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Title: Anarchist Identity Author: Ruymán RodrĂguez Date: February 26, 2018 Language: en Topics: Gran Canaria Anarchist Federation, Spain, organization, practice, strategy, identity Source: Retrieved on September 30 from http://autonomies.org/2018/09/the-call-of-anarchism-an-identity-made-in-practice/ Notes: Translated by http://autonomies.org | Translator's note: "I have left all references as they appear in the original essay, translating only when necessary"
In considering oneself an anarchist, I have never understood this as an
identity. For me, collective identities always tend to constrict us in
sealed compartments, in closed, quantifiable, easily identifiable and
assimilable categories. I respect all of them, as long as they do not
configure themselves in opposition to other identities that are
considered to be inferior. Yet in my opinion, the identity that truly
belongs and defines us is the individual one, that which we develop even
if we had been raised in the dark and on a desert island. It is true
that identity is shaped by the environment, sometimes absorbing it and
sometimes repelling it (and often a little of each), but I am interested
in knowing how much of what we are survives in contact with the
environment. I have always thought, certainly erroneously in the opinion
of philosophers and sociologists, that what we really are is what
remains after this contact with the environment. What the environment
adds to us is our social identity; what the environment can not change,
what resists its contact, that is what we are. Of course for many this
is individualistic romanticism, but it is not my intention to
philosophise. Suffice it to say that for me what defines a person is
their individual identity, above the cultural, ethnic, generic, etc.,
identities, that have been imposed or that one has had to choose, from a
limited number of options. Sometimes these identities, such as political
identites, are not neutral, and significantly mark how the person is
(for example, an authoritarian political identity), others are charged
with serial privileges (such as the male generic identity) and we must
declare ourselves against or in favor of them, and this also defines us
as individuals. But in general, when we are simply limited to being
something circumstantial, something that we have not chosen, that others
chose in our cradle for us (national or religious identities), then all
of them can be equally lethal. I have said before and it always sounds
just as hard, but I like to insist: all cultures are the same, because
they can all be equally bad. In short, group identities do not help me
to define people, their individual identity does. For what remains, I do
as Jesús Lizano did and “I see mammals” only.[1]
For me to be an anarchist is a sensitivity, a way of understanding life
and social relations that involves a real practice and a proposal of an
alternative life to that which exists. It is a sensitivity that existed
before it was given this name and that will exist after it has been
forgotten. Anarchist manifestations precede the label, they predate the
Greek coining of the word[2] and a Frenchman calling himself this in a
provocative gesture.[3] The name of anarchist is assumed because it
gathers together all that this sensitivity implies, but throughout
history there have been many and varied nouns that have tried to define
the same thing. The one that corresponds to the contemporary age is this
one, there is no more. It is possible that now, in not linking it to an
ideological or scientific concept, someone enters the door, asks for my
anarchist card to tear it up in my face. But what I say is nothing new
or original and many before me have so understood anarchy and anarchism.
For Malatesta: “Anarchism is an individual and social way of life to be
carried out for the greatest good of all, and not a system, nor a
science, nor a philosophy”.[4] Rocker explained the matter further:
I am an anarchist, not because I believe in a future millennium where
the social, material and cultural conditions will be absolutely perfect
and will not need any further improvement. This is impossible, since the
human being her/himself is not perfect and therefore can not engender
anything absolutely perfect. But I believe in a constant process of
improvement, that never ends and can only prosper in the best way under
the most free possibilities of social life imaginable. The fight against
all tutelage, against all dogma, whether it is a tutelage of
institutions or ideas, is for me the essential content of libertarian
socialism. The freest idea is exposed also to this danger, when it
becomes dogma and is no longer open to any capacity for inner
development. […] Anarchism is not a closed system of ideas, but an
interpretation of thought that is in constant circulation, that can not
be oppressed in a fixed framework, if one does not want to renounce
it.[5]
Anarchism has been for many, who have been able to explain it better
than me, an anti-absolute, a special and concrete sensitivity to real
problems, that has demanded in turn a specific way of confronting them:
practical anti-authoritarianism. It is logical that if this is
anarchism, then the anarchist, rather than being tied to preconceived
and uniform identities, should correspond to the above.
