Today's Topics:
1. freedom news: Reflections on Anarchist Organising -- In his
latest column, Jon Bigger reflects on grassroots anarchist
organising. (pt) (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
2. alas barricadas: Against the social pact of the salary
misery -- Trade Union Confederation of Workers Solidarity (ca)
[machine translation] (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
3. alas barricadas: Towards a feminist strike on March 8 (ca,
it) [machine translation] (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
4. FOR THE EFFECTIVENESS OF POWER SUPPLY IN THE AREA OF THE
POLITICAL by Anarchist Collectivity "Circle of Fire" [APO] (gr)
[machine translation] (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
5. Black and Red #1 Anarchist Political Review December 2017 By
APO (gr) [machine translation] (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
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Message: 1
Living on a university campus means I come into contact with lots of people interested in
politics for the first time. Some have never heard of anarchism and others have a very
slim knowledge of what it is. It's slightly different from meeting and discussing
anarchism with people in their mid 20s onwards, who think they do know what anarchism is
and are waiting to have a nice long discussion where they try to prove you wrong. ---- The
anarchism conversation is the pits with the second group of people. They've already formed
their prejudices but instead of just saying "I think you're wrong", they open a
conversation seemingly interested in what you believe and why. It doesn't matter how you
respond. They've decided. "People are too selfish for anarchism to work" they say. "But
that's why we need anarchism", you insist. "We need a system that prevents the selfish
from having power and wealth beyond their fair share". This doesn't satisfy them and they
spend what feels like hours explaining to you the way human nature proves that you're
wrong. Or maybe I've been meeting the wrong people.
The first group on the other hand can be much more receptive. I've recently been involved
with a group set up horizontally and focused on collective decision making a direct
democracy. We meet to discuss action, we carry the action out and we meet to assess the
efficacy of the action before planning the next activity. Whilst there are two or three
regulars in the group who call themselves anarchists the main body of the group are just
there because of the issue we face. The fact that it's organised along anarchist
principles though has started to gain some interest within the group and people have
started to ask questions in a genuinely interested way.
People have started to share books and pamphlets on anarchist organising. "I can't believe
these ideas aren't more well-known", someone said the other day, starting a conversation
on non-hierarchical groups. This then leads to a discussion about terms like ‘solidarity'
and ‘equality' and ‘horizontalism'. As we carry out our direct action we talk about
anarchism both as an end result and as a day to day activity.
We reach the conclusion that there is no end result. Anarchism as a day to day way of life
starts in the here and now and never ceases. It is the continual challenging of power and
authority. We can reach what we might see as some form of anarchist system and society but
we must accept that the process of revolutionary change may never end. We will always need
to be ready to challenge hierarchy whenever it starts to solidify or be recreated. We
cannot assume that a system will prevent power becoming solidified without active
participation from individuals and groups.
In a direct democratic system it may be necessary to challenge those that are delegated
responsibilities and temporary powers for example. In a communal economic system it may be
necessary to actively secure equality if people amass more than their fair share of
wealth, food or housing. The idea of building organisations within our current society
that can supersede the old ones once they are made redundant means that as we practice
anarchism we create the future, no matter how far off that may feel or how many arguments
or schisms exist in the movement itself.
The crucial thing about these experiments is that we do not need to convert everyone to
anarchism. The group I'm in is made up of people focused on a specific goal. That goal
intersects with other groups and so a network is slowly emerging based on mutual aid and
solidarity actions. As more people get involved and see the value of this method of
organising I'm seeing people develop skills that will help them transfer to other groups.
They will recognise and be able to act in other groups composed the same way.
Sometimes the most revolutionary we can be is to start with the things closest to us. Some
of the big problems of the world seem so far away we feel helpless to change them. But by
starting small and local we might just make a little difference. We might also interact
with other people making small differences in our area and suddenly we see meaningful change.
