. The normalization of D281 marks the chokehold of this strategy. Used to its hegemony, the CMDO won't even take care of the form, for the occasion, as it no longer cares about the Assembly's vote. In the days that followed, about 200 people take part in demounting the barricades, not without showing around a few protesters, thus doing in advance the work of the police. Lama Faché, the shack on the road, is taken apart. Some will rebuild it further away. Since then the Assembly of struggle, that only represents a portion, althought major, of the occupiers and the people in struggle, is trying to negociate. For maintaining unity, the ideologues of the composition will have broken apart the unity of those for whom this struggle meant something else than conquerir a farm or a field negociated with the State. In so, this struggle has reminded us that the "Friends" are not necessarily friends, same for the COPAIN.

All this will have equally reminded us that a mere form cannot by itself insure horizontality. Some of us who've been otherwise hating assemblies have invested them. Not for potentialities of freedom and self-organization they may offer, but on the contrary for logics of government, control and submisson they could here be promising. If we remain attached to the Assemblies, it is for coordinating ourselves, making it possible to expose the power plays of the groups or gangs, avoid nourishing narcissist group postures, etc. So, for their anti-authoritarian potentialities.

COMPOSITION IS TO SELF-ORGANIZATION what the chains are to freedom. We have, on our part, always defended associations of individuals within assemblies of struggle, collectives, agaist the strategic composition between organizations or gangs. We are among those who have always refused to co-sign texts with organizations, and not only the "political" ones. The piling up of acronyms is not an identity and autonomous strenght, but on the contrary expresses only submission to the general staff. As if there was worry about the decomposition of the Left, which has never been more than a facade for submission, that we should be helping to put back on its feet, if not take part in it.

Composing is to be playing a role, to format yourself towards elaborating a large front. It is carrying your activities starting from an essentially strategic approch, not an ethical relation. And above this, all it produces is dispossession, and spaces where each and every one is required to follow one pre-traced route, instead of looking to brind complicities and build commons without shutting down divergence and different personal realities. To compose is essentially to be renewing the old political tradition in all its horror.

Today, this idelogical apparatus of the milieu seems to have spread like a fever. Assemblies of struggle for the asylum-seekers are allowed to receive the visit in their occupatons from an EELV senator previously allied to Valls, the anti-rep collectives are considering forming a local association with CGT (a major conservative labor union), that in 2016 had condemned the rioters away from its activities, the Maison de la grève (a social center in Rennes) are hosting Houria Bouteldja (an Islamist, regressive Left media figure who made antisemitic statements), membes of the parisian front protest group are defending the offices of Emmaus, a charity that is complicit with the deportation machine...

What the ideology of composition is spreading is a milieu discipline that privileges ties with the Leftist labor unions, associations and parties over any effective radicality. The ritualized spectacle of controlled direct action serves as much as a channel to evacuate activist impulses warrior affects than to maintain a false insurrectional image. The spectacle of protesting instead of the protesting the spectacle.

- "El Condor passa" committee

Caen, mars 2018

Source article in French: https://www.non-fides.fr/?Une-critique-de-la-composition-zadiste-en-cour...

via act for freedom now

Act for free received :21/4/18

The arrests of anarchists

Autumn of 2017. The Russian state actively participates in the Syrian war. International relations are destroyed by the annexation of the Crimea, military interventions and threats. Society remembers the murder of the prominent opposition politician Nemtsov. Hundreds of political immigrants and dozens of political prisoners. Trade sanctions and falling energy prices are devastating the economy. Mass protests against corruption and the general strike of cargo carriers, the guerrilla war of Islamists in the South – such is the reality of Russia. In just a few months, presidential elections will be held.

In October, vague rumors spread that a number of anarchists were arrested in Penza. But in the websites there is nothing. It is hard to get any of information. Even the number of detainees is unknown. Only some fragments of leaks are reporting that the anti-terrorist department of the FSB (secret service) is involved in the arrests. This is hard to believe, because in Penza for several years there have been no any radical actions. It seems that the rumors are unreliable, exaggerated.

Suddenly, inside the anarchist circles appeared news from one of the arrested. He asks everyone he knows to flee and reports that “the FSB has methods, which are efficient.” Those comrades who assumed the worst disappeared in advance.

For three months the case was covered with a fog of obscurity until a new wave of arrests began. In St. Petersburg, Victor Filinkov, Igor Shishkin and Julian Boyarshinov were detained. Also Ilya Kapustin, a work mate of one of the arrested, was detained too. After the interrogation, he was released. He told about the tortures and left to Finland, where he requested political asylum. At that moment the case became widely publicized and details appeared, concerning tortures as well.

Political asylum in Finland was also requested by Aksenova Alexandra, Filinkov’s wife. The investigation considers her an ideologist of the “Network”, and gaining military training in Ukraine.

Underground

According to the FSB, the arrested belong to the underground anarchist organization “Network”, which consists of several autonomous groups. The aims of the Network are the rocking of the people during mass protests, attacks on the authorities during the presidential elections and the World Cup, the physical destruction of the heads of local administrations, leaders of “United Russia” party and the chiefs of subdivisions of the internal affairs agencies, and the overthrow of the constitutional order.

It is only known for certain, that the anarchists conducted military training in the forest. Participants learned the battle tactics, pyrotechnics, survival techniques, first aid. The video recording of such training is at the disposal of the FSB. Nevertheless, there is no evidence of a radical acts, and detainees are not even accused of committing such acts.

Chronology of arrests

In October-November 2017 in Penza members of the local group of “Network” were arrested:

Egor Zorin

Ilya Shakursky

Vasily Kuksov

Dmitry Pchelintsev

Andrey Chernov

Arman Sagynbaev

Age – from 21 to 27 years.

Two more participants of the Penza group “5.11”, according to materials of the investigation, fled. During the search of apartments and cars, operatives of FSB seized pistols, grenades, gunpowder, and materials for explosive devices. Arrests took place not simultaneously, but were held during two weeks. However, not many people took the opportunity to escape.

According to the same investigation materials, Filinkov and Shishkin, detained at the end of January 2018, were members of the St. Petersburg groups, the “Field of Mars” and the “Jordan”, respectively. To what group was attributed Boyarshinov is still unknown. In addition to arrested, FSB suppose membership in Petersburg branches of at least for 8 more people. Also, two more are mentioned in relation to the Moscow group “MSK”. Also, the FSB announced the existence of a “Network” branch in Belarus. Later, the KGB detained a Belarusian anarchist, but it is for unknown whether this is connected with the “Network case”.

Testimony

The main evidence are the testimony of the detainees. Unfortunately, among of 9 people, only Vasily Kuksov and Julian Boyishin refused to speak. All the others gave testimony about themselves and comrades.

“A masked man came in, he had a handkerchief in his hand covered in blood, that’s when I heard the name of Kuksov. It was then that I realized whose moans came from the next room”(Shakursky)

Operatives of the FSB immediately, along with classical beatings, began to use torture by electric shock. Usually, operatives used electric shockers, but in some cases they used electrodes.
“They blindfolded me and stuffed my mouth with a sock. But then to my thumbs on my feet some sort of wiring was attached I felt the first charge of the current, from which I could not restrain moaning and trembling. They repeated this procedure until I promised to say what they would tell me. Since then, I forgot the word “no” and said everything that the operatives told me. ” (Shakursky)

Electric shocks were applied dozens of times, throughout the body, including genital area.

“He alternated impacts in the leg with electric shocks in handcuffs. Sometimes beat in the back or neck … I gave up almost immediately, in the first ten minutes. I shouted: “Tell me what to say, I’ll tell you everything!” – but the violence did not stop. “(Filinkov)

It is important to note that the operatives used torture even after the arrested were visited by Public Supervisory Commission (PMC). During the visit to Filinkov, human rights watchers found fresh traces of beatings, bruises, traces of burns from electrocution. But it didn’t stop tortures.

The operatives forced them to learn “the testimony” they wanted, the wrong answers led to new impacts. They distributed the roles themselves and selected the facts arbitrarily, rewriting them many times.

“I was asked questions, if I did not know the answer – I was hit, if the answer did not coincide with their [expectations] – I was hit, if I thought about or formulated [for a long time] – I was hit, if I forgot what they said – I was hit. “(Filinkov)

“The investigator few more times took sheets with my “testimony” out from the room. It became clear that this whole story, sponsored by FSB officers, has editors-in-chief who are watching that nothing comes out of the general canvas. ”

Not only the accused but also the witnesses were tortured. The operatives seized Ilya Kapustin a work mate of Shishkin.

“I want to bring the deepest apologies to the people whom my problem touched, sorry, guys!” (Shishkin)

“When I didn’t know the answers to some questions, for example, when I did not understand who or what I was talking about, they beat me with an electric shock to the groin area or to the side of my stomach. I was hit with an electric current to make me say that this or that friend of mine is going to arrange something dangerous.” (Kapustin)

Pchelintsev Dmitry was hung upside down with a dynamo attached to his fingers. He was brought to such an extent that “they touched my neck and checked that I did not die from …”. Later Dmitry announced the torture with a lawyer. Then he was tortured again, and got warning that if he again “turns back”, then repressors will imitate his suicide and show a video recording to relatives.

Andrei Chernov, in addition to torture, was also threatened with the fact that his brother would be imprisoned too.

