Today's Topics:
1. The 100th anniversary of the Anarchist Uprising in Rio de
Janeiro By ANA (pt) (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
2. US, black rose fed: PUTTING BRAZIL IN CONTEXT: THE FALL OF
THE WORKERS PARTY (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
3. Declaration of the participants of the 12th Balkan Anarchist
Book Fair in Novi Sad, Serbia. For a Balkan of solidarity and
struggle by A.N.A. (pt) [machine translation],
(a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
4. Greece, Live your legend in Exarchia - Posted by dwarf horse
APO (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
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Message: 1
Within the 100 years of the Anarchist Insurrection of 1918, the Group of Studies of
Anarchism (GEA) is proud to present: ---- >> Refoundation of GEA and presentation of
ongoing research. ---- >> Lecture with Prof. Dr. Carlos Addor (UFF) on the 100 years of
the Rio de Janeiro Insurrection 1918. ---- >> The Anarchist Insurrection of Lisbon in 1918
by Prof. Dr. Alexandre Samis (Colegio Pedro II and PROPGPEC).
When: Wednesday, November 14, from 6:00 p.m.
Location: Federal Fluminense University (UFF), Gragoatá Campus - Block O - PPGH - 5th
Floor - Room 1 - Niterói (RJ)
FB: https://www.facebook.com/events/182835552643663/
anarchist-ana news agency
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Message: 2
Introduction by Adam Weaver ---- With the election of far-right politician Jair Bolsonaro
to the presidency of Brazil many are struggling for answers as to how the world's fifth
most populous country elected a president who openly praises the Brazil's former
dictatorship and has threatened to jail left political opponents. At the same time the
charismatic former Worker's Party (PT) president, Lula de Silva, is blocked from running
as he remains jailed on corruptions charges instigated by the right wing. ---- The context
of Bolsonaro's victory is driven by the country's deepest economic recession since the end
of the dictatorship, corruption scandals that have discredited existing political
institutions and parties, and a 2016 parliamentary coup initiated by the right-wing to
oust Dilma Rousseff of the PT from the presidency. Factors that are not to be forgotten
are the support Bolsonaro received from right-wing media, illegal campaigning by wealthy
backers, support from Koch brother funded organizations, and the counsel of former
Breitbart News editor and Trump adviser Steve Bannon.
But the story would not be complete without an understanding of the decline of the PT. As
Jewish Marxist philosopher Walter Benjamin noted, "every resurgence of fascism bears
witness to a failed revolution." Lula de Silva, a union leader and former metal worker,
rose to global prominence with his 2003 election to the Brazilian presidency and
association with the PT hosted World Social Forum held in Porto Alegre, Brazil 2001, 2002
and 2003. But similar to the ill-fated Syriza of Greece, the PT has transitioned from
political darling to quickly forgotten footnote for many. Once in office Lula embraced a
rhetoric of "fiscal responsibility" and a practice austerity measures, cutting social
programs and attacking labor rights. Some progressive reforms were enacted, such as
increases in minimum wage and cash transfer programs, but overall the PT faced the classic
contradictory dilemma of attempting to implement their program or actually governing.
Rodrigo Santaella, an activist with Socialism and Freedom Party (PSOL), a left leaning
split from the PT that emerged after Lula's pension reforms and which assassinated
Afro-Brazilian activist Marielle Franco was an elected official of, describes the
trajectory of the party as such:
"The Brazilian left was, since the end of the 70's, all focused on building PT as an
alternative political tool for the working class and social movements in the country. ...
Around 1988, PT had begun to grow inside the state's institutions and this started to
increase the pressure to adapt to the bourgeois social order, with the same process
happening also in the labor movement. After PT's defeat in the 1989 elections, in which
the party still had a very radical program and also an activist-centered form of
organization, the central part of its leadership, with Lula at its head, proposed that it
was necessary to moderate the program in order to achieve electoral power. A right-wing of
PT, which papered over the class struggle and sought broad alliances with moderate and
right-wing forces, slowly gained dominance within the party. This also started to change
the internal organization of PT, and since the 90's it turned from a militant party with
the priority of organizing branches to a party organized around elections, with
professionalized campaigns, private financing, etc. ... The tendency of moderating in
order to win elections accelerated, and in 2002, with a big businessman as his
vice-presidential candidate, Lula was finally elected. At that point, the compromises and
alliances that PT had would leave a definitive mark on its public policies, reforms and
government programs that came later. This showed that the party was completely adapted to
the neoliberal global order, though with some peculiar characteristics, such as the
increase of the social compensation programs like the Zero Hunger campaign."
The below article, "Life After Dilma" by Jeffery R. Webber was originally published in
Jacobin in May 2016. It opens with the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff and in an ominous
foreshadowing of the current moment notes that Jair Bolsonaro "dedicated
his[impeachment]vote to Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, chief of secret police during the
military dictatorship," a reference to the torture that Rousseff endured as a captured
Marxist guerrilla. But more importantly the piece discusses the structural pressures the
PT faced once in power and how ultimately it became another chapter in the long tale of
"the left in power."
Life After Dilma
By Jeffery R. Webber
Millions of Brazilians were glued to their televisions on April 17, waiting for the
results of the Congress's impeachment vote. They came through late: the 513-seat lower
house of Congress voted 367 to 137 in favor of impeachment charges against President Dilma
Rousseff. The Senate is expected to vote to formally open the impeachment trial and prompt
Rousseff's suspension as president on May 11.
For a moment it seemed the vote in the Senate might be canceled. On May 9, seemingly out
of nowhere, Waldir Maranhão, a member of Congress for the center-right Partido
Progressista (Progressive Party, PP), and interim president of the lower house since last
Thursday, suspended the impeachment process, citing at least four procedural
irregularities in the voting process of April 17. Maranhão insisted that the Senate cease
its proceedings on the matter and send it back to the lower house for further deliberations.
Having none of this, the president of the Senate, Renán Calheiro, called Maranhão's
decision an "anti-democratic idiocy" and announced that the process would proceed in the
Senate as scheduled.
Calheiro is a member of the Partido do Movimento Democrático (Brazilian Democratic
Movement Party, PMDB) - once an ally of the government, but now its leading nemesis. On
the eve of the reckoning in the Senate, and in lieu of action by the Supreme Tribunal, it
appears as though Rousseff's presidency will be suspended.
Coup in Congress
The spectacle in the lower house in mid-April was as ugly as it was farcical. In the
ten-second speeches members gave before voting, the vast majority of the opposition did
not invoke the actual impeachment charges - that Rousseff tinkered with government
accounts to conceal the true size of the deficit.
Instead, the speeches were rallying cries about god and country, alongside a string of
fringe irrelevancies.