In reflecting back over 2017 I can't help but feel a little sad and overwhelmed. The
challenges are huge and sometimes I feel we tread water just to drift downstream. I feel
despondent at the state of the movement and the bust ups that flare up between groups
within it. When I look at the small things though, the manageable and controllable things
nearby I can see the difference I and others make, together. Success isn't a large protest
with lots of publicity. Success can be lots of small but positive outcomes that really
change lives. One of the outcomes we must seek is in spreading the word about our values
and ways of organising to people who don't know what anarchism is. For me, doing that
positively, by example, has been one of the best lessons of the past year.
https://freedomnews.org.uk/reflections-on-anarchist-organising/
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Message: 2
We live in a country where salaries have risen by 5% in the last ten years, while prices
have risen by 13.7%, which means that wages have lost more than 8% in the last decade. of
purchasing power. Actually we have lowered wages with the excuse of the crisis. And this
does not mean that the part of the national income held by the capitalists has been
increased: one in two euros of the new growth will be remunerated to the capital. With the
crisis have lost 30,000 million in wages but profits have increased by 14,000 million. The
working class loses purchasing power and average wages have been stagnating since 2011:
the effect sought with the labor reforms approved by socialists and the popular in 2010
and 2012. ---- And it is in this context that the majority unions, the employers and the
government throw the bells on the fly with the announcement of a deferred and conditioned
rise in the Minimum Interprofessional Salary for the coming years. The rise is 4% for
2018, 5% for 2019 and 10% for 2020. But, although it may seem the opposite to the
uncontrolled euphoria of the bureaucracies of CCOO and UGT, this measure is nothing more
than a tremendous deceitful limited. And it is for the following reasons:
-The increase is legally conditioned to GDP increases of over 2.5% in the coming years and
450,000 new jobs are created each year. The forecasts of increase of the GIP of the
European Union and of the Government for 2019 are below those amounts and, in the case of
2018, they move in that same limit (between 2,3 and 2,6 according to a report sent by the
Government to Brussels and 2.4% according to the Bank of Spain). This would leave without
effect the strongest increases, those of 2019 and 2020.
-The increase is not extended to salaries and public benefits that by collective agreement
or law, are referenced to the SMI.
-The possibility that the measure benefits all workers, transferring the increase in
remuneration to workers covered by the agreements, is very limited. Last year, despite the
rise of 8% in the SMI, the wages agreed in the agreement did not increase more than 1.4%,
and the average salaries total 0.4%. In any case, below inflation, which was 1.5%. The
latest labor reforms have dynamited collective bargaining, weakening the possibilities for
workers to advance in the agreements. And this is your result.
-The rise of the SMI for full-time workers leaves out of reach the growing mass of more
precarious workers, with part-time contracts for a few hours, temporary workers subjected
to the constant blackmail of the non-renewal of the contract, people forced to the
irregular economy, false self-employed workers, workers in training, etc.
And it is that the social scenario of this Spain at the beginning of the 21st century is
frightening: 14 million poor workers (who, despite having a job, can not get out of
poverty), since 201 more than 1.8 million households with all their members unemployed, a
coverage rate of unemployment benefit that does not reach 56% and a poverty rate of more
than 22% of the population. And, of course, attacks against the right to strike (such as
the recent ban on the strike of Barajas workers) and increased repression in the public
sphere, on the street and in jobs.
That is the legacy of the pacts of official and bureaucratic unionism with government and
employers in recent years: labor flexibility, cheap or free dismissal, widespread
precariousness, expansion of new forms of exploitation, physical insecurity and accidents,
poverty, social cuts ... thus, this deferred and conditioned increase of the SMI makes
them happy because it allows them to continue with this dynamic of the social pact, the
demobilization and the surrender that guarantees their status as interlocutors accepted by
the system. Of well-paid representatives of a working class that they have left behind.
They help the employers to manage the social conflict and, with agreements like this, they
wash their faces trying to pretend that they are doing something for the workers who feed
them.