It is true that anarchism does arise as an identity problem on many
occasions. I have already had the occasion to comment on this in several
texts. There are those who need to assume a prefabricated identity that
they believe will give them prestige among a more or less broad group of
affinities. Thus, truly ridiculous phenotypes are produced: the
anti-authoritarian who defends with fanaticism the intellectual
authority of this or that master; the iconoclast who keeps his
libertarian relic, in the form of a flag or symbol, next to the heart;
the heretic that heads the “congregation of the doctrine for the faith”
in pursuit of the libertarian dogma. Aberrations of this kind are
everywhere: anti-capitalist speculators, misogynist feminist allies,
believing atheists and ignorant intellectuals. There are also anarchists
who are anarchists in an identitarian way, but for me, with all due
respect, this is a very poor way of being an anarchist, just as
considering oneself an Aryan is a very poor way of being a human.
Far from any aporias, I believe that the anarchist sensibility is of
vital importance when it comes to managing our own lives and social
conflicts and social inequalities. A life without hierarchies and where
our survival is guaranteed by relationships of mutual aid is more
necessary than ever. Although most anarchists can agree on this, some
comrades have raised a debate that could be summarized as follows:
should this sensitivity continue to receive the name of “anarchist”?
Although the question seems merely formal and not substantive, the
reality is that the implications, by their motivations and consequences,
go beyond any nominal issue.
Let’s start by clarifying that this debate is not new. Ricardo Flores
Magón already proposed more than a century ago: “Only the anarchists
will know that we are anarchists and we will advise them not to call
themselves so as not to frighten the imbeciles”.[6] Several voices in
the early twentieth century in Spain proposed the use of the term
“libertarian socialism” instead of “anarchism” to avoid the negative
connotations of this latter.[7] And in the last decades, the very term
“libertarian” has become a euphemism for anarchist, when it has not
served to clarify that one is an anarchist but in a light,
decaffeinated, non-flammable way. In fact, the origin of the word has
nothing to do with the search for a kind and sweetened noun to define
anti-authoritarianism. The word was coined by the French
anarcho-communist Joseph DĂ©jacque who thus titled his newspaper (Le
Libertaire, 1858-1861) and who had already used it in 1857 in an open
letter directed against Proudhon, in which he accused him of being
“liberal and not libertarian “for his machismo”.[8] The term was rescued
by SĂ©bastien Faure in the face of the anti-anarchist laws (known as
“perverse laws”) approved in France in 1893 that expressly prohibited
anarchist propaganda and the inclusion of the word in any apologetic
text. Thus he gave life in 1895 to his newspaper Le Libertaire and so
popularised a word that had been forgotten for almost 30 years. The term
was used as a synonym for an anarchist when the latter term could not be
used, if the legal consequences were to be avoided. However, it did not
necessarily signify an adjustment in commitment or self-affirmation. It
is with the passing of the years, with social expressions and persons
that did not declare themselves to be anarchists, but still opposed to
authoritarianism, that the term begins to be so defined. And it is with
the passing of the years, when those who are not comfortable with a name
that they take as aggressive or unattractive, that some begin to use the
term “libertarian”.
This attitude has sought to justify itself on the grounds of the bad
press of the word “anarchist”, given to it especially after the wave of
violent attacks and assassinations of the 1890s. It is true that the
word has been tinged with negative connotations, but this arose long
before the “propagandists by the deed” abruptly broke onto the stage of
history. During the French Revolution, the term anarchiste was used in a
pejorative way to accuse radical political opponents, supporters of the
“equalisation of fortunes” and the most active sans-culottes.[9] It
would be painstaking and unnecessary to reproduce all the fragments of
the history of philosophy in which the term anarchy or anarchist, from
Plato[10] to Bentham[11], has been anathematised. Even the first
anarchist classics, from Godwin[12] to Proudhon[13] himself (who used
the word indistinctly), were affected and used the term negatively. In
conclusion, the name was not originally cursed for what the anarchists
who employed it did or did not do; there has always been a fear of the
term and this can not but follow, in a world organised under order and
command, its etymological meaning: absence of leaders. I do not need to
dwell on this because anarchists have for centuries tried to explain the
paradox of linking anarchy and chaos, authority and order. The fear of
horizontalism, autonomy, the deregulation of everyday life, the
abolition of private property without subterfuge, is inherent to a world
whose functioning is based on some being above and others below. It is
thereby logical that any attempt to alter this state of affairs be
considered a threat. In fact, in all of the examples I have just
mentioned, from Plato to Bentham and from these to the most conservative
factions of the French Revolution, the criticism of anarchy and its
supposed propagators is not based so much on the fear of absolute
freedom as on in the fear of egalitarianism that entails the absence of
formal authority. For those cited, anarchy would suppose an inadmissible
seismic equalising that would undermine the social hierarchy, put an end
to the “natural” superiority of some individuals over others and lead us
to chaos. The anarchist, obviously, could not be more unattractive.