No doubt the darkest harbinger of things to come was Congressmember Jair Bolsonaro's
intervention who dedicated his vote to Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, chief of secret
police during the military dictatorship that began in 1964.
In obvious reference to the torture Rousseff endured as a Marxist guerrilla during the
authoritarian period, Bolsonaro praised Brilhante Ustra as "the terror of Dilma Rousseff."
Bolsonaro's son Eduardo then used his time to note that "they lost in '64 and they lost in
2016."
The Senate's electoral structure, where the more densely populated, richer, and intensely
anti-government states of the south and southeast are relatively underrepresented, is
slightly more favorable to Rousseff than the lower house. But unlike in the lower house,
where a super-majority of two-thirds is necessary for impeachment, the Senate only
requires a simple majority.
Estado São Paulo predicts that forty-six of eighty-one senators favor an impeachment
trial, with only twenty expressly against. If the Senate votes as expected, Michel Temer,
leader of the centrist PMDB, the vice president, and former ally of the government, will
assume powers as acting president.
The final stage is a Senate vote to impeach, which would take place in late June. This
vote requires a supermajority. If it succeeds, Temer will be the country's formal
president until the next scheduled elections in 2018.
How did Latin America's biggest economy and most important political power come to this point?
Global Slump and Corruption
The country's steep economic downturn since 2011, when the global crisis made its delayed
landing in the country, is certainly one catalyst. In 2010, a counter-cyclical stimulus
package produced 7.6 percent growth, seemingly extracting the country from the global
downturn. But that illusion was quickly shattered.
Between 2011 and 2014, economic growth averaged 2.1 percent annually, half of the 4.4
percent growth Brazil enjoyed between 2004 and 2010.
Then the economy shrank by 3.8 percent in 2015, transforming the country long touted in
the financial press as one of the fastest-growing economies in emerging markets into one
suffering its deepest recession since official records began. Projections of a further 3
percent fall in 2016 are similarly dour.
The economic crisis has had dramatic political consequences. The renowned "realism" of
Rousseff's Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers' Party, PT) worked in a period of high
growth with strong external drivers: the rich could get exponentially richer, and the poor
could become less poor. But that model has since come crashing to the ground.
At the same time, a massive corruption scandal called the petrolão (big oily) has added
fuel to the fire. It began in 2014, when Sergio Moro, a little-known judge from the
southern state capital of Curitiba launched an investigation into a currency dealer
suspected of tax evasion.
The scope of the operation widened, eventually revealing "an extraordinary tale of
large-scale bribery, plunder of public assets, and funding for all major political
parties, centered on the relationship between Petrobras and some of its main suppliers -
precisely the stalwarts of the PT in the oil, shipbuilding, and construction industries."
As of March 2016, Operation Car Wash (as the investigation was called) has led to the
arrest of 133 people. Some of the richest business figures in the country from sixteen
different companies - among them, Camargo Corrêa, OAS, UTC, Odebrecht, Mendes Júnior,
Engevix, and Queiroz Glavão Engenharia - are incarcerated.
Politicians of every stripe - those opposed to and those aligned with the government - are
embroiled in the affair, including members of the PT, the PMDB, the PP, the Partido da
Social Democracia Brasileira (Brazilian Social Democratic Party, PSDB), and the Partido
Trabalhista Brasileiro (Brazilian Labor Party, PTB).
The hypocritical intensity of the impeachment effort defies satire.
Forty of the congress members who voted against Rousseff themselves face criminal
indictments; the Car Wash investigations have implicated fifteen more - including several
members of Temer's PMDB.
The day after the lower house made the impeachment vote, a former Petrobras executive
claimed that Calheiros, the PMDB speaker of the Senate, accepted bribes of six million
dollars from an oil rig supplier. Meanwhile, the electoral authority continues to
investigate both Temer and Rousseff for using money from the Petrobras corruption scheme
to fund their reelection campaigns in 2014.
Eduardo Cunha, until last week the right-wing evangelical speaker of the lower house, ally
of Temer, and a central protagonist in the impeachment drive, faces separate corruption
charges involving secret Swiss bank accounts that hold roughly thirty-seven times his
declared wealth at home. The Supreme Court already indicted this surrealist avenger for
corruption and money laundering.
Even though "the big oily" seems to cover everyone, mainstream newspapers and TV channels
have focused their scrutiny almost exclusively on the PT's involvement. In what became a
major media event, investigators detained and questioned Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (the
former leader of the PT and two-term president) over claims that he acquired a beachside
apartment and a rural getaway through illegal kickbacks.
Rousseff tried to appoint Lula as her chief of staff, which would have shielded him from
prosecution from any judicial body below the Supreme Court. Federal judge Catta Preta Neto
blocked the appointment, illegally publicizing an illegal recording of a conversation
between Rousseff and Lula that, according to the opposition, irrefutably proves that
Lula's brief chief of staff appointment was made only so that he could escape jail time.
At the same time, Preta Neto posted pictures of him and his family participating in
anti-government demonstrations on his Facebook wall. Revealing the crass politicization of
some sections of the judicial apparatus, he wrote beneath the photos: "Help topple Dilma
and be able to fly to Miami and Orlando. If she falls, the dollar will drop."
Slaying Lula, who had eighty percent approval ratings at the close of his second term and
remains intensely popular, would slay the PT. It would also redirect attention from the
many opposition leaders implicated in the scandal.
Impeachment Drive
Despite the strenuous efforts to prove Rousseff's entanglement with the distended rot of
her party (and much of the political elite), nothing implicates her in illegal activity.
If this remains true, her impeachment would constitute a "parliamentary coup" like the one
that toppled center-left Paraguayan president Fernando Lugo in 2012 (comparisons with
Honduras, where a straightforwardly military coup took place in June 2009, are misleading).
Without a clear link to the petrolão scandal, Rousseff's impeachment will proceed on the
charge that she used funds from public banks without authorization to cover budget gaps
and to minimize the deficit's visibility. But this is a common practice in Brazilian
history: no president has ever been impeached for making this kind of budgetary payment.
A post on the presidential blog in early April 2016 noted that the payments, commonly
known as "pedaladas," were not "a crime of responsibility," the sort of presidential
breach of conduct required for impeachment under the constitution. The blog stressed that
"[b]ig or small, pedaladas are not a crime."
Opponents floated alternative - and even weaker - grounds for impeachment. They claim
Rousseff accepted campaign funding from corrupt sources in 2014. But this would implicate
all the other major parties simultaneously and thus challenge the legality of the 2014
elections. So most of their money remained on the pedalada card.
Financial markets have reveled in Rousseff's potential downfall. "If there is one thing
that Brazil's left-leaning president, Dilma Rousseff, probably will not miss when she
leaves office," Joe Leahy writes in the Financial Times, "it is the tendency of markets to
loudly applaud her every misfortune."