And it is that workers can only expect good news from their own assembly and grassroots
self-organization. Combative unionism, which is nothing other than the form adopted in
many places by workers' cooperation with each other (rather than by the bureaucrats) to
fight and defend their own rights. From the base and from the fight. Trying to solve the
problems we have as a class, not by changing the name and embellish reality, but by
action. Direct action and organization.
From Solidaridad Obrera we call the workers to the struggle, to the organization, to the
construction of union alternatives and not to be deceived by the siren songs of the
pseudo-bureaucratic unionism, the bosses and the governments. Faced with discouragement,
action. Facing impotence, organization. Facing the lies of the system and its
spokespersons, cooperation and solidarity. Together we are strong.
The struggle is the only way.
Trade Union Confederation of Workers Solidarity
Madrid, December 27, 2017
http://alasbarricadas.org/noticias/node/39431
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Message: 3
From the feminist movement, we made the decision to initiate a process that will lead us
to a women's strike on March 8, 2018. Fleeing from the prototypical strike model, we want
to go beyond the strike model, we propose the need to stop all women, at all levels, care
strike, consumer strike and labor strike. Because we understand that the world does not
work without us, but that we are not only exploited in the world of work, our care is
necessary to keep millions of people, our consumption marks the daily life of the markets
in the neighborhoods, therefore, we want to stop it everything and demonstrate to the
world, to governments, to society: that we are essential. ---- And as we want to stop
everything, we want to stop all, from the intersectionality, understanding the different
realities that cross us, migrants, students, bolleras, journalists, cooks, housewives,
trans, autonomous, artists, doctors, lawyers, diverse , we want to be able to stop all, we
need to be all of them. We understand that building and organizing a strike is a long
process, in which we want to be all women, of all the vital and material realities, in
order to make the process to strike, a process as diverse and inclusive as possible.
We understand that March 8 is important, but more important still, the process we are
carrying out to reach that day, feminists of all realities, from different places, of
different thoughts, we are united against patriarchy and willing to give the battle to
build better lives.
This is how the proposal is explained by the initial promoters of this strike. This comes
from the 8M Commission of Madrid , which has more than 50 feminist groups, about 150
activists and different commissions: extension, communication, content, legal-union, ...
It meets on the 8th of each month and can be written to comision8mmadrid@gmail.com to
receive the calls.
The mobilization is preceded by the women's strike in 1975 in Iceland, but especially the
women's strike in Poland on October 3, 2016 against the Abortion Law and the arrests of
the same month in Latin America and Italy in response to femicides under the motto Not one
less, live we love each other and known as Black Monday . The movements of different
countries quickly coordinated to convene an International Women's Stoppage on March 8,
2017, which aspired to go one step beyond the traditional demonstrations of that day.
This explains the reasons for the next strike:
We propose to stop to claim our sovereignty and our right to have control over our lives.
We want to denounce the patriarchal precariousness that crosses us vitally, that violates
us in our day to day life, and that prevents us from fully developing in our lives.
Therefore, we intend to address the feminist strike based on four axes:
- Labor: we want to stop in our workplaces, because patriarchy and capital form a criminal
alliance, which, through the sexual division of labor, condemns us to precarious jobs,
worse paid, unpaid, invisible and illegal. We suffer a salary gap of 23%, compatibility
only applies to us, workplace harassment is a daily reality in our work, the glass ceiling
prevents us from progressing. We demand that the gender perspective be applied in our
labor agreements and that the wage gap be eliminated, that our work be respected and
dignified.
- Student: we also want to stop in our classrooms to demand a public, secular and feminist
and quality education. We receive an education with patriarchal content, where we are
hidden from women, however, we are not an exception, we are the constant that has been
silenced. Our classrooms are not safe spaces where we express ourselves freely, we receive
a sex education marked by heteronorm and that does not take into account the feminine
pleasure. For all these reasons, we demand that a training be promoted with feminist
curricula in which the gender perspective is mainstreamed in all disciplines. We also want
our right to an affective and sexual education free of heteropatriarchal and normative
stereotypes to be respected. A sexual education that educates us in diversity, without
fears, without complexes and without reducing us to objects.