The word anarchist, therefore, must be logically and unfailingly
negative in a society where the powerful have a monopoly on discourse,
where the taboo of authority is rarely publicly questioned, where
everything keeps turning because neither the privileges of some nor the
duties of others are changed. What the anarchists have done with that
name can help more or less to give ammunition to the enemy, but in no
way conditions the connotations of the word. Starting from this, we have
to understand that when the first people who consciously went by this
name arise, that they know perfectly well what they are doing. They are
not taking a vague word that will be stained with use; they are taking
an insult, a pejorative epithet, a political disqualification, and they
are claiming it. It is an act of provocation, of giving prestige to the
tainted, of turning against the established. And provocation, conscious
and strategic, is still necessary. This is what most of the repressed
and marginalised collectives and people have done when they have turned
their accusations against their accusers: black, whore, queer, pariah,
have been darts that the oppressed have picked up from the ground to
return to their accusers. And the occasions have not been few when they
have hit the target of wounded pride.
Leaving behind this historical digression, which I hope has been of some
use, we are going to delve into what interests me above all in most
issues: its practical dimension. Being an anarchist, as a fetishistic,
sectarian identity, as a masturbatory activity, is a hindrance. The
anarchism of these anarchists is one I have always criticised: one that
lectures to the supposedly illiterate masses, in which the anarchist
believes that the absolute truth was revealed to her/him by some dusty
book, one that imagines that s/he can give lessons of moral superiority,
one which thinks that s/he can not learn anything from people who walk
and who are without a definite ideology, the anarchist who does not work
because moving stains and reality pushes to contradictions. But the
anarchist sensibility, the way of defining an anarchist by what s/he
feels, lives, proposes and, above all, does, should s/he stop bearing
that name? The argument in favor of abandoning the term goes on to say
that it is a very unpopular name, that it creates a distinction between
the anarchist and the rest of the people, that it is easier to introduce
our practices in social struggles if we leave it in our pocket and that
it is in itself a worn, obsolete designation. I do not agree, I have
never agreed, with any of these arguments.
Firstly, I have already clarified that the unpopularity of this term
comes from its own meaning and from the ability of the powerful to
exercise semantic hegemony over a word that is a challenge for them in
itself, especially if it were to materialise as a majority option. But
regardless of this, we must start from something that is as terrible as
it is true: not everything popular is correct. It is one thing to focus
the message in a way that resonates with people, to find the best way to
express and present it, to stop believing that everything we propose is
infallible, that it is the people who have to convert to our creed, and
to begin for once to be aware that it is our proposal that has to give
an effective response to the most immediate needs of the people. And it
is a very different thing altogether to think that our discourse must
follow the strategy of demagogy and adapt to what is generally accepted.
Our discourse must be realistic, verifiable in the facts, but that does
not imply that it is not provocative, that it must necessarily be
comfortable and that it must be accepted without breaking some initial
resistance. To think otherwise is to open the door to Machiavellianism,
to lack of integrity, to say what people want to hear even if it is not
what they need to hear. Letting ourselves be carried away by this raises
a dangerous antecedent: why not take on a racist discourse in order to
introduce ourselves to those working class neighborhoods where
propaganda against immigration has taken hold? Why not accept a macho
argument if we want to create a union in a workplace where you breathe
testosterone? Why not support animal abuse in exchange for befriending
kids who like dogfighting? Why not forget to question private property
and capitalism to reach the crowds that flood shopping centers and whose
leisure is consumption? These are rhetorical questions, but they
exemplify very well the danger of lowering the intensity of discourse in
pursuit of marketing. The end never justifies the means. To let
ourselves be dragged in the opposite direction will turn us into some
kind of great publicity experts in marketing, but we will be useless as
agents of social transformation. When the smoke dissipates, we will not
have anything to offer because we will have given up everything to be
popular.