Dan Bogler notes that her impeachment could be a godsend for foreign investors in Latin
America more generally. It would set a precedent for the early removal of unwanted
left-leaning leaders.
Alejandro Werner, the International Monetary Fund's western hemisphere director, hopes a
Temer presidency would produce the necessary political consensus around spending cuts and
further trade and financial liberalization. "Sufficient policy consensus behind an
important policy package," Werner suggests, "could send a very strong signal that Brazil
is on the mend."
Temer pledged to adopt orthodox neoliberal economics - balancing the budget and no longer
raising salaries, benefits, and other payments to the working classes to meet inflation -
once in power. The will of finance is axiomatically more important than democratic niceties.
Lula's First Term
In present circumstances, it is easy to forget how the PT arrived at this juncture. The
party's decline cannot be reduced to the machinations and scheming of an authoritarian
political right and its allies within the state apparatus. At the outset of Lula's first
administration, the PT departed from its working-class base to embrace capital. Initially,
the class content of the government seemed to change. Long-standing activists with
progressive political alignments, trade unionists, and NGO advocates held important
positions within the federal administration. But, as Alfredo Saad-Filho and Armando Boito
remind us:
This does not imply that the class character of the state had changed, or that public
policies would necessarily shift to the left. But it changed the appearance of the state:
millions of workers could recognize themselves in the bureaucracy, which increased hugely
the legitimacy of the state among the poor and spread further a feeling of shared
citizenship in Brazil.
Despite appearances, Lula's first term largely preserved the neoliberal parameters that
Fernando Henrique Cardoso of the PSDB (1995-2003) and Fernado Collor de Melo (1990-1992)
introduced. Ricardo Antunes, one of Brazil's most astute political observers, wrote that
Lula left "unaltered the constitutive structural features of Brazil's perversely
exclusionary bourgeois social formation."
Three commitments limited Lula's policy: low inflation and central bank independence;
liberalization of capital flows and floating exchange rates; and fiscal austerity. Within
this framework, little could be done to improve the conditions of the working classes,
much less strengthen their organizational power.
This is not say that nothing happened: the administration formalized labor contracts,
increased the minimum wage, improved targeted cash transfer programs, and extended the
role of development finance. But low growth rates and minimal distribution dogged Lula's
first term.
Then, in 2005, the first of the corruption scandals that would haunt the government: the
mensalão (monthly payoff) scandal, in which the PT bribed deputies $7,000 a month for votes.
Perry Anderson explains the logic of the PT's bid to remain in power: with "less than a
fifth of the seats in Congress," the party decided "to stitch together a patchwork of
smaller parties . . . But they naturally expected a share of the spoils too . . . so the
mensalão - the monthly backhander - was devised for them."
PT loyalists were quick to argue that Lula merely perfected a long-standing art of
Brazil's political elite. Perhaps. But it was a blow to the credibility of a party whose
origins had been rooted in working-class emancipation and whose leader was a former trade
union militant.
Lula's Second Term
The 2006 elections found the PT in internal turmoil, and the party nearly lost at the
polls. To retain the PT's base and buoyed by the international context of a commodity
boom, Lula introduced more distributive elements in his second term without sacrificing
the government's allegiance to agribusiness, finance, and industrial capital.
Honing a regime of multi-class conciliation, Lula conceded to capital's demands all the
while offering targeted welfare to a pauperized strata dependent on the state. The World
Bank-lauded bolsa família - a conditional cash transfer program that reached millions - is
just the most famous of these efforts. He also expanded higher education and introduced
university quotas for black students.
In the wake of the global crisis, Lula drew on foreign reserves, accumulated at high rates
during the commodities boom, to launch expansionary programs. He created millions of jobs,
but they were mainly low-paid, unskilled, and precarious. The state invested in
nationalized enterprises: Petrobras expanded following the company's discovery of deep-sea
oil reserves.
Brazil and the global media celebrated Lula's statesmanship and the country's proud
membership in the BRICS group of emerging countries. Lula become something of an
ambassador for Brazilian capital abroad, visiting thirty countries between 2011 and 2012,
twenty of which were in Africa and Latin America. Construction firms, including the
later-disgraced Odebrecht, OAS, and Camargo Correa, paid for thirteen of these trips.
The boom years allowed the PT to lubricate its multi-class alliance, targeting modest
social reforms at the poorest Brazilians, expanding employment, and raising the minimum
wage and living standards, while allowing the rich to capture a vastly disproportionate
share of the increasing wealth.
But at the same time, there was no export diversification or technological developments in
manufacturing. The state also neglected infrastructural investments, like basic urban
transport and water, which would become flashpoints in coming protests.
Lula's unprecedented popularity at the close of his second term in 2010 allowed him to
anoint Dilma Rousseff as his successor and virtually guarantee her election.
Rousseff had been a Marxist guerrilla during the dictatorship; she was Lula's first
minister of energy and mines (2003-05), and then his chief of staff (2005-2010). Her
bureaucratic experience did not translate into political acumen: prior to becoming
president she had never campaigned or been elected to any office.
Dilma's First Term
The new president inherited a roaring economy. As the continuity candidate, she gathered
the various bourgeois fractions that had supported Lula around her. Her initial program
reproduced that of Lula's second government: she tried to stoke growth in the internal
market, increase export commodity production (particularly in the agribusiness sector),
and reduce taxes for large corporations. Meanwhile, she maintained extraordinarily high
interest rates, guaranteeing the financial sector's support.
During Lula's presidency, the country's terms of trade improved dramatically. Raw material
exports grew from twenty-eight to forty-one percent, while manufacturing fell from
fifty-five to forty-four.
The trend continued under Rousseff. Primary materials accounted for over half the value of
total exports by the end of her first term. However, from 2011 forward, the international
price of Brazil's raw material exports spiraled downward. Iron, soy, and crude oil rapidly
declined.
Brazil had not escaped the global crisis, only delayed its arrival.
Rousseff's political misfortune was to become head of state just as the hurricane reached
the doorstep. The prolonged slump in the US and eurozone, combined with China's cooling
expansion, further depressed commodity prices.
At the same time, quantitative easing in the US, UK, Japan, and the eurozone ignited
capital outflow to Brazil, overvaluing the currency, stoking deindustrialization, and
sustaining the GDP's long fall.
In a misguided attempt to restore "market confidence," Rousseff's administration
enthusiastically embraced structural adjustment and austerity measures, cutting social
programs and attacking labor rights. Unemployment rose; wages fell.
And of course austerity's effects were disproportionate: the profits of Brazil's four
largest banks in 2013 exceeded the GDP of eighty-three countries.
But Rousseff's overtures to big businesses could not stop the crisis.
Problems with domestic consumption accompanied plummeting commodity prices. The PT had
increased the popular classes' purchasing power not only through minimum-wage increases
and cash transfers, but also through a breathtaking surge in consumer credit. As Anderson
points out, private-sector debt more than doubled between 2005 and 2015.