- Care: we want to stop so that the care does not only fall on us. Women are obliged to be
carers, as something inherent to our gender. Our reproductive work is rendered invisible
and devalued by the system, as it is a work that only belongs to the field of women. The
contradiction capital - life drowns us in our day to day. We are the ones who constantly
take care of our families, couples, co-workers, friends, all those who revolve around us.
The system would collapse without our daily care work. We want to stop caring but, on the
other hand, we also want to claim care in themselves, make them visible, raise awareness
around them, in order to redistribute them and prevent them from falling entirely on us,
- Consumption: women manage a good part of consumption, especially domestic consumption,
and we want to assert our collective strength as consumers. We are constantly bombarded by
sexist advertising specifically directed towards us, which subjects us to gender
stereotypes, with which feminists are determined to break. To do this, we must not only
consider the cessation of consumption, but also build an alternative consumption that
respects our rights and our lives. We want to stop consuming to show that without us the
markets of our neighborhoods, towns and cares will not work, there will be no
fruit-makers, there will be no butchers and there will be no consumers.
Aware of the difficulties to realize a mobilization of these proportions, organizing the
strike began as early as May 2017. Although the initiative is mainly in Madrid, it has
quickly spread to other localities creating different territoriale assemblies s that
generate their own spaces with objective of working the Feminist Strike from the local,
provincial or autonomous. In September there was a meeting in Elche of the feminist
movements that had already started the process of convocation and where they decided to
create a structure of state coordination.
The number of feminist assemblies for the preparation of the strike is growing rapidly.
There are only two months until March 8, but there is still time to join the organization
and make March 8 a historic day for women's rights.
Web: hacialahuelgafeminista.org
Facebook: Feminist Strike
Twitter: @HuelgaFeminista
Hashtag: #HaciaLaHuelgaFeminist
http://alasbarricadas.org/noticias/node/39406
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Message: 4
On November 14th, a group of people locked the doors of the Polytechnic University
forbidding entry into hundreds of people and imposing controls even on primary school
children who visited the same morning. It decided and ordered the prohibition of "party
and political organizations" in the Polytechnic and the presence of
anarchist-anti-authoritarian societies in the way they choose, as they themselves admit in
their text. (" The general attitude of saying that comrades and comrades with their
political organizations / collectives would not come in, which was not our main point and
was not in the communication, meant practically not to put a table and not to have
occupied political body ", from the text after the evaporation of" occupation "
As anarchists, we are struggling for the social and classical emancipation that goes
through the broad outreach to the social and class oppressed. We promote the organization
of the downstream social, class, and political organizations of the base so that our
society and our class are not the state and capital, so that they are not the struggling
and the suffocating social base of the hopes of aspiring "saviors and redeemers ". Based
on this reasoning, we find ourselves in the struggles - and each year as a college in the
Polytechnic - and these ideas are promoted in the way we choose without giving anyone the
right to impose our will, whether it be a party or a snippet .it meant the redemption of
the insurgency, hierarchy, and "hurrying" rebellion ) that we riding on our imaginary
horses will release us.
In the past, we have often encountered aspiring Polytechnic rulers and the rebels of the
rebellion, sometimes even larger and smaller, who, whenever they attempted to enforce,
exploited as a value the use of the 1973 Uprising, while practically pursuing the
exclusion of all and the consolidation of their own sovereignty. And we have given along
with many other battles against repression and party armies to keep the Polytechnic an
open space for thousands, who each year and with different starting points visit it to
remember and honor, to inspire and draw from the contents of the '73 Revolution.