Boyarshin was beaten after being detained for refusing to speak. Later, he was transferred to the detention center “Gorelovo”, where he was beaten straight in the cell by prison activists of the administration. This prison is notorious for its outrage, at the behest of the authorities, prisoners are beaten, raped, tortured. The torture process is controlled by FSB operatives. They come and demand that Julian testify, but for now he keeps strong.

Solidarity under the ban

The FSB did not stop at the figurants of the “Network case”. Unexpectedly, they began to stop criticism and solidarity with the arrested. The first strike was taken by human rights activists who made critical statements. Dinar Idrisov, who said that before the presidential elections, there is a planned sweep of people who were in the base of the Center “Extremism” (another security agency), was beaten at the entrance of his house. Other journalists who covered solidarity actions were searched.

The FSB had a conversation with the anarchist Sofiko Arifjanova, they wanted her to testify that the anarchists allegedly support the “Pre-bombardment” movement of the nationalist Maltsev, whose supporters were massively detained in November 2017. Shortly before the arrests, Maltsev suddenly declared himself an anarchist, which can hardly be an coincidence.

In January 2018, Moscow anarchists held street actions of solidarity, including braking a window of the office of the “United Russia” party and throwing a fireworks pyrotechnic inside. A few days later, the special forces broke into the apartments of Elena Gorban and Alexei Kobaidze, they were searched and taken to the police station for interrogation.

In February 2018, an action of solidarity was held in Chelyabinsk, in front of the FSB department was posted a banner with the slogan “FSB – the main terrorist.” A few days later, spetsnaz detained the anarchist Dmitry Tsibukovsky directly at the factory where he worked. Also, three more people were detained. Tsibukovsky and Maxim Anfalov were beaten and tortured with electric shocks. They were forced to plead guilty for the action and to give evidence.

“They beat with a shocker on the waist, on the legs, on the hands – it felt like they put something very hot. The most unpleasant thing was when they hit in the handcuffs, it was very painful, and because I jerked, it hurt even from compression of the handcuffs. The most painful hits were on hands – they told me to hold on the shocker with both hands and hit it. It was very painful. “(Anfalov)

“As I did not confess for a long time, the operative applied an electric shock to me. He inflicted at least five strokes on my leg to the thigh area. After each stroke, he asked if I had decided on what to say. The pain from the current was unbearable, and I decided to “confess,” to give testimony that the operatives needed, to stipulate myself and others. For me at that moment it was important to get out alive from this situation. During the interview, the operative wrote the testimony himself and gave it to me to sign. ” (Tsibukovsky)

Safonova Anastasia was not tortured, but she was forced to listen to the torture of Tsibukovsky, her boyfriend.

“During the interview, I was given the opportunity to speak with Safonova on the internal phone with the neighboring office in which Safonova was held. I was told that we must convince her to confirm my words and then they would let us go together.” (Tsibukovsky)

Over Dmitry Semenovy operatives scoffed forcing him to stay in a half-squat position for a long time.

“They brought some sort of apparatus, they said it was some kind of electric shocker, they tied me to a chair and told me that I had the last chance to write a confession, but I still did not write it” (Semenov)

From torture he was rescued by a lawyer, who came quickly.

In February, anarchist Yevgeny Karakashev was detained by police officers in Yevpatoriya (Crimea). He was charged with inciting hatred and public calls for terrorism. The basis was a video of “Primorye Partisans”, a combat group of Rissuan Far East, which operated until 2010.

In early March, in Sevastopol (Crimea), members of repressive structures broke into the house of anarchist Alexei Shestakovych with a search. They put a cellophane bag on his head and took him to the bus, where he was knocked to the floor.

“The shoes flew off – they had removed the shoelaces in advance. They closed the bag on my head, the air ran out, and I began to suffocate. I try to breathe, they tighten even more. Ten or twenty minutes passed. At this time, they raised my arms from behind by the handcuffs, wringing them out. They say to me: “Shout ” I’m an animal!”. I shout – they let go. The thumb of the hand was taken and slowly turned out. He’s knocked out now. When it got really bad, he asked: Does not it rock you there?? “(Shestakovych)

Shestakovich was sentenced to 11 days of arrest for publishing banned songs on the social network. After serving his term, Ilya moved to Ukraine.

In March, seven people were detained in Moscow, anarchist Svyatoslav Rechkalov and his flat mate, as well as several leftists, who were later released.

“My neighbor ‘s and my hands were tied up by the ties behind our backs, blindfolded us with black tape and placed in the trunk of a micro van. They tell me that it is wrong to act as criminals in the fight against crime. It is necessary to cooperate with the authorities and engage in socially useful activities. One said with a sneer: “Well, I think that such a motivated revolutionary for the sake of his idea will stand any pain. Two or three people started beating me. The hits were not strong, but the power of the electrical current discharges increased, which became quite painful. Someone from behind grabbed me by the pants, they began to yank and shout that they will now go to the eggs. After that I said that I was ready to talk [he testified against himself, but not against the others] “(Rechkalov)

Coverage of the case in Russia

A number of Russian anarchists and journalists interpret this story in their own way. Arrested anarchists are called by amorphous terms “anti-fascists” or “left activists”, and completely deny the existence of an anarchist underground, giving it away for the FSB’s fantasies. What is the purpose of this?

First of all, the desire to influence the opposition-minded civil society, so the story can receive maximum resonance and sympathy, and raise the necessary money for lawyers. Obviously, the goal has been achieved, repressions are widely covered, human rights activists have joined the company of solidarity.

Of course, that in court some of the arrested will deny the blame, and some activists assumes that public opinion will help to achieve a mild sentence … The parents of comrades want to believe this, they can not accept the inevitable yet.
But is it really possible to believe in this? Maybe public opinion prevented the conviction of Pussy Riot? Did it protect sentenced protesters of 2012? Did it help Dmitry Buchenkov to avoid obviously fake accusation? The society will forget about the prisoners in 1-2 years, and the only thing they will have are few close persons and their own credo that will not allow them to slip into the abyss of years of despair. Counting on public opinion as a lever of pressure on russian deaf authority is a dangerous delusion.

It is impossible not to understand that our comrades will be imprisoned, demonstratively and cruelly. From the fact that some people want to help the detainees in the said way or want to convince themselves of the fiction of “Network”, objective reality will not change. And the mass of anarchists, and the FSB know that the anarchist underground is not a fiction.

So far, because of “self-restraint” anarchists lose their own identification. It creates the false impression that the FSB grabbed almost random leftists guys who only played airsoft games and shared foggy “antifascist” views. The word “anarchist” with regard to comrades occurs in mass media less and less, we are lost in faceless “anti-fascism”. Anarchists appear in the image of victims of state terror, who do not have anti-regime ambitions, their own political face. You have to pay the price of impersonality when you want to get the sympathy of the majority.

And, actually, the majority? With the toughening of the regime, the frustration of the population in liberals and legal ways of struggle is growing. Direct confrontation with the authorities will cause more and more sympathy. Russia has already passed this stage in the early 20th century, when revolutionaries provoked widespread sympathy of the society.

Anarchists should not be ashamed of themselves. We can, in principle, deny any “guilt” in court. However, an anarchist, denying accusations, can not give up his identity, his ideas. Nobody can condemn the very essence of the charges, in attacks on the authorities there is nothing shameful to be embarrassed and shunned. Authority would like it most of all, if for the sake of illusory chances in court the anarchists themselves expose radical methods. All that the detained comrades can do is to disrupt the FSB setting of repentance and self-denial, to pass the forthcoming trial with honor. This is what we all need to help.

International coverage of case

We do not know whether this was done consciously or not, but the international anarchist movement turned out to be misleading. For example, Crimethink reiterates the human rights version, force them to sign false confessions admitting to participating in an obviously invented terror network.»

On April 20th russian TV channel demonstrated propagate movie, including video from military training that does not resemble airsoft games at all.

Such kind of approach, like substituting reality with arbitrary interpretation (albeit with good intentions), destroys confidence within the movement. If you can not tell the truth — keep silence, but do not tell the lie.

The truth is that those arrested are anarchists, there is no any non-anarchist anti-fascist, or people who associate themselves as an anti-fascist on the first place. Also, the FSB is not grabbing any, but anarchists of a certain social-revolutionary direction.

However, does this mean that there is no falsification? Not at all.

Falsifications

Obviously, the FSB’s internal instructions have allowed operatives to use a certain set of tortures at their discretion, the main aim is to get the result. Previously, the publishing of the facts of torture, as a rule, stopped executors, they preferred not to take risks. Now publicity does not bother anyone, the operatives impertinently flaunt their unlimited power.

According to comrades, operatives are pushing very delusional versions, for example, about financing from Iran or links with the nationalist movement “Pre-bombardment”. Thus the operatives artificially overestimate the importance of the anarchists’ underground organization. With such methods of investigation nobody can reliably state where the truth is, and where the fiction. Such methods make it possible to create completely fake cases, as has been happening for a long time in relation to immigrants.

Such falsifications are reminiscent of the notorious practice of Stalin’s courts. In the 30th, the violence against arrested people grew from year to year, and reached the level of sophisticated medieval tortures. European anti-fascists, who had been interrogated by the Gestapo, and later were arrested by the NKGB [proto-KGB] in the USSR, asserted the obvious borrowing of the arsenal of torture from the Nazis. At the same time, there was a growing degree of falsification of the investigation, down to absolutely fictional ones, according to which random people were judged.