Meanwhile, austerity measures alienated the organized working class and informal
proletarian layers that had long lent the PT support. The first signal of discontent from
below arrived with the wave of urban rebellions in June 2013, eventually involving more
than two million people nationwide.
The Movimento Passe Livre (Free Fare Movement, MPL), a social movement rooted in the
struggle for free mass transit in urban Brazil, initially organized the revolt. Privatized
and unreliable transit, and the more general marketization of the public sphere under PT
governments, angered working-class youth.
They constituted much of the initial base of the demonstrations. These days of rage also
channeled pervasive indignation at public money directed to the 2014 World Cupand away
from health care, education, and basic infrastructure.
Protestors appropriated public space, occupied streets and plazas, questioned the existing
forms of institutional representation in Brazil's capitalist democracy, and practiced new
forms of direct democracy.
The Brazilian myth of a middle-class country, fostered by the PT since 2003, in which a
virtuous circle of capitalist development would allow all classes to prosper, came apart
at the seams.
Yet the organized left was too fragmented and marginalized to provide leadership in the
June demonstrations, which were characterized by multi-class participation and ideological
eclecticism.
On the one hand, they drew precarious youth, working-class university students, and youth
from poor suburban neighborhoods. There were a small but important number of far-left
political groups and social organizations as well: the Partido Socialismo e Liberdade
(Socialist and Freedom Party, PSOL), Partido Socialista dos Trabalhadores Unificado
(United Socialist Workers Party, PSTU), the Partido Comunista Brasileiro (Brazilian
Communist Party, PCB), the MPL, the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Teto (Homeless Workers
Movement, MTST), and the Movimento Periferia Ativa (Movement of the Urban Periphery, MPA).
But there were also sectors of the conservative middle class, who with time grew in number
and cohered in political clarity.
The Left's weakness was in part a reflection - particularly in the case of the expressly
political formations - of their recent inability to widen their social bases, despite the
declining popularity of the centrist PT.
A new anti-party, populist right capitalized on the Left's marginalization and captured
extra-parliamentary momentum at the end of June. The protests emboldened proto-fascist and
fascist groups who began to physically attack and expel those carrying left-wing banners.
This was the backdrop to Rousseff's 2014 presidential campaign. She campaigned as an
anti-neoliberal, promising to reject the fiscal adjustments demanded by capital and to
defend the social rights won by Brazilian workers through decades of struggle.
At the same time, the traditional popular base of the PT feared the fierce neoliberal
restructuring that Rousseff's conservative opponent Aécio Neves would enact. This allowed
Rousseff to win, even if it was by a narrow margin.
Dilma's Second Term
However, once elected, Rousseff made an about-face and appointed Joaquim Levy finance
minister. Levy was an unambiguous representative of international financial capital,
trained in economics at the University of Chicago.
Before joining the Rousseff administration, he worked at Bradesco, one of the largest
private banks in the country. Levy set to carry out a severe austerity package, signaling
once again that the PT's top priority was appearing credible to the market.
But the representatives of capital considered Levy's austerity program, despite being a
brazen betrayal of workers and the poor, too little too late. Even before Operation Car
Wash flooded the political scene, Rousseff's approval ratings had fallen into the single
digits.
The Chamber of Deputies and Senate coalition that had supported the Rousseff government
came apart. The call for impeachment grew louder.
The anti-party, right-wing populist groups organized mass demonstrations - something not
seen since hundreds of thousands of right-wing protesters were mobilized in the lead-up to
the 1964 coup d'état that overthrew progressive president João Goulart.
Hundreds of thousands of upper-middle-class protesters, backed by the mainstream media,
took to the streets in Brazil in 2015 and 2016. By March 2016, three million Brazilians
participated in demonstrations, according to police.
A poll of demonstrators in São Paulo on March 13, 2016 revealed that 77 percent had
post-secondary degrees. The same percentage were white. (This in a country where fifty
percent of the population is black or mixed-race.) 63 percent of the protestors earned
salaries equivalent to at least five times the minimal salary; the average age was forty-five.
The 2015-16 protests are distinct from those of 2013. They are unambiguously right wing,
anti-corruption, and pro-impeachment.
New Right
The new right first gained large-scale visibility on June 20, 2013, the day of the
so-called Revolt of the Coxinhas (a pejorative term used to refer to pampered, white,
upper-class men). That day, tens of thousands of coxinhas, carrying green and yellow
Brazilian national flags, joined the massive demonstrations against bus tariffs organized
by the MPL and began attacking protesters carrying symbols of the Left.
Some observers suggest the new right is the spontaneous creation of mainstream TV media
and right-wing social media groups. But the facility with which they seized control of the
demonstrations suggests something else.
The new right is militantly organized, with politicized cadres, coherent strategy,
tactical experience, and political education developed through years of work in the public
and private university systems.
Raúl Zibechi dates their first action to August 17, 2007. On that day, Civic Movement for
the Rights of Brazilians, better known as Cansei (I'm tired of it) organized
demonstrations in response to the mensalão corruption scandal. Five thousand people
participated.
The repertoire of the demonstrators foreshadowed what we witness today: they chanted "Out
with Lula," mobilized popular telenovela actors, and enjoyed the support of the Federação
das Indústrias do Estado de São Paulo (Industrial Federation of the state of São Paulo,
FIESP), the most powerful manufacturing sector organization in Brazil, and the Ordem dos
Advogados do Brasil (Brazilian Order of Lawyers, OAB).
Between 2007 and 2013, the new right organized public university student federations that
had historically been bastions of the Left. The most significant initial victory occurred
at the University of Brasília (UB).
In 2009, a group called Alliance for Freedom won the leadership of the UB student
federation in 2011 with only 22 percent of the vote, due to fissures in the Left. In 2015,
they were reelected for the fourth time, this time with 60 percent of the vote.
Under the new right's leadership, the student federation has engaged in important direct
actions, including occupying the rector's office to force him to resign for acts of
corruption.
Alliance for Freedom has ties to Students for Freedom, a group funded by neoliberal and
Cold Warrior think tanks based in the US. Also in the network is the Liberal Institute,
which focuses on quotidian necessities of students, like clean bathrooms and security on
campus.
The link between everyday student needs and far-reaching political objectives has been
very effective organizationally. Using this strategy, the new right took over student
federations in other state universities during the same period, including Minas Gerais and
Rio Grande do Sul. They draw their support from the departments of economics, law, and
engineering.
But we should be careful not to exaggerate the institutional strength of the Right in the
student movement. The largest universities in São Paulo and Rio are still controlled by
the Left. The elected rector of the second-largest university in the country, UFRJS in
Rio, is a PSOL member and has a long history as a trade union militant.