Martin Luther King stated the matter very well when he said:
On some positions cowardice asks the question, is it safe? Expediency
asks the question, is it politic? Vanity asks the question, is it
popular? But conscience asks the question, is it right? And there comes
a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic,
nor popular but he must take it because conscience tells him it is
right. [14]
There are times when it is necessary to do the right thing even if
initially it is not popular. Feminism, for example, has been a movement,
a struggle and very unpopular, for many years. In fact, it continues to
be in many significant environments, despite the efforts of women to not
give up space or conquests. Should feminists give themselves another
more popular, more acceptable name, so that men do not feel their
privileges to be threatened or their male pride offended? No. What they
do is quite the opposite: the more uncomfortable the name, the more
forcefully they claim it, they dispute the hegemony of meanings of those
who control the language and do not allow others to decide how they
should be called. Thanks to this vindication, there are many women who
come to approach a name that does not need to adapt to susceptible
sensibilities and does not renounce being what it is. It is still
ceaselessly repeated that to be a feminist is as bad as to be a
machista, that they are extremes that touch each other, that there is no
need to be one or the other. If feminists were to renounce the name,
they would lose a battle that goes beyond any formal consideration, they
would justify those who denigrate them and hand over to their opponents,
exclusive control over the narrative. The same applies to anarchists or
any other demonised group and/or demand.
On the other hand, there is the issue of honesty. I remember the
beginning of 15M [the 15 of May movement of 2011] in Las Palmas of the
Gran Canaria. Initially we were four anarchists who erupted into a quiet
camp with leaflets that cried out against the elections or the
possibility that parties demobilise the movement. The poor university
students who then had the leading voice did not have much of an idea of
what anarchism was, and those who knew of it, did not have the most
favourable views regarding it. On the first day, an assembly was held to
throw us out. Today I remember it with a big smile. That experience was
enough to stir things up, people with more political experience or with
more empathy towards the persecuted defended us, our adversaries would
rethink their supposed pluralism and their democratic convictions and
the majority would ask “what the fuck is this anarchy about?” In the
end, the results were surprising: many people stopped judging us by
their preconceived ideas and began to judge us by our actions; a few
days later, anarchists began to emerge from hiding, everyone was or had
been an anarchist but nobody dared to say it until we started the
commotion; unpoliticised people began to take an interest in our ideas,
to debate and to organise; many declared themselves anarchists without
being previously (a group of 4 isolated anarchists became a group of 20,
not counting supporters, with the ability to call demonstrations on
their own); in a public square, anarchism was spoken of, as perhaps it
had not been done in the Gran Canaria since the 1930s of the last
century; black flags began to be an identifiable symbol for people (to
think that the majority could speak of “mourning for democracy” [this is
quite true], that began to appear on posters and statements, as a call
to attract libertarians); the anarchists gave workshops or were involved
in the commissions and in the resolution of conflicts; there were
well-attended assemblies in which, without proposing it and to my
surprise, the libertarians were the majority; and so, in a few months,
the FAGC was born. There was another important factor: the anarchists
never hid the fact that they were anarchists, and rigthly or wrongly (I
still think it was correct), we decided not to interfere in the assembly
decisions collectively (there were no previous agreements on any common
position in the voting) so as to preserve the autonomy of the movement.
Other groups, on the contrary, especially those fishing politically,
tried to manipulate the assemblies quite clearly, vetoing proposals and
votes, or promoting votes in series, with strategic compulsive applause.
In the end people could perfectly identify if the Humanist Party, DRY
[Democracia Real Ya!], or whatever, was behind a proposal. The most
curious thing is that many of the members of the different collectives
or political parties did not openly identify as such, they mobilised
under collective slogans, but without making explicit their links or
affiliations. This generated some suspicion and animosity among many of
the assembled. Is that the tactic that anarchism should follow, that of
parachuting and infiltrating? I’ve always thought not. We do not have to
be naive. When we declared ourselves to be anarchists, the people from
political parties, those who were there to make personal gains, aspiring
journalists, those who were tied to institutions or those who sought to
turn 15M into a party, they never stopped attacking us and trying to
block or even sabotage any initiative launched by the anarchists. People
can be influenced and manipulated, but not everyone and not all of the
time. If the boycott of political parties could work when demonstrations
without flags were called, and when they appeared, they were booed or
taken down, these same people who protested were asking us for advice on
what to do in case of arrest and celebrated with us when we blocked
evictions with human walls, and when we solved the internal problems of
coexistence in the encampment without resorting to the police, or when
we resisted with our bodies the eviction of the Plaza de San Telmo.