There are no guarantees, whether there are no casual people in the case, whether the weapons have been planted and exactly which one, whether the goals of the organization are not fiction. With such methods of investigation, falsification ceases to differ from reality: under torture almost everyone will give the necessary testimony.

Conclusions

One of the purposes of torture was their demonstrativeness. The order for this came from above, it was not just a method to knock out or fabricate testimony. The FSB wants to convince anarchists and any anti-regime movements that even loyal behavior after arrest would not insure against torture. These tortures are prophylactic and intimidating.

The Russian government, like any authoritarian regime, can not exist without the image of the enemy, external or internal. But people since Soviet times have got used to an eternal “threat of the West” and its spies. Therefore, the society is increasingly being pushed onto the needle of brutal massacre of ” public enemy forces”. For this purpose, the topic of extremism is actively promoted and new “enemies” are being stamped out.

Now the turn of the anarchists came to play the role of the “enemy”. It was evident several years ago, when repressors started to create fake extremism cases. FSB does not care about real radical actions, now people are being tried simply for their intention, for ideology. In modern Russia, to be called an anarchist-revolutionary has become a crime. We are back in the tsarist times.

Russia is heading for fascism, the worst is ahead.

April 2018

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From nantes.indymedia.org via machine translation. [April 11th, 2018]

As I get ready to join my friends and my friends at the ZAD, and as many across France, I'm changing the situation behind my screen and in the newspapers, I'm uncomfortably struck by the speech I read, that I hear. They are always the same "spokesmen" more or less self-appointed, always holding the same words: the State, despite the sincere willingness to negotiate the "movement" supposedly united, would flout its promises, for example (as by chance) by expelling the Hundred Names, an "agricultural" collective - and the home of some of the heads of the Committee for the Maintenance of Occupations (CMDO). These words, now more than ever, we must make a political criticism.

The game of the state for a few months is (as usual) to divide the occupants into two camps, opposable between them, the "good" who would give pledges ("cleaning the roads") and deposit individual agricultural projects "»; and the "bad" who are, apparently, only "wankers" ("Michel" at radio-France-info, April 9). Instead of denouncing these gross maneuvers, and demonstrating what was formerly known as "solidarity" (a twentieth-century dictionary will be consulted if necessary), a good number of those designated as "good" were quick to to submit to all the injunctions of the prefect and others. And, of course, the more one obeyed these injunctions, more new injunctions were formulated. The now-known example of "cleaning" the D281 is still in everyone's memory: it was first required to destroy a few buildings, then quickly all buildings, then there was a permanent police presence "to accompany the pavement repair work ", etc. At each stage a number of individuals, many of whom were members of the political organization who confiscated most of the power (control over the tools of communication, monopoly of relations with others, "Components", creation of a bogus "assembly of uses" where everything is ready in advance, etc.): the CMDO. In fact, it was a question of proving to the state that they were able to maintain order themselves.

Then there was the first "betrayal" of the state: the "opponents" who nevertheless thought they had planned everything for their integration (with a complete institutional organization chart), were not even invited to the negotiations on the future management of the lands ! What humiliation for those who wanted, at any price, to integrate into bureaucratic management and become the relays of the State!

But, instead of belatedly becoming aware of their abject role and the obviousness that this role could only turn against them, our brave aspiring managers have nonetheless redoubled their licks, and have filed urgent agricultural projects to not to see their houses evicted, without pretending to worry about the other occupants (the "wankers"). Therefore, all the submissions to the bureaucratic order that otherwise claimed to fight are good: another leader, Delabouglisse, the spokesperson of Copain44, said Tuesday, April 10 at a press conference that "the sheep came from to be "chipped" by the inhabitants of the Hundred Names. Seeming to ignore (but not ignoring) all those who still struggle against the pillage of sheep, and in general against agricultural standards (and who are very attentive to what is happening in Notre-Dame-des-Landes), he testifies to the desperate desire to integrate at all costs into the bureaucratic apparatus, giving all imaginable pledges of complete submission. And he even goes so far as to apologize for not being able "in two months to propose a perfect project".

The indescribable Julien Durand (Acipa) finely suggested a solution in Presse-Océan of 9 April, that is to say during the attacks of gendarmes: "We strongly encourage the inhabitants of the Zad to submit individual projects to obtain a relative raise of concern [sic] on the scale of the expulsion operation [sic]. Everything is said: whatever happens, now that there is no more airport, we must liquidate the movement of occupation, tear gas or not1.

In summary, "Since the beginning of the discussion with the prefecture, we were totally amazed. So, they are strong, because they had us, we believed in dialogue, in appeasement and today they respond to us with violence, "whispers" Willem "in Ouest-France on April 10th. Naivety or cretinism? I can not decide.

On the other hand, if the Hundred Names (between ten other houses, remember even if they were houses of "wankers") could be attacked, evacuated and destroyed from the first day of the operation of the gendarmes, it is well above all because the road D281 (which leads to it) was abandoned, under the pressure, among others, of certain inhabitants of the Hundred Names themselves! A five-year-old child discovering chess would not have made such a tactical mistake. We are indignant at the ("illegal") violence of the gendarmes even though we themselves have rolled out a red carpet, crushing the recalcitrant on the way.

And yet, in front of the smoking ruins of his house, one of the inhabitants, instead of learning from his weakness, still whined, accusing the State of not having "the respect of the value-work [sic]" (" Michel "at radio-France-info, April 9). It seems necessary, unfortunately, to recall that most of the occupants always tried and tried to fight against work and exploitation. Some people today praise the work in the press, it's the height of crap.

In the context of the repression of struggles, it is rather commonplace for the State to try to integrate certain particularly pushy or ambitious fractions, to frame the rest and undermine the struggle; and it is very rare that he does not find candidates (trade unionists, student "leaders", etc.). In the ZAD, it will have been the CMDO, in addition to the Acipa / Coord and Copain (such behavior is obviously much more expected for these latter structures openly reformist and co-managers).

Yet, despite the most delirious (and obviously dangerous) marks of submission, the state did not want them! Perhaps because, having in any case otherwise well-run relays (eg Acipa), the state wanted to mark a symbolic frontier that could not be crossed: that of ownership. Or, more exactly, that the State does not give up the property of a good (of a land) by negotiation; and by the balance of power, very rarely. It would be for him to recognize that the sacrosanct principle of property, indispensable pillar of capitalism, is in the final analysis only a vulgar piece of paper. But must we be moved by the fate of those whose odious hopes are thus reduced to nothing? The CMDO is solely responsible for what happens to him, and it is useless to shed tears over his pitiful ruin.

On the other hand, it is necessary to continue to support those who, far from the cameras, the press conferences and the negotiating tables of the prefecture, are not fighting against the airport, but against "his world" that some have conveniently forgotten.

In any case, from whimpering to licking boots, we have gone from a situation where the State, driven to failure by the struggle, had to give up a considerable infrastructure project, to a situation where the opponents themselves In the name of a "sacred union", whose mechanisms are known, they have done some of the work of their own expulsion.
It is vital to continue to oppose, in the ZAD and everywhere else, the brutal repression of the State; but to do this it is essential to draw the political lessons from what has happened in the ZAD in recent years and even more in recent months, under pain of reproducing, again and again, the same mistakes, and tolerate, still and always, the same takeovers and the same stabbing in the back.

Fortunately, some are still there who are resisting seriously and with remarkable determination. May they step back the state - and its henchmen, now or in the future.

A distant comrade, April 11, 2018.

From Zone A Défendre

On the 19th of April, a few of us were not only informed without much notice, but also by chance that there was a callout for a meeting at Le Camps des Chevaux Blancs. The discussion was around the state of negociations after the refusal by the government of the COP globale*. This is yet another attempt in a long list of attempts to destroy the collective running of the ZAD, this time thanks to a submission of statements for individual projects, nominative yet inter-dependent.

A certain number of us prefered to not or to no longer adhere to these “stunts” and so we got together today to try and explain why.

Part of it is that negoications with the state were never acceptable. Another is that, even though we started out relatively optimistic we have progressively lost all confidence and enthusiasm these last weeks and months…

Furthermore, this new loss of ballast was presented such that it was necessary to have “consensus”, that the accord of individual signatures must be complete, that if one collective refused that it would block everything. We rejected both this ultimatum and this paradox of forced consent. Our position is that our refusal to submit both a project and our signatures is clear and to be respected, and that it is not to block this process. It was never meant to be a veto.

We refuse judgemental and authorative practises, blackmail that plays on our fears, imposed reasoning based on urgency, lobbying etc., whether it comes from within or from outside of the zone.

We don’t accept that certain people exclude others who fight everyday against norms, whether experienced here or elsewhere. Nor that those in irregular situations find themselves musled… despite being sponsored.

We refuse to subscribe to the rule of law, collectively or individually.

We can understand or can imagine that there are those who stand by these tales of legalisation to either gain time or win back the solidarity of others components of the struggle. But now, seeing how it has played out over the last weeks and months, our opinion is that it has all become futile, if not harmful.

We no longer identify with this soft strategy.

Even in the best of outcomes, these accepted projects bring us in a round-a-bout way to the worst of scenarios: a normalisation that legitimises certain people to live here more than others.

In the end, despite all the presentations and the promises, we feel that the Legalisation for All damages other struggles that wish to remain without title, boss, plot or border…

Thank you to those who have arrived for the support and for the good vibes and our thoughts go out to our friends who have been wounded or incarcerated.