Alongside university organizing, the new right participates in demonstrations and marches.
In 2011, they mobilized twenty thousand people nationwide across twenty-five cities.
Protesters sang the national anthem and carried the national flag.
By the June 2013 rebellions, the new right was well positioned to intervene. The Left's
core organizers had joined the lower echelons of the state apparatus under successive PT
governments, but the new right's cadres had recent experience in extra-parliamentary,
social-movement leadership.
As a result, the new right redirected what began as left-wing demonstrations against
transit fees. Movimento Brasil Livre (Free Brazil Movement, MBL), Vem Pra Rua (Come to the
Streets), and Revoltados On Line (Revolted On Line) - which have become the most important
vessels for mobilizing against corruption and for impeachment - emerged from these
demonstrations.
Ideologically, the new right is distinct from the authoritarian Catholic and right-wing
militarists from the 1960s and 1970s. The rise of Evangelical Protestantism is essential
to this difference.
The dominant current of Evangelical Christianity, to which roughly one-fifth of the
Brazilian population belongs, preaches a "theology of prosperity." It promises "material
success on earth rather than mere relief in heaven" and boasts billionaires and
politicians among its growing ranks.
The incongruous new right accepts abortion, gay marriage, the decriminalization of
marijuana, and free public services. But they glorify the free market, opposing
state-mandated university quotas for black students and framing bolsa família as a program
that takes from the deserving upper-middle classes to give to the undeserving poor.
The core groups of the new right combine the large donations from think tanks, lawyers,
and industrial capitalists with small contributions from grassroots supporters and
proceeds from t-shirt and protest paraphernalia sales.
The anti-politics profile is key to the credibility of the main organizations, but many
leading campaigners have longstanding ties to traditional political parties. Right-wing
politicians who have served time in prison for corruption or presently face corruption
charges have played important roles in the demonstrations.
The leader of the main opposition party (the PSDB) gave the keynote at an anti-corruption
mobilization in Belo Horizonte; ex-president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, also of PSDB,
joined the growing chorus calling for Rousseff to step down.
The police and media have embraced the new right mobilizations. This is in stark contrast
to the standard repression and demonization meted out when the Left mobilizes. Those in
the streets are the shock troops for the politicians waging the technical impeachment
proceedings in Congress, and the judges and prosecuting teams producing the legal
justifications for Rousseff's removal from office.
But while they may succeed in removing Rousseff from office, the new right lacks any
credible political vehicle with which to fill the power vacuum. As a consequence, Brazil
is at an incredible impasse: competing forces vie for the hegemony that the PT has
evidently lost, without any obvious alternative.
Fragmented Political Field
To recap, the explosive situation in Brazil grew out of a confluence of intermingling
crisis tendencies. The global economic crisis was delayed but no less fierce. Rousseff
campaigned in 2014 on a lie and won with the narrowest margin in recent Brazilian history.
She hasn't been unable to win back the confidence of the markets or the support of the
popular classes. In December 2015, fiscal hawk Levy resigned; Nelson Barbosa, a dove in
fiscal matters, replaced him.
But this feigned tack to the moderate left fueled the Right's impeachment campaign without
returning support from the Left.
Corruption charges have now entangled virtually the entire leadership of the PT dating
back to 2002. Important figures like José Dirceu and João Vaccari Neto are in prison.
Rousseff has lost all semblance of political authority, as the alliances holding her
government aloft unravel quickly.
Workers and the poor continue to reject the PT government's austerity packages; the new
right is gaining confidence and capacities, even if it still lacks an alternative project
for power. There is no independent socialist left with sufficient influence to produce an
alternative.
This situation would not have been possible without the PT's internal debacles and its
abandonment of working-class emancipation.
The Rousseff government repressed protests and allied itself with capital, made labor
legislation more flexible, and covered for a corporation responsible for the environmental
crime of Mariana. It applied multiple rounds of austerity that disproportionately affected
the country's popular classes.
The ruling party now mourns the absence of its own moral capacity to mobilize the poor
against the Right. But this was foreseeable: their maintenance of neoliberal rule combined
with routine corruption more typically associated with the Right diminished their support
base.
The PT, as is its instinct, will continue to try to forge a negotiated, elite-driven pact
with the centrist parties in the Senate in order to hold on to power. But as historian and
PSOL activist, Sean Purdy, notes, "the anti-government left must organize opposition to
the deal between the PT and the centrist parties, which will only bring more austerity."
The present impasse, then, is both wrought with danger and opportunity.
To be "against impeachment today," Ricardo Antunes rightly argues, "cannot mean any
complacency with regard to the tragedy of the PT in power, in all of its dimensions."
The challenge, according to Antunes, "is to build a social and political alternative of a
new kind," a new left authentically aligned with the best of the popular movements.
He points to the land struggles and occupations of the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais
Sem Terra (Landless Rural Workers Movement, MST), the struggle for housing of the MTST,
the free transit mobilizations of the MPL, the ongoing rebellions in the poor peripheries
for housing and against the racist brutality of the military police, recent strikes by
metallurgical workers, bank workers, teachers, doctors, and other public employees, and
the possibilities of class-struggle union federations, such as Conlutas and Intersindical
as inspiration: "It will be the conjunction of these molecular movements with the best of
the Lefts (social and political) of a new type, rooted in concrete experiences of the
social struggles of our time, out of which something new can emerge."
Antunes argues that the corruption scandal produced a false polarization in Brazil between
the new right/PSDB and the PT. But they have more in common than is commonly recognized.
Therefore, the creation of authentic socio-political polarization becomes the order of the
day. To do so, the Left must find a new socio-political basis capable of rejecting both of
the reigning images of capital.
There are already actions in this direction. "The MTST has promised to launch massive
demonstrations if the government defaults on its promises to boost public housing
programs," Purdy writes. "And the two left-wing trade union centrals - Conlutas and
Intersindical - are stepping up their support from the public- and private-sector strike
actions that are multiplying across the country." High-school and secondary technical
students are presently occupying over a dozen schools in São Paulo and Rio over
state-level corruption and austerity.
Navigating the present moment's complicated terrain will require strategically mapping the
balance of forces in the extra-institutional and the institutional arenas alike, plotting
interventions, and hoping to turn the tide.
Fragmented left political groupings and social movements are channeling the initial spirit
of the 2013 struggle to oppose Rousseff's austerity programs and combat the new right. But
prospects are dim, at least for the early days ahead.