Finally, these same people, regardless of the fear that politicians
tried to instill against us, approved by majority, without any
orientation other than common sense, the proposal for the organisation
of 15M that was based on the libertarian principles, laid out by a
libertarian.[15] Discovering that the anarchists could not only stir
things up, but also build, propose and reason, opened the eyes of many
people, regardless of the weight of violent legends and the decades of
television news, which had shaped their judgments. Based on close
contact with us, they stopped evaluating us by what they had heard and
began to value us for our activity.
Is it better to save all this and not have to break down initial
prejudices? I do not think so. The more we hide that we are anarchists,
the more those prejudices will fester. People are not stupid and as soon
as they begin to link our proposals with certain ideological currents
they will begin to define us and may feel cheated. The contact will have
already brought down the prejudice, but not necessarily the suspicion
before a group of people who need to watch out for, as if ashamed of it,
what underlies proposals that speak of mutual aid, action without
intermediaries, no leaders, staying independent of parties and
institutions. On the other hand, that tension that I have described in
the previous paragraph is necessary. It is important to remove the
hornet’s nest, that people face their fears and preconceived ideas, that
they have to question what they have been taught and deconstruct what
they have learned. Not every provocation is gratuitous and foolish;
there are those that are well reasoned and that have strategic purposes.
In any case, we deceive ourselves: the important thing is what we do,
that is what will condition the opinion that people have about us, about
our ideas and about how we define ourselves.
The essential thing is that anarchist practices abandon their isolated
spaces and that their discourse turn its back on hyper-rhetoric. Mutual
aid must be seen on the ground and in the struggle against evictions;
illegality must stop being a fantasy and must be practiced on the picket
lines and in the socialisation of housing; direct action should be used
when organizing with neighbors, workers, the unemployed, the indigent
and the persecuted. And for this, it is not necessary to stop defining
oneself as anarchists; quite the opposite. People are underestimated
when we take their rejection for granted. Many neighbors pass over the
term, or do not know it or do not care. Those who a priori are against
it, offer a magnificent opportunity to debate, to confront their beliefs
with the reality of the practice, to demonstrate that we have to learn
to forget what we have been taught. And maybe we get a surprise and we
find ourselves with one or two voices happy to be reunited with us, that
remind us of what we read about of 1936 or what happened in 1968, and
who pressure us to be up to the task. The experience I have described
with 15M shows that saving a name does not serve to reduce the distance
with people without a specific ideology, quite the opposite. Defining
one’s sensitivity serves to galvanize resistances and to magnetise those
who are seeking just what we are offering. I repeat that it will be our
actions that define us and our anarchist ideas. If we are effective,
decisive and practical, our anarchism will be useful and people will
adopt the tool without the need for proselytising. If we are charlatans,
incapable and abstract, our anarchism will be useless and people will
despise it without caring what Tele 5 says.
In our militant activity in housing, defining ourselves as anarchists
has never been a problem for us. As I said before, most people do not
know the term nor its connotations (at least in the Canary Islands, and
this for many years now). People want solutions to the problems that are
overwhelming them, and when those solutions are achieved with anarchist
weapons, those are the weapons strapped on the waist or held between the
teeth, without caring for other considerations. When your social work is
efficient and offers positive results, people associate your anarchism
with immediacy and realism. That is the basis of everything. When you
continue working along that line, presenting yourself as an anarchist
can even be an advantage. People who come to your assemblies or who
contact you, first seek information on the Internet or ask their
neighbors. When your speech and your achievements speak for themselves,
and when in each working-class neighborhood there is someone who in turn
knows someone whose cousin, sister or sister-in-law received help from
your collective to stop their eviction or to get housing, the term
anarchist begins to open doors for you. We have reached out to
communities that were to be victims of massive eviction, where they
received us worse when they thought we were coming from a political
party or platform, than when they learned that we were anarchists.