 Now let us sort out those who speak of an “Us” 

*comprehensive Precarious Contract of Occupation

via freedom news

This is the Mayday appeal for solidarity with Russian anarchists persecuted by the state. The case was reported at Freedom News here and here.

Dear comrades all over the world! We appreciate your support and solidarity and are very proud of it. Spreading the information, collecting money for legal expenses and, most important of all, the solidarity and protest demonstrations that united hundreds of people in dozens of cities around the world on March 18 as well as on other days — all this is extremely important and helpful in our collective fight against state oppression.

However, the situation remains critical. Russian special services’ atrocities are not subsiding. Despite direct evidence, state authorities are still denying the fact that our comrades accused of “terrorism” are being tortured. State media are broadcasting false reports on the case. And finally, there is now a new accused in the case: our comrade, Yulian Boyarshinov. All the comrades are still in prison under false accusations. And this means our collective campaign of solidarity needs to get on and get stronger.

The May Day is approaching, the global day of resistance for revolutionary and progressive forces. We call all of you: libertarian, revolutionary and progessive groups and communities to be with us on this day. At your May Day demonstrations, protests and events, raise your voice about the struggle and the repressions in Russia: on your banners, in your speeches, in your discussions, with any means you have.

More than 100 years ago our fellows in Chicago paid the highest price in the fight for justice. Today, anarchists are still being persecuted for their beliefs and their fight by the same forces as in the past. We believe that together we can make our voice heard by many people and force the Russian state to stop this orgy of tyranny and sadism.

The FSB is the terrorist!
Your tortures will not kill our ideas!
Freedom to Russian anarchists and antifascists!

source: RUpression

If you want to support the arrested Russian anarchists, please make a donation to ABC Moscow: PayPal abc-msk(at)riseup.net with reference “St Petersburg and Penza”. For another options for money transfer, contact abc-msk(at)riseup.net for details.

From Open Democracy

Over a dozen people connected to Russian anti-fascism have been tortured since October 2017. According to the security services, they are a part of a plot to destabilise Russia. 

via contra info

– Yesterday, 44 of our comrades were arrested accused of property destruction, provocation, and fighting with the police. Night legal team tried to reached them but still cant make it, as they have been isolated (02.05.18)
– One of the Legal Aid was arrested and beaten.
– Until now our 12 comrades are still imprisoned and the police continuing the witch hunt.

International solidarity for arrested comrades whatever means necessary!

More information

https://agitasi.noblogs.org/

Updates (received on 03.05.18)

Communique

Although this is an exclusive communique towards Yogyakarta or Indonesians in general, we call for international pressure and solidarity against this rotten feudal system that still exist in this century!

Greetings to the beloved people of Yogyakarta, those who vilify our
demonstration which was intentionally intended to censure the
institution of Kraton in Yogyakarta.

Believe us when we say that we already knew, even since before we
carried out our demonstration, that there would be an antipathy from the public towards our demonstration. It is very understandable. Feudalism creates this belief that kings and the royals are like half-divinebeings; their authority is sacred and self-justified. Somene becomes a ruler in a feudal system because they happened to be born in the right family: the royal family. The whole feudal territory is the property of the king and his royal family, and the people are just occupants who can be evicted any time at the king’s will.

The sytem is perpetuated by, among other things, this irrational belief towards the feudal rule. In Yogyakarta, feudalism is what makes Yogyakarta “special”. Politically, this special status means Yogyakarta is not governed by an elected governer like other provinces in Indonesia. Instead, the region is governed by a governer who is also a Sultan. Socio-culturally, this special status has another meaning; it gives a false sense of pride to the people of Yogyakarta. Yogyakarta is special because it is ruled by a Sultan, and the people are proud about it.

How is being ruled by someone with an unchecked power something that you can take pride of? What is so proudful from being a subordinate of another human being, solely because they were born in the royal family?
Our demonstration was not meant to draw sympathy. If drawing sy mpathy was what we were aiming, we wouldn’t have done a demonstration that disturbed the reproduction of social values like what we did. No, our demonstration was not intended for that. We are not a political party, a“leftist” organization, an NGO, or the proponents of the incumbent rulers or their opposistions, who need people’s endorsement and sympathy.

WE ARE ALSO NOT PART OF PMII; FAIZI ZAIN AND HIS CRONIES WHO EXPECTED A RIOT TO LIFT THEIR AGENDA OF OVERTHROWING JOKOWI FOR THE BENEFITS OF THEIR POLITICAL MASTERS! THEY ARE POWER BROKERS! WE ARE NOT!

Our demonstration was meant to disturb the circulation of capital in
Yogyakarta. We intentionally want to create a non-condusive situation for capital investment, be it national or foreign, that will intensify the development and gentrification that disenfranchise the middle and lower class people in Yogyakarta.

We had guessed that the public would be infuriated by our vandalism and provocative calls.

The destruction of one police post and the call to “murder the Sult an!” have massively angered the people of Yogyakarta. The anger is absent when the police repeatedly, with violence, is at the front line of conflicts between people’s interests and the rulers’, on the side of the rulers’ of course, like the one in Temon, Kulonprogo, where there is an on-going process of land-grabbing by the Sultan through the legitimation of Sultan Ground/Pakualaman Ground, a feudal land ownership system, on behalf of the expantion of tourism industry capital. The anger is also absent when the inhabitants of the urban kampungs (informal settlements,slums) have to deal with water shortage, caused by the usage of ground water by hotels and apartments, which construction is being intensified, under the blessing of the Sultan of course.

That call to “murder the Sultan!” that have angered some people of
Yogyakarta, whether we wrote down the call or not, wheter the call was literal or symbolic, has its own importance in ratteling the authority of the Sultan in Yogyakarta, which is seemingly sacred and
unquestionable; a power with no control mechanism because it is
protected by “faith” towards the Sultan’s self-justified authority. This
“faith” is responsisble for the disenfranchisement of the people. Soon er or later, you who are reading this will probably be disenfranchised by the “development” in Yogyakarta too. A “development” for the interests of the Sultan and his cronies; local and national corporations; domestic and foreign invetors.

Yes, the Sultan is one of the main orchestrators of many problems in
Yogyakarta; eviction, land-grabbing, gentrification, and the develo pment that disenfranchise middle and lower class people. The Sultan and his royal family, and also his cronies, are the ones who dominate every economic aspect in Yogyakarta.

Yogyakarta is one of the most economically unequal provinces in
Indonesia. The development in Yogyakarta is not carried out for the
interests of the people, but for the interests of the ruling class: the
capitalists and the feudals. In Yogyakarta, the two vile sytems are
having an affair, while crushing the people under; those who aren’t the royals and are the middle and lower class.

Mothers, aren’t you tired of having to visit your children at prisons,
twice a week, who probably had to steal or rob people just to survive?
And the reason why they are in these overpopulated prisons in Yogyarta is the deeply rooted poverty that is prevalent in Yogyakarta. Does your Sultan care?

And then, are we gonna keep fooling ourselves, thinking to oursevels
that everything is fine? Or even, “special”?
We have no interest in being admired. We are not a political party who need people’s votes on elections.

We are just people who are sick. Sick of everything that is going on
around us and how the people are lulled by this false consciousness,
telling them that everything is fine.

We’re calling to the middle and lower class people, intellectuals,
artists, academics, those who claim to be liberals and moderates, and
others who choose to be “neutral”. Do you remember the historical event that gave birth to the concept of modern nation-state? The period that you call the Enlightment Period, where the kings, queens, and the royals were guillotined at the Place de la Révolution. Didn’t it create what you call as democracy?
We don’t mean to repeat or glorify history. The democracy that you
uphold and sell out is not bringing us anywhere other than to poverty, ecological degradation, and dienfranchisment.

We are the libertarians. We are what you call as anarchists. We dream of a world where people cooperate with each other, work together, rule over themselves, in a horizontal way, without rulers, the royals, political contract, social contract, or the capitalists. We want a life in its truest form, where human’s natural desires are in tune with nature; a life without class, racial, ethtnic, religious, and other false divides.

We are what you call utopists.

We want a free society without oppressors. We want a society where
people can have any beliefs, sexual orientations, or anything without
fearing being persecuted.
Total freedom!

– The Anarchists

via act for freedom now!

As many times as it takes the “anti-terrorist” brigade to declare them guilty.

On March 27, 2018, the deputy attorney of the Supreme Court and the former supervising prosecutor of the “anti-terrorist” brigade appealed to the Supreme Court against the acquittal by the five members (of department A) of the Criminal Court of Appeal of Athens, which declared our comrade’s innocence.

May 11, the E department of the Supreme Court will consider this appeal. If it is accepted, Tasos Theofilou will return to prison with the initial charges against him (which could even lead to life imprisonment) pending the completion of a new trial at the Court of Appeals, once again with a different set of judges.

Tasos Theofilou was arrested in August 2012, a few days after a robbery at the Alpha Bank on the island of Paros, during which a driver taxi was mortally wounded while attempting to prevent the thieves from escaping.

“Following rushed procedures” Tasos Theofilou was described by the anti-terrorist brigade as well as by the media as the thief in a cowboy hat who allegedly killed the 53-year-old taxi driver. In July 2017, the decision of the five members of the Court of Appeal seemed not to obey the orders of the “anti-terrorist” brigade and media because they acquitted him of all charges against him.

