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Title: To Start Over Author: Avis de TempĂŞtes Date: Summer 2018 Language: en Topics: autonomy, affinity, insurrectionary, Avis de TempĂŞtes, The Local Kids, The Local Kids #1 Source: Translated for The Local Kids, Issue 1 Notes: First appeared as Recommencer in Avis de tempĂŞtes (Bulletin anarchiste pour la guerre sociale), Issue 1, January 2018
To start over, always. That is the prospect, which can seem kind of
tragic, of all those who are at war against this world of infinite
horrors. Along the way some fall under the blows, others don’t resist
the siren-song that calls to resign oneself and get back in line, some
even make an outright U-turn. The others, that persist in fighting –
with ups and downs – have to find strength and determination to start
over again each time. However, on second thought, the tragedy is not to
start over, to start from scratch, but to abandon and to betray oneself.
Conscience, always individual, can be a heavy burden to carry and
becomes cruel when one betrays it without having enough anaesthetics at
one’s disposal. This world doesn’t lack anaesthetics, and even distils
them at will. A little alternative career for your own good, Sundays to
marvel at a natural park, a humanitarian or cultural project. Even
harder drugs; screens of all varieties, virtual reality and
relationships, a total stupor. No, such a prospect frightens us more
than all the distress, than all the difficulties connected to the
failure to destroy authority.
So, to start over. To sharpen conscience in a world that has taken aim
at it by launching its deadly poisons at it. Because what is
accommodation, resignation and submission other than the quenching of
one’s conscience, justified – or not – by the conditions we’re all mired
in? “They are too strong”, “people are too stupid”, “surviving is
already too hard”, “it’s too far from my nest” are some of the classics.
So, to sharpen conscience, means also to redevelop a taste for ideas
that allow us to see, to distinguish more clearly the contours of those
that pour cement on freedom. And, at the same time, to open up horizons
so as to be able to look – even if only a peak – beyond the walls and
the antennas, beyond the prisons and the laboratories, beyond the
massacres and the soldiers. Ideas are not bought in supermarkets and are
not deepened on the internet. It is each individual that appropriates
them step by step till cherishing them, and that defends them also
through thick and thin. Above all so in our times when democratic,
mercantile and technological totalitarianism aspires to eliminate each
fervour, to install slaveries and dependencies even more deceptive.
Somehow it is the most important treasure of the anarchist; the
conviction that there is no compromise possible between freedom and
authority, that they exclude each other, always and everywhere.
Thousands of institutions, organizations, ideologies try to destroy this
treasure. As well a state that drowns in blood the – at last roused –
cries of yesterdays oppressed, as the technocrat who talks about freedom
to design a technological system that expands every day its hold to the
four corners of the earth. As well the next leaders who seek to call the
shots of a movement of anger, as the clever acrobat of rhetoric who
tries hard to remove all significance of the attacks carried out against
this world. If we talk about starting over, it is to express our will to
take up – once more – the deepening of our ideas, to make them toxic for
all the authoritarians who try to approach them, and stimulating for all
the lovers of freedom who embrace them. It is to start over again –
inside contexts which are born to us and which have changed a lot over
the last years – to elaborate our lifelong anarchist project; to destroy
oppression and exploitation. Over time, as we plunge into it, other
experiences will arise, other attempts, other defeats. All of them are
part of our baggage, our heritage if you will, that – instead of making
us sink into a dark melancholy – can reinforce us to rebuild an
individual and collective project of freedom, a revolutionary
perspective. Certainly, it is impossible to avoid errors, to not find
oneself at times in a dead-end, to not be shipwrecked in the stormy
seas, but these failures are an integral part of our journeys. Like that
anarchist from the beginning of the 20th century said: “We move with
ardour, with strength, with pleasure in such a determined way because
we’re conscious of having done everything and being prepared to do
everything for it to be the right direction. We give study the biggest
care, the biggest attention and we give to action the biggest energy.
(…) To precipitate our course, we don’t need mirages of an imminent goal
within reach. It suffices us to know that we’re moving… and that, if
sometimes we reach a stalemate, we don’t get lost.”
But ideas alone are not enough for us. To know that authority is our
enemy, and that all who embody it is a target, from politicians to cops,
from technocrats to officers, from capitalists to supervisors, from
priests to snitches, is one thing. To project oneself into the necessary
destruction of the social relations, the structures and the networks
that allow them to exist, is something else. The communicating vessels
of idea and action are at the heart of anarchism. So that ideas don’t
wither, you need actions to invigorate them. So that actions don’t go
round in circles, you need ideas to animate them. Ideas to corrode the
mind-sets of obedience, the ideologies and submission. Actions to
destroy the structures and persons of domination. And if it is always
the time to act, to strike what exploits and oppresses, acting cannot be
a simple conditioned reflex. It cannot be content with responding
(re-acting) on a case by case basis with rage and vigour. So that acting
really becomes to act – in a revolutionary and anarchist perspective –
the initiative has to be ours, in an offensive that starts from our
individualities, our imaginations, our analyses and our determination.