Besides, the message of that rebellion is not a historical fossil, but it continued to
inspire the struggles in the years of the post-conflict, symbolizing the refusal of peace,
assimilation and capitulation. The Polytechnic became a space of meeting social, class and
political subjects over time, a field of collectivization of resistance through
assemblies, occupations, conflicts with the forces of repression. Facts that sometimes
sparked, and sometimes participated in these anarchists, such as the seizure of the 1990s
against the acquittal of the cop, Melista, for the assassination of M. Kalteza, the
1991-92 school disorder, the occupation of '94 after the invasion of the police in all the
occupations of Athens and the arrests of anarchists in the Patission tables, the 1995
rebellion that began as an act of solidarity with the political prisoners and insurgents
of the Korydallos prison until December 2008 and a number of other smaller moments of
resistance marked the course of social and class struggles and became a reference point
for the radicalization of consciences. They have not only succeeded in sabotaging the
rhetoric of power that the Polytechnic symbolized bourgeois democracy and the tomb of the
insurrection, but they created breaches in the enforcement of social consensus, addressed
and mobilized wider social forces. The blatant counterfeiting and appropriation of these
struggles and rebellions, which are a collective field, to justify the rule of authority
over struggling people and the service of micropolitical feasibility is a blatant
blasphemy. Micro-political feasibility manifested through the ban on access to the
Polytechnic to anyone who did not accept the terms that set an occasional scam. With
declarations, which, among other things, were to reproduce a regime-inspired
"anti-political", which is the camouflage for the absolute domination of the disguised
political tactics, the otherwise supposedly "anti-political". The distortion and the
looseness of the anarchist liberation project in the case of a temporary group that
decides and orders, the transformation of the revolt into caricature, threats and bruises
to anyone who did not fit visually into the pause, the ban on entering the Polytechnic in
fighters who have given the their blood inside it, unfortunately, is not a thunderbolt in
the sky. it is considered by some almost self-evident the application of the basic
authority "authority": the power of the treaty strong towards those who, at times, find it
weak.
Not only is this enforcement not self-evident, but on the contrary it is not in any way
connected with us, and from our position in the anarchist struggle we have been fighting
it and we will always fight it. This imposition is the material expression of a deeply
antisocial, elitist and anti-genius perception, which, regardless of the phraseology it
uses, faces them from the bottom in the way that the ruling elites define. As "inferior"
and "insignificant", as values of use and followers of the plans of the chiefs and chiefs.
The movement is treated with the same hostility, for it is the only real obstacle to the
empowerment of the micro-rulers who, instead of the collective self-organization, want to
impose the "organization" of the feuds and gangs. The movement is open to the storm of
ideas and tendencies and not to submissive delusional plans. It is open to the thousands
who suffer under state and capitalist tyranny, and not to power, in order to impose its
so-called "acquire " . "Acquired" in the present came to the unthinkable point of taking
responsibility for the exclusion of anarchist collectivities from the Polytechnic (" For
this reason, the anarchists ' right to be considered as an acquis communautaire that in
the open occupations and actions one does not make the material of the organization's
policy or collectivity ");
The Polytechnic was and remains an area of the movement and not a whim of those who
define as leaders of anything, who will make an event, what characteristics it will have,
whether it will have a political presence and how it will be. Its character is the result
of the mobilization and the presence of too many, which some unlikely elitists of
misfortune discredit as "sheep". Our presence there has been won, thanks to the
contribution and struggle of thousands, which no one has the right to eliminate or impose
on face control, as a prerequisite for their presence there accepting any "conditions"
that they have decided 15 among themselves. (" In practice it meant that anyone who wanted
could be enough to respond to two political terms"The fact that the repressive army of the
MATs will very hardly invade this area, that it is possible to hold assemblies and events
there, that it is a refuge and a base for fighters is largely due to this massive racing
stock, and certainly not in 10 rails or in the "contribution" of those who are imagined to
use it to exclude those who are not like their faces.
As a collectivity, we have remained in the field outside the Polytechnic, where for years
we have been promoting disinformation material during the three-day period. The supposed
"occupation", as expected, not only did not live the Polytechnic, but it was during its
duration that the life and massiveness of the space remained after decades of crap by
party mechanisms. The clipping replaced the multiple-party cowboy line - which was forced
through races not to exclude those who did not drive - with the line of a single crap that
excludes those who did not.