On Friday May 11, they will consider whether the acquittal of the Court of Appeals will be final or whether the comrade will be once again be dragged into another trial on the basis of the following accusations: participation and belonging to the CCF, participation and involvement in terrorist groups, attempted manslaughter, intentional homicide. May 11 will not be the end of the story. It is rather the beginning of a new undeclared, yet very real, period of hostage-taking of our comrade until the decision of the Supreme Court is finally announced, which could take from a few weeks to several months.

Although the legal proceedings of Tasos Theofilou might appear as the manifestation of  personal revenge, this is not the case. This is a political accusation related to the repressive restriction of the anarchist movement, the wider combative movement and our class in its entirety.

This is directly related to recent developments in the cases of other comrades, who were sentenced to severe prison sentences based on Article 187A of the Penal Code and the article on individual terrorism, as well as the coming trials of comrades, apolitical prisoners and those close to them as in the case of Distomo, which was blithely elevated to the rank of “terrorism” under cover of the case of a revolutionary struggle. That is part of the same repressive plan against any active individual or someone in any way related to the anarchist movement; of the anarchist Marios Seisidis, who was sentenced to 36 years’ imprisonment only because of a DNA report of an expert, to the outrageous convictions of Irianna and Perikilis based on their social relations coupled with samples of questionable genetic material.

The broad solidarity movement that surrounds the comrade’s affair and which greatly contributed to his acquittal, was a bulwark against the laws of terror and the falsification of DNA samples by the police. Of course, this could not remain unanswered by the “anti-terrorist” brigade and their political chiefs, namely the SYRIZA government, who have faithfully defended both Article 187A and the uncontrollable use of DNA samples by the police since they began exercising their functions. In revenge they are now trying to take him away, and we will oppose them once again.

In solidarity with anarchist Tasos Theofilou

It’s time to get rid of their terror laws!

Organization and struggle for the social revolution.

Demonstration: Saturday 5/5, at 13h, Thiseio (subway station)

Gathering: 11/5, at 9 am, Court of Appeal (avenue Alexandras)

Groups and comrades

via: mpalothia.

Translated from French by Act for freedom now!

via act for freedom now!

received by mail / Saturday April 7th, 2018

Two people sentenced to months locked up after deportation of Bois Lejuc. Three sent on remand recently in Limoges and Ambert.

Krème still in jail for the rookie sauce barbecue of May 2016.

We are of the opinion that the best, most worthy response to repression remains attack.

Rather than withdrawal, paranoia, taking distances, putting spokes in the wheels of power. Choosing where and when in small groups using the havoc of demos or the silence of the night.

Never surrender.

The night of April 2 to 3 we burned a car of the diplomatic corps, rue Pierre Demours (Paris 17).

Solidarity with the comrades struck by repression.

Solidarity also with Lisa in prison in Germany for robbery, and with the comrades on trial in Italy for operation scripta manent.

Cœurderage

P.S. We believe that claims of attacks serve to explain the reasons that pushed us, as well as to motivate others. The frustration of trolling comments does not interest us. So thank you for not publishing this little text on the dustbin infested with trolls that Indy Nantes has become (already the publication of the claim for a car with a diplomatic plate, a violet Nissan Juke on March 27, was done against our will – perhaps deliberately to spit on direct action).

via:  Attaque

Translated by Act for freedom now!

via act for freedom now!

Since March 27, multiple searches, arrests and incarcerations have struck anarchists and kindred spirits throughout France (Ambert, Amiens, Limoges and Toulouse for the moment).

A note to announce some good news in the environmental fog. The two comrades of Ambert, in jail since March 28, have been released under judicial surveillance following the appeal trial against custody. They have to sign twice a week and cannot see or communicate with each other and with a certain number of people.

Also, during the hearing, which was supposed to take place behind closed doors but wasn’t because the prosecutor forgot to request it, we were able to gather some information.

The only fact mentioned was an attempt to destroy the property of others, referring to an incendiary device found under an Enedis vehicle in Ambert last June. No DNA or fingerprints were found on the device.

Devices “of the same kind” were found in one of the places searched in Ambert.

As for the investigation, it had gone on for months involving telephone tapping, geolocation (of telephones), GPS detectors on at least two cars and photos of meetings between people, at the least.

Some more specific information should arrive soon.

————————————————–

via:roundrobin.info

Translated by Act for freedom now!

From CrimethInc.

When the Bolsheviks usurped the Russian Revolution, it was a disaster for anti-capitalist movements everywhere. This book traces a timeline of the Bolshevik crackdown on revolutionary currents in Russia and elsewhere around the world, starting before the October Revolution and running up to the treaty between Stalin and Hitler. It includes a treasury of quotations from some of the anarchists who helped make the revolution only to perish under the heel of authoritarians.

Click the image above to download the PDF.

This is a revised and expanded version of the texts we published on the anniversary of the Russian Revolution—”One Hundred Years after the Bolshevik Counterrevolution” and “Restless Specters of the Anarchist Dead“—complete with a new introduction and additional archival material. You can download the book free of charge.

Our friends from Active Distribution have printed copies of this book, in both paperback and hardback editions. If you live in the US, you’ll soon be able to buy it from AK Press.

From CrimethInc.

Resisting the Wave of Fascism, Spring 2018

In February and March, during the run-up to the elections, Italy experienced a period of intense conflict between fascists and anti-fascists analogous to the period in the United States that culminated with the struggle in Charlottesville in August 2017. In hopes of learning from how these conflicts are playing out in different parts of the world, we reached out to our comrades in Italy to learn about the history of fascism on the Italian peninsula, the current state of the autonomous movements resisting it, and the possibilities and obstacles ahead.

Across the world, reactionary movements have emerged promoting nationalist and racialist values. The global rebellions of 2011-2014 produced formidable enemies, as many hastened to defend the inequalities and indignities that autonomous struggles were fighting to abolish.

Even today, at the nadir of the reaction, these struggles have only continued to gain momentum. Last year, anti-fascist struggles exploded across the United States in the wake of Trump’s electoral victory. A protracted struggle against misogynists, the alt-right, and full-fledged neo-Nazis brought tens of thousands of people into the street to support confrontational tactics and anti-authoritarian values.

The same process of polarization and escalation is playing out in Italy. On February 3, 2018, 28-year-old Luca Traini shot six African immigrants in the small town of Macerata. Traini is an ideological fascist and one-time politician associated with the Lega Nord, Forza Nuova, and CasaPound. In the wake of the shooting, few organized unions and political parties rose to condemn the murders. With elections fast approaching, it was unclear how the public perceived even the most vile attacks. No one from any party was prepared to condemn the killings in a way that might jeopardize their electoral strategies.

On February 9, thousands of autonomous protesters and working class Romans marched in the Tor Pignattara district, denouncing the fascists. Two days later, a huge crowd marched in the small village of Macerata, and hundreds of protesters clashed with riot police in the small northern village of Piacenza, where fascist group CasaPound hoped to host a celebration at their local social center on the one-year anniversary of its opening. The images from Macerata and Piacenza spread virally on the Internet, and footage of a carabiniere being beaten with his own shield played on television screens in train stations and coffee bars across the peninsula. Clashes between anti-fascist protesters and police and the extreme right broke out in other parts of Italy, including Pavia, Trento, Bologna, Napoli, Torino, and Rovereto.

The right-wing party Lega Nord won a plurality in the elections of March 4, 2018 and Steve Bannon was there to bear witness. Ideological fascists and authoritarians of several stripes are concealing themselves behind the farcical populism of Lega Nord, which officially promotes an “Italians first” policy. Like fascists in the US, these movements hope to gain ground in the wake of the elections.

When the stakes are this high, only those with nothing to gain from compromising with fascists can be trusted to resist the tyrannical brand of capitalism that is sweeping across the globe under the banners of nationalism and supposed “anti-globalism.” Here, we take a closer look at anti-fascism in Italy in order to gain perspective on our situation in the US. North American fascists draw inspiration from European fascist groups such as CasaPound, Generation Identity, the Golden Dawn, and the Nordic Resistance Movement, not to mention PEGIDA and the “Brexit” campaign. We would do well to continue studying our comrades’ efforts against them, to better understand our own options here.

Anti-fascist activists clashing with the police in Turin on February 22, 2018.

Anti-Fascism in Italy from World War II to Today

1945– At the end of World War II, Italy is officially re-organized as a democracy by Allied forces. The Communist and Catholic parties (PCI and DC) are integrated into the government because both participated, in their own ways, in the Italian Liberation War in which partisans fought to depose fascists and drive out the German Nazi occupying armies. The parties of the institutional left promote a moderate reading of the Resistenza and the anti-fascist movement. For them, the end of the War represented a moment of national unity, not a insurrectional or revolutionary movement.

Between Italian fascism and democracy, there is a strict continuità dello stato (“continuity of the state”): every effort was made to prevent a purge of state structures within the judiciary, law enforcement agencies, and the army. An ad hoc commission was convened to ensure that Italian war criminals retained impunity for their imperialist activities in the Balkans and Africa. This process was called the “amnistia Togliatti.” While it emptied prisons and closed trials for the heirs of Salò, fascist-era magistrates initiated the judicial persecution of thousands of anti-fascist partisans, chiefly communists and anarchists, who had illegally combatted fascism for a quarter of a century.