Neighbours who looked at us suspiciously when they thought we were from
Podemos, have opened the doors of their houses when they discovered that
we were those FAGC kids who created squat communities, that we stopped
the eviction of entire buildings and that we had been arrested and
tortured for it. In the end, the term anarchist can be prestigious and
serve as a beautiful letter of introduction. It is only necessary that
your actions be up to the task.
Then there is the excuse that the term is old and worn. What words have
been more used than equality or freedom, manipulated and directed
against their own defenders? Do we renounce them? Do we give them
definitively up for lost and deliver them over to power? Socialism,
self-management, autonomy and a long et cetera are terms that can also
be accused of being anachronistic and outdated. Should we reactualise
them with new practices or should we allow our enemies to appropriate
them, to reinvent them in twisted ways, or to cast them into the
cesspool of history? On the other hand, anarchism is hardly exhausted
when its practices are more necessary than ever in neighborhoods and
when they take on living forms every time a human community decides to
rebel and chooses the libertarian model to organize informally. Perhaps
this is the most alarming: after a last decade of political discredit,
of disbelief in political parties, we now debate whether to abandon the
word anarchist, when perhaps there has been no better moment to exploit
it. We allow confidence in the institutions to be rebuilt with recycled
political parties, we let patriotism, especially the Spanish one,
re-identify the people with the State and all this while we renounce our
discourse, beginning with the name. To renounce the term means to give
it up so that others may say what it is and what it is not, without any
resistance on our part. If you do not vindicate your anarchism nor
define it, for fear of being unpopular or misunderstood, others will
define it, and define you, at their convenience. And that empty space
will be occupied by power, always willing to extend its tentacles into
vacant spaces. And if power does not do it, the opportunists will do it.
In the Gran Canaria, we once again verified the need to define ourselves
as anarchists, without subterfuge or euphemisms, just when we began to
intervene on the housing front. At first, out of modesty with regards to
our own role, we did not claim as our own the evictions that we stopped
or the homes we expropriated. We talked about assemblies and of the
people in movement, which was true and very honest on our part, but of
the activity of the anarchists, who had prepared and organised the
action, we said nothing. It was in this way, due to our abandonment and
inhibition, that platforms that had not been in the pickets claimed in
the media to have paralysed the evictions of people that they did not
know or whom they had refused to help (because they were rent cases,
squatters or for personal reasons). This is how we arrived at proposing
squatting as if following the model of subcontracting or outsourcing,
with us doing the dirty work and running all the risks, while other
groups publicly claimed the action and wore the medals. We therefore
came to the conclusion that if we did not publicly claim our work as
anarchists, it would be others who would do it in our place. And it was
not a question of ego or primogeniture, of name and labels; it was a
matter of substance. If we were silent, the same work that had been done
by mobilising inhabitants of neighbourhoods, organised through
assemblies in which migrants, indigents and squatters participated, at
the margins of any institution of power, without subsidies, without any
kind of institutional assistance, in opposition to the law and private
property, based on relations of mutual aid and solidarity from below,
would be claimed by people who were no-name representatives of certain
political parties, who treated the evicted as “users” who could be
charged for the help given, who defended the laws and the rule of law,
who fraternised with the police and colluded with institutions of
authority and who did not intend to question the foundations of the
capitalist world. The same act, to stop an eviction or help in a
relocation, could be claimed on the basis of very different premises and
values, denouncing or defending totally opposed interests, either
assuming a challenge to the System, or concerned to merely repair its
excesses. Behind the name, there was much more than the name.
In conclusion, every time we renounce being what we are, hiding it
openly, so as not to scandalise, to frighten, to generate alarm, we
limit ourselves a little, retreating into the Procrustean bed of
convenience, lowering the discourse, moderating the demands, sweetening
the content, softening the program. Each time we cede more and more
ground, handing over more and more space, until we have nothing left.
And so it happens, until one day you look back and discover the sea
behind you. What matters are the facts, these are the foundations of the
most humble revolutionary shantytown. But the facts need to be
represented and vindicated, because otherwise, as I have already
explained, they will be absorbed by the enemy. And to represent them,
hollow names or straw letters are not enough; we need clear concepts,
forceful ideas, sharp terms that cut like axes. What needs to be done is
to think them through, otherwise, in the end, for fear, complexes, a bad
sense of strategy, we will have handed over the narrative, the meaning,
the verb and the word … And we are not strong enough to afford to give
anything up.