Because to act is not a given and it doesn’t fall out of the sky,
reflecting on how to act is indispensable. It is for this reason we have
to bring again to the table the question of projectuality, our
autonomous capacity to project ideas and actions directly into the field
of the enemy. Waiting for “the people” - that hollow abstraction, here
to substitute the deceased proletariat – to become conscious and to
desire freedom, endeavouring to “educate”, doesn’t befit us. Not only
because it wouldn’t work, but also because such a perspective is now
totally obsolete (if it hasn’t already been always) in the face of a
constant bombardment of minds and senses by domination. To advance
gradually, struggle by struggle, social movement by social movement,
towards the big moment where everything finally converges to announce
the total upheaval, doesn’t suit us neither. If in every revolt against
what is imposed upon us, is always dormant the potential of a challenge
to everything beyond its starting point, too many checks, repetitions,
channelling are at work inside this kind of social movements to prevent
the dykes bursting and the unknown of subversion opening up.
That leaves us with – forgive us for going a bit fast – the possibility
to act as anarchists, on our own. But in order to go much further than
ourselves. Striking back is a basis, to elaborate a projectuality to not
only strike, but also to destroy the dykes of domination is an extension
more than desirable. It is here that we enter again the spheres of
insurrection; the perspective of making the dykes burst, of unleashing
the evil passions as another said, of opening a rupture in time to
strike more crushingly against the state and capital. Evidently there
are no recipes for insurrection, in spite of the veiled calls of modern
Leninists – recycling under less patched-up costumes the old recipe of
the seizure of power (this time from the bottom-up). But having no
recipes doesn’t prevent us from reflecting on, putting to the test and
exploring anti-authoritarian hypotheses; from a struggle against a
specific project of authority to an autonomous intervention during a
bout of social fever, from the paralyses of infrastructures that allow
the daily reproduction of wage slavery to the bold and sudden upheaval
against an enemy in the midst of a restructuring with an uncertain
outcome. To experiment in one’s own life these insurrectionary
hypotheses on anarchist bases, even on a small scale (our own), takes us
in any case far away from the tedious barracks of militancy, the same
old guesswork about what “the people” think or not, about what “the
milieu” does or doesn’t do, far from the expectation of the next social
movement, and so on and so forth. That means taking yourself the
initiative of attack following your own approach and itinerary.
Conceiving of an insurrectionary and anarchist perspective leads us
necessarily to the question of how to organize ourselves to advance on
such a path. That labour unions, also the more or less libertarian, will
not be appropriate instruments is rather obvious. Certainly so in the
current times where old “communities” based on work have been neatly
severed and dissolved by the advances of capital. The same goes for the
formal anarchist organizations; with their branches, congresses,
resolutions and initials. Maybe less evident is the fact that big
assemblies (that are adorned with the adjective “horizontal”) are also
inappropriate. We’re not denying the importance of open and contrary
discussions inside struggles and revolts, and so the eventual interest
to take part in them, but anarchists shouldn’t confine themselves to
participating in these moments of exchange, but also organize themselves
outside of them. The best element to ensure the communicating vessels
between ideas and actions, to formulate a real autonomy of action, is
the affinity between individuals; mutual understanding, shared
perspectives, willingness to act. Next, to develop more incisiveness, to
expand possibilities, to elaborate a vaster projectuality, to coordinate
efforts, to lend support to potentially crucial moments; there can grow
between the affinity constellations – always depending on the
necessities of a project – an informal organization. Meaning
self-organized, without name, without delegation, without
representation… And to be clear: informal organizations are also
multiple, according to objectives. The informal method doesn’t aspire to
bring all anarchists together in a single constellation, but makes it
possible to multiply coordinations, informal organizations, affinity
groups. Their encounter can happen on the terrain of a concrete
proposal, hypothesis or a precise projectuality. That makes all the
difference between an informal organization with necessarily “vague and
subterranean” outlines (so without being in search of the spotlights),
and other types of fighting organizations for whom the most important is
almost always the affirmation of their existence in the hope of
influencing the events, giving indications on the path to take, being a
force that is part of the power equilibrium. Informal organization
projects oneself elsewhere: avoiding the attention of the guard dogs of
domination, it exists only in the facts it fosters. In short, it doesn’t
have a name to defend or assert, only a project to bring about. An
insurrectionary project.
So that is where we start over from. In this day and age where revolts
hardly erupt and are more on the defensive than on the offensive, where
war moves in parallel with the technological caging of the world, where
the control grid closes in on everyone and so also on anarchists, where
the adherence of a lot of oppressed to the system is – as always – the
best defence domination can arm itself with, we persist in wanting to
propagate our ideas of freedom through a struggle without compromise
with authority. Outside the well-trodden paths, by affinity and informal
organization, conscious of the necessity of social revolution regardless
if it seems close-by or far-away, to transform fundamentally the social
relations on which this authoritarian society relies. To propagate ideas
and echoes of destructive attacks against the structures and persons
that embody oppression and exploitation, so as to open up
insurrectionary horizons.