Continuity of the state enabled figures of the fascist regime to assume key roles in the nascent republican state in the name of anti-Communism, with the blessing of the US government. Italy has not exorcised the specters that linger from its fascist and colonial past. The average Italian citizen does not know that Italy used gas on the African population; he thinks that the racial laws of the Third Reich were horrible but that Mussolini, by comparison, was not so bad. Thanks to this continuity, even today, laws such as the Rocco Code remain in force from the fascist regime.

In every significant outburst of revolt since the transition to democracy, combative protesters, such as those who mobilized in 2001 against the G8 summit in Genova, have been charged with Fascist-era crimes such as devestazione e sacchegio (“devastation and sacking”).

December 26, 1946– The Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI) is founded by former exponents of the fascist regime. The party is inspired by the Repubblica Sociale Italiana. In 1948, the MSI participated in national political elections.

1947– The Communist Party is expelled from the government.

July 1960– Fernando Tambroni of the Christian Democratic Party seeks to form a government with the participation of the MSI. This is the first example of Left parties being openly complicit with the far right after the war. Clashes between proletarians, police, and fascists erupt all over Italy, especially in Genova and Rome. For the first time after the war, the clashes were not controlled by left unions or parties.

April 27, 1966–Paolo Rossi, a university student, is murdered by a fascist in the first widely known politically motivated post-War homicide of an anti-fascist.

December 12, 1969– A bomb explodes in the Piazza Fontana outside one of the first squatted social centers in Europe, killing many people and injuring dozens more in the northern industrial city of Milano. Police arrest several anarchists—one of whom, Giuseppe Pinelli, dies after “falling” from the window of the police station during his interrogation by police Superintendent Luigi Calabresi.¹ Years later, it came out that fascists were responsible for the bombing, quite possibly with the collusion of state actors. Following the massacre, a massive and radical anti-fascist movement spread throughout Italy.

1969-1979:– Alongside the essentially national-revolutionary organizations that hope to subvert the democratic order of the republican state by armed struggle (such as the Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari, NAR), other groups take shape (including Ordine Nuovo, Avanguardia Nazionale, and Ordine Nero) that wish to pursue similar objectives through a strategic compromise with the right-wing and dark sides of the state, including elements belonging to the secret services and the secretive P2 organization. The right wing, both inside the state and in extreme right groups and criminal syndicates, implements a program now known as the strategy of tension, carrying out a series of terrorist acts to create an atmosphere of tension and widespread fear in the population. The goal is to justify a return to authoritarian state control and send warnings to left-leaning and Communist elements.

In the 1970s, a new account of the Resistenza as a betrayed revolution spread in extra-parliamentary groups. Historians drew the conclusion that the resistance had been betrayed by the leaders of the Communist party who chose not to continue the insurrection of April 25, 1945 (when Mussolini was executed in the streets by partisans), but preferred to form a government with the conservative forces. They understood the final years of Fascism as a civil war.

Anti-fascism increasingly shows two souls: “institutional antifascism” and so-called “militant anti-fascism.”

February 1977– Clashes take place at the University of Bologna between the fascists of the FUAN group and anti-fascist students of the autonomous collectives. The Communist Party elaborates the theory of opposing extremisms and the violence of anti-fascist extra-parliamentary groups as “squadrism.” A deep rift divides left parties and autonomous groups.

The theory of opposing extremisms has become a normal reflex in Italian politics. It is based in a political theory that aims to group the centrist forces in order to isolate and marginalize right and left “extremism,” which are considered equal but opposite, two sides of the same coin. The goal is to depoliticize the ongoing conflict, framing it as a problem of public order. This framing is still employed today. Media and politicians, whether right or left, always interpret murders carried out by fascists or clashes between fascists and anti-fascists as gang violence between opposing “squads” with no political motivation or weight.

1989– Lega Nord is founded by Umberto Bossi. At the beginning, the party openly declares itself to be regionalist and ethno-nationalist, defending the interests of northern Italy against the rest of the peninsula. Despite declarations of hatred towards Rome, the national state, and the regions of southern Italy, Lega Nord participates in the Berlusconi governments of the 1990s. The Lega combines a fanatical right-wing populism with liberal economic and anti-federalist policies, as well as racism against immigrants and fervent defense of “traditional families.”

1992– Fini, secretary of the MSI, is a candidate for mayor of Rome supported by the businessman Berlusconi.

January 27, 1995– The MSI is dissolved and Alleanza Nazionale is born: a more European conservative party lacking the typical Italian extremism and fascist dog whistles. The disappointed leave the party and form new neo-fascist parties. This is the end of unity in the neo-fascist galaxy.

1997– Forza Nuova is born thanks to two prominent figures of the radical Roman right, Roberto Fiore and Massimo Morsello, who are close to the 1970s groups Third Position and the NAR, respectively.

Shortly after the Bologna massacre in 1980, Fiore and Morsello were accused of subversive association and took refuge in London to escape arrest. As soon as the waters calmed, the two neo-fascists immediately returned to Italy and put the party into action, founding it on September 29, the day of the cult of St. Michael the Archangel, protector of the Romanian para-fascist movement, the “Guardia di Ferro.” The ideology of this movement is a mix of neo-fascism, nationalism, xenophobia, homophobia, and Catholic traditionalism. Forza Nuova draws its ranks from the young, fishing in the sea of skinheads and football hooligans. Its platform is based on some principles of Catholicism (anti-abortion), social policies to preserve traditional family structures, and opposition to immigration. It is the smallest party of the far right and the only one that has professed open support for the shooting in Macerata.

December 27, 2003– CasaPound is founded. Some young fascists decided to occupy a large building at 8 Via Napoleone III in the Esquilino neighborhood in Rome: the CasaPound. Leading the occupants was Gianluca Iannone, leader of an alternative rock band with right-wing lyrics. The name of the social center is in honor of Ezra Pound, the reactionary poet who became an idol of young neo-fascists in Italy.

The political style of CasaPound is characterized by “young and new” communication and the use of social networks. They call themselves “fascists of the third millennium.”

2013– The “CasaPound Italia” party is born, nominating Simone di Stefano as their premier. The electoral talking-points include the right to housing for Italians (the party logo is a turtle), opposition to immigration and EU policies, and monetary sovereignty from the Euro.

2014– The new Secretary of Lega Nord, Matteo Salvini, moves the Lega to the right, collaborating with Fratelli d’Italia and CasaPound as well as the French far-right group Front Nationale (FN). Later, he abandons the alliance with CasaPound in favor of center-right parties.

2017– Salvini explicitly defines the current line of the Lega Nord secretariat as federalist and nationalist, without the independentist and secessionist program, replacing the slogan “first the North,” with “first the Italians.” The discourse of the Lega electoral campaign, like that of the entire right wing, is based around the supposed invasion of Italy by foreigners, the poverty of Italians compared to the supposed “privileges” of immigrants, and the so-called “clash of civilizations” between Italy and political Islam.

Today– CasaPound boasts six thousand members, one hundred offices, a trade union (BLU), a youth organization (Blocco studentesco), a network of associations (sport, environment, solidarity), a web radio (Radio Bandiera Nera), and multiple magazines. CasaPound is the most influential neo-fascist party in Italy and has a “European commissioner,” Sebastian Manificat, who owns the bar “Carrè Monti” in Rome, and has close ties with the ultranationalists of Greece, Poland, Germany, Russia, and Ukraine (CasaPound is connected to the Azov Battalion deployed in the Ukrainian civil war of 2014). In the administrative elections of June 11, the Turtles made the ballot in 13 municipalities with over 15 thousand inhabitants by placing councilors in centers such as Lucca and Todi (winning their organization 7.84% and 4.81%, respectively, and becoming the third most powerful political party in Lucca). Presenting themselves as a new and incorruptible political force, they managed to win 1.5% in the national elections.

In recent years, CasaPound has tried to take root in the neighborhoods by organizing committees that conceal their fascist agenda. They make anti-eviction pickets, distribute food to the Italian poor, and organize patrols against violence against (Italian) women.

Protesters against Forza Nuova clash with police in Bologna, Italy, February 16.

Immigration in Italy

Historically, Italy has been a country of emigration. Significant immigration began only thirty years ago. There are few second- and third-generation immigrants, because Italy never possessed vast colonial holdings like France or England. Consequently, most foreigners recognize themselves in the values and traditions of their communities of origin. Many speak Italian badly, relying predominantly on the church, television, or autonomous initiatives for classes.

Furthermore, as a country of arrival, it has a special role in the EU reception system: the Dublin Convention, launched by the EU in 1997, stipulates that the Member State responsible for examining the asylum application will be the state where the asylum seeker entered the European Union. This means that many foreigners who are headed to different European countries are forced by law to stay in Italy pending the bureaucratic process evaluating their request for accommodation. The evaluation can last two or even three years. In 2002, the government criminalized illegal immigration and identification and created expulsion centers in which to lock up undocumented persons. Some of the immigrants locked up in the centers are then deported to their countries of origin.

The crisis around migration intensified in 2015. Crackdowns following the Arab Spring, the war in Afghanistan, and the civil wars in Libya and Syria have caused a mass flight to Europe. Right-wing Italians describe this as an invasion. This racist discourse is completely legitimized in Italy, while the legacy of the fascist and colonial past is concealed. Racism is not identified with fascism: you can say you hate black people and vote left. The fear of foreigners has found fertile ground especially with the economic crisis that has impoverished the middle class since 2009.

Today, the immigration issue monopolizes political discourse. A member of the Lega said: “We must make choices: decide whether our ethnicity, our white race, our society must continue to exist or our society must be canceled: it is a choice.”