If you enjoyed this piece we recommend the similarly themed "Socialist Faces in High
Places: Syriza's Fall From Grace and the Elusive Electoral Road" and the podcast interview
"Elections, Power, & the DSA: The Failure of the Left in Power."
http://blackrosefed.org/brazil-in-context-workers-party/
------------------------------
Message: 3
Between 28 and 30 September 2018 , individuals and collectives from the anarchist and anti
- authoritarian movement of the Balkans and elsewhere gathered in Novi Sad for the 12th
Ankara Book Fair of the Balkans . Vindxs from all parts of the region, we speak many
languages: Serbian-Croatian, Hungarian, Romanian, Slovenian, Macedonian, Bulgarian,
Albanian, Greek, among others. Taking into account our heterogeneous contexts, our meeting
confirmed that the only language we all share is the language of struggle and solidarity.
---- During the days we spent together, we shared many fighting experiences, updated and
tested our analyzes, and formulated some concrete proposals for the future of our
struggles. Through this we can recognize some common patterns that come from the previous
political strategies of the ruling class in all parts of the region. Again, nationalism is
being used as a tool to spread the divisions as a way to facilitate the attack against xs
oprimidxs and at the same time create a false opponent in the form of a populist
nationalism that appears to oppose the really destructive impacts of the capitalist
offensive while in fact providing global capital and opportunities for its restructuring.
As always, nationalism is combined with militarism, renewed religious obscurantism, and
patriarchy. All this is clearly present in the new wave of tensions between the various
forces of the state and the rise of popular nationalisms (such as between Kosovo and
Serbia, Macedonia and Greece, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, etc.). In response to these
divisive efforts of the ruling class, coordinated actions and Balkan-wide campaigns
against nationalism, militarism, and any kind of division among the oppressions are
expressed as an urgent necessity. And this can only be achieved through joint
mobilizations of social forces. One of the next important moves when we can concretely
move towards this goal will be the mobilization against the Lukov march in Sofia,
Bulgaria, in February 2019. We express our full support for the anti-Lukov march and call
on all concerned to create local anti-nationalist mobilizations and, if possible, to come
to Sofia. We also emphasize our commitment to protect our structures from fascist attacks
and the need to react.
Parallel to this, we recognize that the expansion of global capitalism is limited by the
finite nature of our planet. To compensate for these limitations, capitalism readily
employs deadly methods of plunder and exploitation, most commonly and continuously in the
form of attacks on workers' rights and the environment. It is no coincidence that in
recent years the Balkans have seen the eruption of many struggles against the capitalist
appropriation of nature: the gold mines in Chalkidiki and Rosia Montana, large
hydroelectric projects in Balkan rivers, including Stara Planina in Serbia, Mura in
Slovenia, Valbona in Albania, fracking in Romania and Bulgaria, fossil fuel extraction
throughout Greece and in so-called "exclusive economic zones" by local companies and
giants like Repsol, Toral, ExxonMobil and Edison, to name a few. All of these are
particular examples of how the extractivist sector of the economy, run by some global
corporations and protected by the state's repressive legal apparatus, is taking over the
Balkan territories, generating pollution and destruction of labor rights, as well as
exchange communities.
On the periphery of the global capitalist system, looting and warfare transform large
segments of the population into migrants and refugees; this process is not only a
theoretical problem for us in the Balkans but also a lived experience. While the diverse
and heterogeneous population seeks a place to call home and rebuild their lives, they
become targets of capital and its political structures: the first directly integrates into
the capitalist economy as cheap labor while the latter uses -xs as a scapegoat to justify
increasing social control of all, surveillance and repression of antagonistic segments of
society and nourishing the popular right and undermining solidarity among xs oprimidxs.
Three years after the collapse of Fortress Europe's machinery, people are being jailed in
prisons because they have dared to resist the regime of dehumanization to which they are
subject. Cases such as Harmanli in Bulgaria, Moria in Greece, and Röszke in Hungary are
only the best known that punctuate broader processes of repression and criminalization. It
is not only the migrants who resist, but also the ideas and practices of transnational
political solidarity. Now that the Balkan and European states, on a large scale, have
regained control of their borders, quieter and even more lethal tools of criminalization
and racism are being used to push people to the margins, often subjecting them to
illegality and forms more vulgar exploits. We recognize that it is necessary to break the
state of exclusion that is imposed on migrants and refugees and to dismantle the European
regime of dehumanization of borders and concentration camps. We support all actions of
solidarity against detention centers, critical areas and criminalization of migrants.
This year's Fair also hosted a meeting between the Balkan grassroots trade union
initiatives, for which we had a chance to learn about the recent struggles of workers in
shipyards in Pula and Rijeka, Croatia, workers in the health services sector in Kosovo,
the workers' struggle for supermarket and coffee networks in Greece, the logistics sector
in Bulgaria, and so on. Seeing how these struggles share similarities, and especially
taking into account the interconnectedness of capital in the Balkans, we agree on further
enhancement of mutual support and information sharing. We have established a common
platform for information sharing and some other concrete steps have been taken to
facilitate the solidarity of workers throughout the Balkans. New channels of communication
will facilitate the solidarity of the workers and enable efficient coordination of direct
actions throughout the region. Following this, anarcho-syndicalist and grassroots radical
organizations have confirmed their position in focusing on organizing workplace struggles,
helping workers to self-organize; and stir up the international class struggle in the Balkans.
Finally we decided to meet next year in Sofia, Bulgaria, for the 13th annual Ankara Balkan
Book Fair. The anti-authoritarian and anarchist movement will meet to provide a space for
the continuity of our struggles, and also to honor the hundredth anniversary of the
founding of the Anarchist Federation in Bulgaria.
Against nationalism and capitalism! For a Balkan of struggle and solidarity!
No name divides us, no nation unites us!
Participants of the 12th Anarchist Book of the Balkans
Novi Sad, September 30, 2018
Translation> Marginal Press
Related Content:
https://noticiasanarquistas.noblogs.org/post/2018/07/13/servia-12-feira-do-livro-anarquista-dos-balcas/
anarchist-ana news agency
------------------------------
Message: 4
On Monday, October 8th, the Gkini building was convened to organize moves to respond to
the murder of Zackie Oh / Zackie Oh. At the same time that you and comrades tried to
organize their resistances in conditions of generalized social cannibalism, some people
perceived in the courtyard of the Polytechnic a first-class opportunity to steal one of
the dozens of assembled mobs of solidarity in the building. ---- At this moment, in
addition to the obvious tragic irony, he concentrates so many meanings that a semiologist
could write a whole book. However, we are not semiologists. Neither journalists to simply
broadcast the scandalous news nor a press office to express our condemnation. We are
anarchists, so we have decided to write a public text to share our perception of the
events, the (main) causes that they create, and our proposals to them.
This text is not a response to the perpetrators of this act. The answer can only be the
collective decision of the struggling people to dismantle with such behaviors once and for
all. It is not a complete position on the issues of violence and social contrasts. Nor can
it substitute for an overall self-criticism that only the movement as a single (though
varied) body can do for itself. But it is a place we offer in the public debate, in order
to destroy those myths that may be born, but certainly preserve and reproduce such
phenomena. Phenomena which we believe are based on misconceptions or distorted
imaginations that some project on the anarchist space and its vital environment, Exarchia.