…
[1] Yo veo mamĂferos.
MamĂferos con nombres extrañĂsimos.
Han olvidado que son mamĂferos
y se creen obispos, fontaneros,
lecheros, diputados. ÂżDiputados?
I see mammals
Mammals with the strangest of names.
They have forgotten that they are mammals
and believe themselves to be bishops, plumbers,
milkmen, political representatives. Representatives?
“Yo veo mamĂferos” (JesĂşs Lizano, Novios, mamĂferos y caballitos, 2005).
[2] One of the first written records of the term is offered by Aeschylus
in The Seven against Thebes (467 BC) where he puts into Antigone’s: “I
am not ashamed to act in defiant in opposition to the governors of the
city.”
[3] Pierre-Joseph Proudhon seems to have been the first to have so
defined himself, in his work, What is property? (1840).
[4] Quoted by Carlos DĂaz in the prologue to La Moral Anarquista by
Kropotkin, 1978 edition.
[5]
R. Rocker, “¿Por qué soy anarquista?” (El Pensamiento de Rudolf Rocker,
anthology compiled by Diego Abad de Santillán), 1982.
[6] Quoted by L.L. Blaisdell, The Desert Revolution, 1962. In the same
work, other recommendations by MagĂłn are cited that insist on the same
approach: “Everything is reduced to a mere question of tactics. If from
the beginning we call ourselves anarchists, very few will listen to us.
[…] In order not to have everyone against us, we will continue the same
tactic that has given us such good results. We will continue calling
ourselves liberals during the revolution, but in reality we will
continue spreading anarchy and executing anarchic acts.”
[7] “Tarrida, speaking in French with me, used the terms: anarchy
without qualification and pure and simple anarchy; in 1908, in the
reprinting of his essay, he proposed, following Ferrer (in 1906 or
1907), to renounce the word anarchy, which the public interprets too
negatively, and to speak of libertarian socialism.” (M. Nettlau, La
anarquĂa a travĂ©s de los tiempos, 1933).
[8] “Half-hearted anarchist, liberal and not LIBERTARIAN, you demand
free exchange for cotton and other trifles and advocate systems of
protection for man against women in the circulation of human passions;
he cries out against the high barons of capital and wants to rebuild the
high barony of man over the vassal woman; philosopher with glasses, sees
man through the magnifying glass and the woman by the contrary; thinker
affected by myopia, he can not distinguish more than what one eye can
see in the present or in the past, and can not discover anything of what
is above or in the distance, the prospect of the future: you are a
cripple!” (J. Déjacque, De l’être-humain mâle et femelle, carta de mayo
de 1857).
[9] See: P. Kropotkin, La Gran RevoluciĂłn (1789-1793), 1909.
[10] In the Republic, Plato puts into the mouth of Socrates: “[Among the
defects of a young man are] pride, anarchy, debauchery and shamelessness
[…]. Ah, dear, in such conditions anarchy will penetrate into the
families and it will end up even infusing itself in the beasts. The
custom is born in the father that his children are his peers, and to
fear the children, and the children acquire the habit of being similar
to the father, to the point that they neither respect nor fear their
parents to attest to their their condition of free men. This is how the
foreigner and the citizen are equated, and the citizen and the
foreigner; and the same happens with the slave.”
[11]
J. Bentham, Anarchist fallacies, 1796. This is a libel against the
Declaration of the rights of Man and the Citizen approved during the
French Revolution. The title says everything.
[12] “The nature of anarchy has not been sufficiently understood. It is
certainly a great calamity, but it is less horrible than despotism.” (W.
Godwin, InvestigaciĂłn sobre la justicia polĂtica, 1793).
[13] “In the current state of society, commerce, delivered over to the
most complete anarchy, without direction, without facts, without a point
of view and without principle, is essentially speculative.” (Proudhon,
De la capacidad polĂtica de la clase obrera, 1865).
[14] M.L. King, A proper sense of priorities, speech given on the 6th of
February of 1968.
[15] The model can still be found online:
https://laspalmas.tomalaplaza.net/2011/08/08/propuesta-para-la-organizac...