After the shooting, thousands gather in Macerata to condemn fascism.

Timeline: Events during the 2018 Election Campaign

January 12– Young anti-fascist stabbed while hanging posters.

January 20– Anti-fascist demonstration in Genoa attended by several thousand.

February 3– Luca Traini, a member of Lega Nord, shoots blindly at a group of African immigrants in Macerata, wounding 6. Luca Traini wanted to go to court to kill Innocent Oseghale, a Nigerian alleged to have murdered a girl named Pamela Mastropietro, but decided to shoot every black person he encountered along the way. This is what Traini himself reported in the spontaneous declarations he made to the carabinieri after the arrest.

February 4– Pavia: 25 fascists attack a group of 5 boys, some Italian and some immigrants.

February 5– Piacenza: Clashes at an anti-fascist parade against CasaPound. Videos spread virally across the peninsula of a carabiniere being beaten with his shield.

February 9– Rome: Anti-fascist demonstration in Torpignattara in solidarity with victims in Macerata. Several thousand attend.

February 9– Trento: Anti-fascist demo against CasaPound.

February 10– Macerata: Anti-fascist autonomous demonstration draws 25,000.

February 11– Rovereto: Anti-fascist gathering against a speech by Salvini.

February 16– Bologna: Clashes as anti-fascists gather to block the rally of Roberto Fiore (FN). Police use water cannons and tear gas.

February 17– Livorno: Insults screamed at Meloni (Fratelli d’Italia); her car was surrounded and kicked as she left.

February 18– Naples: Clashes and arrests as anti-fascists disrupt CasaPound rally.

February 21– Palermo: A local leader of Forza Nuova is found bound with adhesive tape in front of his office. Two anti-fascists are arrested for attempted murder, then released. Solidarity demonstrations openly defend the actions of the accused. Their charges are reduced to simple battery.

February 21– Perugia: Fascists stab an activist of Potere al Popolo (a new left party).

February 22– Torino: Police charge an anti-fascist demonstration that is disrupting a CasaPound demonstration.

February 23– Brescia: The library of the social center Magazzino 47 is set on fire by fascists.

February 23– Pisa: Police charges and clashes at a protest against Salvini.

March 1– Conclusion of the election campaign. In Rome, anti-fascists demonstrate in Argentina square.

March 3– Pavia: Anti-fascist houses are “marked” with a sticker reading “Here lives an anti-fascist.”

March 4– The Lega receives a lot of votes in the elections: 17.37% in the Chamber of Deputies (5,691,921 votes) and 17.32% in the Senate (5,317,803).

March 6– Florence: An Italian man shoots and kills a man from Senegal.

March 7– Trento: The office of CasaPound is bombed by anti-fascists.

Clashes in Bologna on Thursday, February 15, 2018.

Account: Piacenza

The crowd is moving together, but slowly. Up front, locals are urging the crowd to come to the front to join the cordoni.

In the cordoni, perhaps three or four rows of comrades about 20 abreast, arms are linked to prevent police or fascist attacks. Most of this crowd is masked. Behind them, perhaps ten feet of empty space. And then the banners with many more people in masks and the larger crowd behind this entire arrangement. The empty space between the cordoni and the banners ensures that the crowd does not stampede in the event of clashes, because those up front have a place to fall back without crashing into others.

The chanting is concussive and precise. I am surrounded by hundreds of people chanting “champagne Molotov, champagne Molotov…” at the police. When the first cluster of carabinieri block the crowd, the cordoni push into them without hesitation. Stones and bottles are thrown from behind, while young people with sticks exchange blows with the police. The whole crowd is chanting and clapping. Fireworks explode at the feet of the carabinieri. To the side, digos² are filming everything. When the fighting subsides, few have left the zone. A tense standoff ensues as organizers from Piacenza argue with the commanding officers. They finally reach an agreement that the entire crowd will be permitted to pass.

Now we are winding through the cobblestone streets of this town, passing local shops filled with confused or worried patrons. Piacenza is one of the places in the north that did not experience widespread resistance to fascism at the beginning of the 20th century. Perhaps that explains why it has welcomed authoritarians like CasaPound intent on opening fascist social centers. It is not long before we reach another impasse with the police.

On a small road near the center of the village, large police trucks are surrounded by carabinieri and municipal police. Our crowd is absolutely unmoved by their threats and intimidation. They begin clubbing the cordoni, who respond in kind with sticks and PVC pipes. A gust of stones, bricks, and glass bottles fly from behind the banners, striking officers and police vehicles. Suddenly, a cop falls to the ground. Together, union workers and black bloc anarchists snatch his shield and club from him. He is kicked and beaten with the weapons he was just using against us. His armor preserves him from injury, unlike our hoodies and helmets, but over the following 48 hours he will become a disgrace and laughingstock along the entire peninsula. In the cafés and train stations from Torino to Lecce, the videos from Piacenza will play on permanent loop.

Later, 20,000 people march in the small streets of Macerata, as several thousand had days before in Rome and a week earlier in Genova. Something decisive is developing.

Piacenza: Hundreds of militant antifascists marched alongside a thousand townspeople and unionists to oppose CasaPound in the northern village. Afterwards, this video spread virally.

Account: When in Rome…

Rome is a difficult city. It’s the only real metropolis in Italy. Its area, about 496 square miles, represents a huge territory which can be divided into the North side (more bourgeois) and South side (more poor), setting aside some exceptions. It is almost impossible for an anti-fascist movement to cover all the areas and zones, so there has always been a struggle between different quartieri (districts). Historically, some of them belong to fascists, while others are clearly antifa zones. Fascist propaganda and aesthetics are usually based on the myth of the Roman empire; Rome has always been a strong electoral base for the far right.

Growing up in a city like this, as a young comrade or antifa, you always have to face fascists in front of your school and in public spaces. There have been several stabbings and one comrade murdered: Renato Biagetti, in 2006, requiescat in pace.

In a way, the movement is responsible for not responding more effectively from the beginning in 2003 when CasaPound opened their first squat, their headquarters near the central train station.

We notice that every time our movement grows—for example, during the student protests of 2008, the student riots of December 2010, or the big riot of October 2011—the fascists are always pushed back for a while and silenced. When our movement is at a low ebb, the fascists gain momentum.

As a small group (20 people), we decided to set our sights on a defined territory, our neighborhood: Marranella/Torpignattara. Here, among a mixture of immigrants (Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Chinese, Latinos) and local proletarians (and sub-proletarians), we feel that we can build solidarity. We have participated in building networks of mutual aid, anti-eviction struggles, and a free food program coordinated with a Bangladeshi association and other political groups of citizens. We believe that this is the best way to push back the fascists, preventing their political action whenever they show up in public, even when that means facing repression In our zone, CasaPound was beaten strongly when they attempted to set up a propaganda booth.

Build the urban commune, that’s our aim: make space for solidarity, which is the only force that could ease the pressure of surviving under capitalism. Forget all the ideology, but spreading ideas through the population as a part of it, we try our best to dissolve our “militant identity,” our identity as militants, and confront the real problems of the barrio from a horizontal perspective. Anti-fascist struggles and anti-racist positions should avoid any moralistic point of view, any attitude of judging from above. When we organized the February 9 demonstration in response of Macerata’s shooting, we felt this responsibility to call a day of struggle in solidarity with the victims as a part of our class, the exploited, while directing the blame towards political parties and institutions (both left and right).

To be ready when the time is ripe for action, we have to maintain a daily struggle against resignation. “Nunc est delendum” is a Latin motto that could be translated “Now it’s time to destroy”—we too are heirs of the roman tradition, but the tradition of the oppressed, of rebel slaves like Spartacus and the Plebs who always shook Rome with the threat of riots. We have to destroy all the relations of power between us and attack the world that surrounds us, starting from our barrio poisoned by the capitalistic way of life. Alongside this motto that forms the name of our group, there is the sentence Punto Solidale Marranella, point of solidarity, because in a world of empty words, the most revolutionary act is to go straight to the point. The crowd that supports the fascist scum is having a hard time in Marranella’s barrio.

Pool toys serve as makeshift shields in clashes with the police.

“Siamo Tutti Antifascisti”

Following the events in Macerata, Rome, and Piacenza, a whirlwind of news articles began circulating about the new wave of militant anti-fascism. Demonstrations were organized across the peninsula. The clashes in Piacenza and mass militancy in Macerata demonstrated that the movement could even take root in small villages and towns, as the Resistenza had one hundred years ago.

Protestors began to shut down Salvini campaign events in places like Rovereto and Livorno, just as anti-Trump protestors had done in Costa Mesa and Chicago. Then, on February 16, clashes between anti-fascists and carabinieri in Bologna put the movement in international headlines, with police resorting to tear gas and water cannons in the historic university center as they had done 40 years earlier.

In Italy, the palette for political violence is thoroughly developed on the left and the right. In contrast to the US, violence alone is not usually enough to discredit a movement, although it might damage its reputation among moderates. The fact that Italian society is polarized in this way means that neither anarchists nor fascists are forced to appeal to the center to have mass support and influence.

Following the events in Piacenza, Bologna, and elsewhere, the intensity of the conflict picked up. Fascists had beaten young anti-fascists in Genoa a month earlier, but now they were stabbing activists and torching social centers. In the chaotic southern city of Naples, hooligans and antifascists clashing with police were viciously beaten, methodically rounded up, and humiliated on live broadcast by being forced to their knees in a plaza and arrested one by one.