This is because, although it is the first time that such an event occurs (or recorded) in
the Polytechnic, it is impossible to see it outside the general situation prevailing in
the area. And if the general situation in the region is not addressed, it is impossible to
be the last time that such an incident occurs. Besides, as these lines were written, we
were told daily that people were stabbing around the Polytechnic, others were robbed of
the gun threat, harassed passers-by and threatened comrades and comrades.
The myths surrounding Exarchia and the anarchists have been built for years by the state
and are hamstrung by the lack of ability or willingness of the subjects themselves to have
the region as a reference point to clearly identify themselves. Myths that have always
existed in a latent form and now stand in a context of generalized social and kinematic
disintegration that makes it impossible for us to defend our identity. The recession of
social and class struggles, in addition to the problems it creates within the movement,
has to a great extent altered our inherent characteristics. These are the militancy, the
solidarity and the faith in our forces. Having greatly internalized defeat we have been
transformed by subjects trying to determine as much as possible the reality around them,
passive consumers and commentators of images of violence, blood and death. The fact that
the individuals who have stolen anarchist comrades are somehow related to the anarchist
space (a relationship whose size and depth are to be investigated) is the tangible proof
of our almost total defeat as a movement. Not only do we not be able to intervene
socially, set up barricades on the capitalist roller that generates monsters by sweeping
the social fabric, but also threatens our own political survival. Not only are we unable
to politicize pieces with which we come into contact, but reactionary and alien behaviors
that flood the streets we are moving are also slowly emerging on the edge of our
processes. The self-proclaimed "companion" who speaks in an assembly, tomorrow he can wear
a hood to hide from you and steal your motorcycle. And because the detail makes the
difference, steal that motorcycle, which is dissolved and unlocked just because it can do it.
Interpretation 1st
Wild youth and "disoriented companions"
We have said earlier that this text can not be a comprehensive critique of the problems of
violence and social contrasts. But we have to stand by and try to unravel the confusion
surrounding the issue of "wild youth" or "disoriented companions". This confusion has
worked as a huge dishwasher around us. And the priority here is not to be moral about
behaviors, but that these behaviors are translated into violence and blood, which
unfortunately we tolerate as long as this blood is not ours ...
In spite of the differences between political groups and visas within a long-standing
area, even the most ardent supporters of "wild youth" as a subject have in their minds
very specific features. There is and must be a huge distinction between understanding the
causes of violence and in this case metropolitan violence and accepting or justifying it.
In the first case it means that you are fighting against the system that generates it, in
the second case it means you are giving up accepting that this system is stronger than
you. Capitalism as a way of managing the human condition produces by definition separate
and competitive individualities. He relies on dividing, producing society as a sum of
individualized individuals. It creates or cultivates the violence of the fascist, the
sexist, the rapist, the striker, the boss, the bravo or the cop. Understanding the
mechanisms that pervaded violence does not mean accepting reactionary behaviors and
certainly does not turn their actors into potential (revolutionary) subjects. The
designation "wild youth" that counts a few decades of life, arose from the need to define
and to approach a portion militant youth as she appeared at certain historical moments of
social war, eg through squat movements and student / student mobilizations. Thus, "wild
youth" does not mean a total absence of social consciousness, but a lack of those
theoretical tools or practical experience that will make an instinctive and healthy
individual insurrection in a collectively organized attack on the existing. The ferocious
young man, therefore, is fully conscious of his position. He knows who is next to him and
who his enemies are. As he would never cooperate with the police, he would never be
fascinated by the violence of the fascists, he would never turn his weapons on a weaker
person or his neighbor. but a lack of those theoretical tools or practical experience that
will make an instinctive and healthy individual revolt in a collectively organized attack
on the existing. The ferocious young man, therefore, is fully conscious of his position.
He knows who is next to him and who his enemies are. As he would never cooperate with the
police, he would never be fascinated by the violence of the fascists, he would never turn
his weapons on a weaker person or his neighbor. but a lack of those theoretical tools or
practical experience that will make an instinctive and healthy individual revolt in a
collectively organized attack on the existing. The ferocious young man, therefore, is
fully conscious of his position. He knows who is next to him and who his enemies are. As
he would never cooperate with the police, he would never be fascinated by the violence of
the fascists, he would never turn his weapons on a weaker person or his neighbor.
Wild youth is the students who revolt against the teacher and the teaching system, not the
kidnappers who hurt their weak classmate or the childless slain who raped their classmate
in Amarynthos. It is they who bring in them the untreated seeds of a new world. Not those
who carry all of the old man's saliva and sneak around at the first opportunity. The one
who exploits the conjuncture, that is, what he perceives as a "lack of state" and control
to lift his hand to his neighbor is tomorrow's ruffian, not a disoriented companion whom
we must tolerate.
The violence we practice every day knows where to return it and how to do it. The morality
that characterizes us as anarchists is clearly expressed even in our most violent actions,
such as the robbery of a bank. There has never been a passer-by, someone who went to make
money or get a pension. On the contrary, it has always been explicitly and unequivocally
clear that the enemy is the bank, not society. And it has always been so clear and clear
that it has spread and been adopted even by non-anarchist bandits or offenders. At the
opposite of this attitude, attacks on the road to anyone who is considered "bossy," and
the thefts in what seems an easy task are but the quintessence of petty bourgeois ideology
camouflaged with "unconventional" dressing and style. And when they are practiced by
people who have knowledge (even by hearing) of what social social anxiety means, there is
no excuse.
Explanation 2nd
In Exarchia "there is no state" - Exarchia is "unobtrusive"
Although the state has demonstrated that it is in a position to intervene decisively when
deemed necessary, the residents and people who are politically active in Exarhia have made
enormous struggles to keep the police out of our region. There have been seasons that have
been difficult even to make a poster. The MTATs camped on a permanent basis in the square,
insurers circulated with machines in the neighborhood and harassed comrades, called them
with their little name, handcuffed us without cause, knocking us, and at times they marked
us with their service revolvers. This regime of violence and terrorism broke through the
years. We were not given the area. He just broke through hard, everyday and often bloody
struggles. We have claimed it because we really believe we can organize our lives in an
anti-lingual and uninterrupted way. Because we believe in the equal coexistence of people
and in the consciousness it produces. That's why when parents, classmates or friends told
us "Well, are not you afraid of Exarchia?" We laughed and we responded that it was the
most secure neighborhood. Who can say the same today? And how do they physics and seal the
defeat of the funny style between us? "Well, in Exarchia square you live?" "Well, do you
leave your motorcycle unlocked at the Polytechnic?"