In this treaty on Thursday, November 16, after a call for the "Classical Anti-Attack -
anarchist-communist group", a concentration took place at the Exarchia Square, which moved
to the Polytechnic and hundreds entered it from the gate of Stournari Street . The alleged
"occupation" simply disappeared, under the weight of its inability to assemble anything
beyond exclusion. As soon as this blockade ceased to exist, the "occupation" ceased to
exist, which evaporated when the self-evident occurred, when many comrades and comrades
were found in their "natural" space, simply indifferent to the fetaquas of the
"lock-cheer". This self-evident ability of comrades and comrades to be in the Polytechnic
has been questioned and "restricted". Without illusions about the overall state of the
movement (and its time-lagging substitution of its functions from the "space"), we can not
but see the presence of anarchists and fighters as a sine qua non in the Polytechnic. It
is not surprising, of course, the selective "vision" of the one who, in the hundreds,
"stood out" and made "recognizations" trying to connect the unconnected ones, nor do we
consider that the call for food and cigarettes also lacked the corresponding eyewear for
political myopia.
Ultimately, the so-called "antipolitics" consists in the political tactic of a particular
person who, through the failure of his attempt to create a monopoly business and ownership
of a space of struggle, aims and slander by continuing his desperate attempt to "focus" on
in every way, and above all through the constant challenge and the creation of
confrontational conditions, in a futile quest of a certain being. Exclusion, imposing
conditions, threats, "recognitions" are the manifestations of this effort to create
situations that are dangerous to the struggle, and in particular to provoke a conflict and
the attack on the people of the movement, which has been suggested and sought for a long
time. (from the same text:In addition, there were comrades who did not want the natural
conflict in the movement " ... that is, there were others who wanted it, something that
had become clear in a meeting of the day before). The ultimate objective of "occupation",
therefore, was simply to place an enemy dilemma on the movement itself. Or should he or
she have to accept the imposition or should take action in view of the expectation that
the situation will worsen . It is the quality of companions and companionships and their
refusal to join the "strong" logic that canceled both the acceptance of enforcement and
the expectation of rising.
And, obviously, the expectations of "rising up" and the failure of the anarchist struggle
can easily be recognized by state mechanisms, who can use to their advantage a treaty
created by those who speculate on the fetishism of violence, anti-social behavior , the
laxity of anarchist vision and practice. To exploit it in the direction of the suppression
of the anarchist movement - through the reproduction of the mesic caricature of
"alibiously violent and antisocial" - and its isolation from the social and classical
basis. They are therefore themselves solely responsible for the permanent undermining of
the struggle and its exploitation.
For our part, it goes without saying that even the hidden and hidden threats and
challenges touch us, nor will we ask for the permission of any bigman for our presence in
the Polytechnic and in any place of the social and class struggle, and we will continue to
be facing in the efforts of anyone to ridicule and scoff at Anarchy and Rebellion.
Anarchist Collectivity "Circle of Fire" - a member of the Anarchist Political Organization
http://apo.squathost.com/
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Message: 5
CONTENTS ---- Aris Tsioumas: Defending Anarchism * Nikos Nikolaidis: The Anarchic Spirit
and Anhydrous Thought * Nikos Kourkoulos: Maranas, Maron & Blue Merene * Panagiotis
Drakos: Imperialism is Dead, I Demand Imperialism! * Cumulimbimbus: For the Stonewall
uprising * Sofia Pappa: TTIP: at the gates of absolute dystopia * Musical workshop Mundo
Nuevo: Blus-rembetiko: parallel lives under the bosom's nose * Paritsa Nikoloudaki:
Postmodern writing in the context of her poetics madness, the case of S. Beckett's "Text
for nothing" * Book presentations ---- Covering editing: Panagiotis Paximadas
Screenings: Nikos Nikolaidis
* On the cover of the edition of the gravure with the anarchist Ukrainian revolutionary
Marisa Nikiforova
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