In response, a fascist leader from Forza Nuova, the only organization to defend and applaud the shooting in Macerata, was kidnapped outside of his office in Palermo. He was bound with duct tape and beaten with sticks before being left in a ditch at the side of the road. 1000 people marched to defend the actions of the two anti-fascists accused of the attack. The two young comrades’ charges were dropped to simple battery, a misdemeanor unlikely to carry a prison sentence. Clashes continued to break out in Pisa, in Torino, across the country.

When the election frenzy concluded, Lega Nord, the right party, came away with a strong minority. CasaPound Italia won 1.5%. The protests and actions cycled down. For now, the streets have returned to an uneasy calm.

Palermo: “L’antifascismo si fa così li: leghi con lo Scotch e poi li lasci lì!” (This is antifascism: tie them up with tape and leave them there!) The day after a Forza Nuova leader is kidnapped by antifascists and tied with tape, 1000 Sicilians march to support the accused anti-fascists.

Account: A Demonstration in Torpignattara, Rome

We meet up at our social center to organize the last minute preparations. In a couple of hours, we will go down the streets to shout out loud that we will not stand for the fascists’ presence in our neighborhoods. After Macerata, a demonstration is the least we could do.

We are a bit worried and the tension is palpable. We are sure that the comrades from the entire city will be there, but how will the neighborhood respond? In the lead-up, we have received positive reactions to our posters and fliers, but we are still apprehensive.

Now we are in the square. Comrades and friends arrive first and start to help us with the practical organization of the march. Around 7 pm, the square is full. Just a few minutes and the demonstration begins.

The speeches began to follow from the sound system positioned on the car that opens the demo. The microphone is open and everyone can talk. We will not be playing music this time. From the sidewalks, windows, and balconies, we hear shouts of support; we respond with applause and invitations to join the march. Many migrants, children, and families from the neighborhood are at the front. Further back, young and old follow. We are amazed. There are so many people who want to join us in shouting no to fascism with their hearts in the silence of the city.

Today we take back our roads. This is what is shouted into the microphone, among other things. We say no to fascism with our daily choices, with the solidarity we express in our actions, with the way of living that we have chosen. And apparently we are not the only ones who feel this way.

The procession winds through the streets that we cross every day, filling them with life, which is always the irreducible enemy of every form of abuse. The procession proclaims a non-fascist form of life that expresses itself daily in dozens of initiatives that create bonds and solidarity in the neighborhood.

It is 9 pm and the procession is about to end. The police deployment is impressive, but today there will be no confrontations. We have a different goal. This is not the moment to repay the enemy with the violence that has been inflicted on every one of us. Today, it’s time to scare him. To show him that we are many. The faces of everyone, comrades and others, remain sad for the memory of what has happened but also serene because today we have experienced that in this neighborhood, there is a solidarity that could turn into a very powerful weapon.

After Macerata, No Turning Back

Macerata represents a point of no return. It changes the narrative of what is going on in Italy.

We were raised in a country in which fascism and racism have gained more legitimacy that they had in the last half century. Anti-fascism was a kind of minimum common denominator of all the politcal forces in all the years following the Second World War. During the so-called anni di piombo,³ we were always on the edge of a fascist coup (as well as at the beginning of a communist insurrection) and any political force had to prove their formal adhesion to democratic principles—with the exception of the fascists, of course.

Over the past 20 years, this has changed. Xenophobia, increased desire for security, the reduction of everything to an economic function—all of these have created a sitution in which fascism is a more acceptable possibility than it has been in living memory. For this reason, we have to understand this moment as a critical point. For sure, the neo-fascist groups have gained power and legitimacy. They work in the neighborhoods, give free food to the poorest Italians, fight evictions, form local patrols against “criminality,” and so on. But on a broader level, the general discourse surrounding the so-called “migrant crisis” is creating a culture of explicit racism, security solutions, and the desire for a strong national-ethnic identity and politics among both the left and the right.

The left parties especially seem to be experiencing the strongest crisis now in terms of identity and legitimacy. This phenomenon isn’t just Italian; it seems global. The poorest and the working class have abandoned these parties in mass to support the most radical right-wing parties. From one side, the left has led the neoliberal process that has abolished the rights of workers, social protections, and the welfare state; on the other hand, they have adopted the policing agenda of the far right in order to gain political favor. Matteo Renzi, the former leader of Partito Democratico, confirmed this when he supported the campaign to block incoming refugees from Libya, saying “we need to help them in their home,” a kind of neo-colonialist motto very popular in the right movements.

The end of the left is both an opportunity and a problem. Right now, those who are open to anti-racist and anti-fascist slogans are for the most part middle-class students and liberals. “Institutional” anti-fascism condemns both racist attacks and antifa struggles in the neighborhoods; this perspective defines all violence as a problem, even when it takes place in defense against the vilest attacks. Meanwhile, millions of workers are supporting reactionary solutions. During the electoral campaign, the leading candidate of the right coalition for regional presidency in Lombardia even claimed that “the white race is in danger of being destroyed by blacks.” He is considered a moderate.

Autonomous groups and movements, both anarchist and communist, have always been anti-fascist. They have overcome political differences when the need has been urgent to make a strong response to fascist attacks. After Macerata, it is likely that many people will join our movements in order to fight fascism. For the moment, though, it is difficult to say whether there will be a new anti-fascist movement on a larger scale or if this will remain a short sequence of events in reaction to the shooting. But it is clear that a decisive polarization is taking place between those who openly advocate for fascism and everyone else.

In every city, the walls of the zone popolari are decorated with graffiti. Amid the colorful fills and hand styles of the graffiti crews, you can still see the slogans from the past. “Tutto il potere della classe operaia!”—signed Lotta Continua, 1976. The legacy of the revolutionary struggles is present everywhere. Autonomists, anarchists, anti-fascists, and even some communist organizations squat with all of the other workers in the peripheries of the cities; they open mechanic shops, they develop anti-eviction networks, they maintain self-organized “popular gyms.” There are neighborhoods in Rome, Milan, and Naples in which tens of thousands of people are squatting their apartments. In many neighborhoods and areas, the poor join the comrades on the basis of shared needs, and also because their parents or their grandparents were communists once. And this is also why CasaPound feeds the hungry Italians, adorns the walls of the universities with their well-designed posters, and organizes music nights and movie screenings. The decisive factors in recruitment go far beyond simple discourse and propaganda. Nobody knows what to do next, but comrades are organizing in every area of the country.

Postscript: Has the Global Fascist Wave Crested?

In the United States, a large-scale militant resistance to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and electoral victory was followed by a widely-supported movement to oppose his most dedicated followers on the far right. After a year of organizing, clashes, and doxxing, the alt-right is now in shambles, consolidating itself into a few organizations and a smattering of spree shootings and terrorist attacks. These forces will continue to be a problem for many years, as they have carried out a large-scale and protracted intervention in rural white enclaves for decades uncontested, but it may be the case that their current moment in the spotlight as a massive street-ready movement has reached its end.

Similarly, after success in the Greek elections of 2012, Golden Dawn members and ranking officers overextended themselves by murdering anti-fascist rapper Pavlos Fyssas. This killing simultaneously initiated a wave of anarchist-initiated riots and attacks and bogged down their party in a criminal investigation. For the Greeks, this was their “Charlottesville moment.”

In Brazil, the right-wing reaction succeeded in overthrowing the left-wing Workers Party, but the resulting conflicts have brought millions into the streets. The tyrannical regime of Turkish PM Tayyip Erdogan has already helped to spark two insurrections in five years, in both Istanbul and then in Kurdistan. More and more, the far right is coming to be associated with the rich and powerful, just as the left has become associated with corruption, neoliberalism, and the failures of social democracy.

As ecological catastrophes increase in frequency and the maneuvers of the wealthy plunge billions deeper into poverty and alienation, new revolts are bound to break out. These revolts will adopt the means and discourses available to them. Millions of people do not often flood the streets in the service of abstract ideals, but they will gladly appropriate discourses as a tool for understanding their suffering and the struggles they find themselves in. Anti-authoritarians need to participate in the movements to come to connect with the increasingly diverse constellations of actors in these movements, to learn from them and to offer our unique methods and convictions in the context of the movements: not just so that others can employ them, but so that we can test them together. As the world continues to fracture, more and more people will be compelled to join the fray. We should be right there with them, offering different solutions, rather than criticizing them from afar or abstaining from involvement because these movements have not yet discovered our brand of politics.

To give a single example—if in United States, the statist left is able to resuscitate itself in the movement against school shootings, the countervailing forces in the far right will be perfectly positioned to overcome their temporary disorganization by addressing everyone who sees the contradiction in appealing to the arms of the state to defend us against gun violence. We have to be present in these movements, offering a point of departure for a more thoroughgoing critique and more radical solutions.

The interventions of the coming period will have to accomplish many things. Above all, they must reveal the complicity of the far right with the powerful architects of the present order, on the one hand, and on the other, the fundamental failure of the left to address the complex problems of the world rather than reducing them to mere recruitment opportunities. If we are unable to accomplish those tasks, we may find ourselves in the same situation that anarchists and militant anti-fascists face in many former Soviet bloc countries, where the aftermath of the USSR has created a tremendous momentum towards fascist solutions while the institutional forces of the right and left mutually collude to block the emergence of alternative methods of self-organization and autonomy.