If we had struggles to get the police out of this neighborhood, we did not do it to find
an opportunity for everyone to take advantage of the situation for their own benefit.
Exarchia is not anathema. If some people think that Exarchia "there is no state," what
they do is defeat the propaganda of sovereignty and even the right of rhetoric. Exarchia
is a state and very organized. What is happening is that at the same time a social dynamic
has developed that the state is obliged to take into account and count on its movements -
according to the circumstances of the time. To believe that somewhere you get pushed,
stolen, killed, raped is not the justice we want, it is the law of the jungle, the right
of the strong. What we fight against and what we get rid of at such a cost is now trying
to get back from the back door.
Interpretation 3rd
Anarchist space is a marginal condition and therefore close to marginal groups.
Of course, we stand beside anyone who is marginalized. Solidarity with the oppressed and
the weak is a fundamental political choice, a collective decision that permeates us
existentially and transforms us as personalities, as people. But that does not mean that
our worldview and our suggestion for life is or we want to be "marginal", precisely
because being on the margins is not an aesthetic choice. It is an imposed blackmail
treaty. That is why we have always tried to politicize or radicalize those pieces that we
came into contact with. Let us understand their contradictions to overcome them, not to
tolerate hostile attitudes, nor of course to identify with these contradictions. The way
we perceive ourselves can not be identified with the Word that the dominant ideology
produces for us. We are not "fringe," "hobbies," and "bums." On the contrary, in the
dominant propaganda that described Exarcheia or our occupations as a jungle where violence
and allegory prevailed, we were responding to "Matters are the MAT and the insured." We
are neither "fringe" nor "extreme" naive people who dream of a utopia.
We are right. We want a different world to conform to and satisfy the deep needs and
desires of man. And we not only want him but we fight for him. We know very well that man
needs and can be freed. This suggestion is palpable in our everyday relationships, in our
assemblies, in the attacks against what oppresses us, and we try to do it. Make it a
universal reality. We do not reproduce or consume any social dystopia which, through
spectacular mediation, is framed as "underground", "subversive" or even "revolutionary"
proposition.
Interpretation 4th
Exarchia was not always like this, but Athens has become a chaotic metropolis.
The fact that the characteristics of the metropolitan center have changed is the only sure
thing. When we talk about capitalist crisis and poverty, war and refuge, dissolution of
social resistance and alienation, we are talking exactly about what we live today.
Violence, blood and death. But this reality, in addition to analyzing it, also entrusts us
with the responsibility to deal with it. If our times are getting tougher, if our cities
start to look more and more like modern prisons or modern arenas, we have bigger
organizational obligations, no more excuses for resignation. And we have even more
obligations to organize and guard here, because Exarchia is neither a neighborhood nor an
impersonal area of the center such as Omonia or Vathis Square. It is a neighborhood that,
due to its history and its enormous political value, we have no room to lose.
Every season has its arguments and the battles to be given. Battles that are unfortunately
not defined only by our needs and desires, but also by the very reality that stands tough
and relentless in front of us. If at some point it was a good place to say that we have to
get out of Exarchia by disseminating our speech an
The defense of the land we are moving on is not some kind of charisma of established
citizens (even if it can occasionally drag us into such a condition that we must
overcome). The political symbolism of Exarchia capitalizes on a culture of resistance,
practically provides us with a place in which this culture is realized and a land of
irreplaceable importance for our action if it is located in the center of Athens and is
flanked by university institutions. Where are the offices of most grassroots clubs -
members of which are the last victims of Mafia attacks? Where did we get scared from all
the neighborhoods when we learned about the murder of Alexander Grigoropoulos? From what
safe ground did we land our rest in the rest of Athens?
Misunderstanding 5th
Exarchia has always been so
This is the greatest myth and at the same time the most dangerous because it preserves the
illusion that nothing can change, justifies inaction and disarms us definitively.
Phenomena such as what happens in or around the Polytechnic has no precedent in the area.
Anyone who supports the opposite view either sees a lot of news stories and believes them
or is younger and has seen Exarchia only in the late phase of their decline or simply
trying to justify his inertia. Drug users have always existed in Exarcheia, however, being
a minority, whose size or influence on the physiognomy of public space has always been
inversely proportional to cinematic activity. In other words, when the movement was at its
zenith, it was almost completely absent, and when the movement subsided, the gap in public
space was covered, among other things, by drug addicts. In any case, users have never been
in any phase of their history the dominant feature of the region (Exarchia as we said
earlier was never either Omonia or Vathi square) lived together without problems with
local residents and people movement and never naturally threatened the anarchist space in
terms of a physical threat to persons. Already in the 80s, even heroin users themselves
flirted with anarchist spearhead with which they come into contact and emblematic figures
(eg as Katerina Gogos, Nicolas Asimos) always had reason against the state, its cops which
they targeted as retailers and the drugs themselves that kept them captives and addicts.
Thus, minority users, while actually perceiving characteristics of the area and certainly
not competing with them, have been used by the media as an excuse to unleash their
familiar tremor-hysteria, paving the way for generalized pantomime and "Virtue" businesses
against us . The periods in which the drug phenomenon was generalized and became more
threatening and dangerous, as with the afflicted users slowly appeared traffickers, they
were always periods of preparation for repressive attacks or redevelopment of the square.
And the movement always claimed its neighborhood and always won it. Today comrades, a
deposed minority are us and the formerly harmless users have been replaced by the largest
drug trafficking platform, the most dangerous mafia in Athens. And not only that, we are
not only politically threatened as a place and, of course, as faces, but the anarchist
slogan "cops sell heroin" that even drug addicts have called, is now being attempted to be
replaced either by an arbitrary position for drugs in general and indefinitely in the name
of anti-toxophobia, or with a justification of those who sell them, and an indifference to
the inter-state activity as a minor issue.
At first, it is inconceivable that we can not discern the differences between the personal
use of substances (a condition which in itself raises huge debate) and the massive narco
culture that has transformed the competitive movements around the world into alternative
sites much more efficiently than did the state repression. And it is even more dangerous
to confuse (intentionally or unintentionally) the right to use with our scourge of the
establishment of the organized mafia in the environment we are moving. The fact that some
people enjoy the use of hashish can not be an alibi for the (maverick) mafias in Exarchia.
Like we drink, we eat, smoke, and dressing is not a contradiction that condemns us not to
criticize capitalism or to target the multinationals that produce the goods we consume. We
will not get involved in dialects of infants to cover our inadequacy to put them with the
daggers of our region.
Human experience, with its positivity or even its contradictions, is not to us of minor
importance, in connection with some vaguely revolutionary tasks. We do not want or can not
leave ourselves out of the conversation, speaking a false language that is not ours. If we
fight it we do just because we want to live. Because we have experienced in our life that
anyone who gives up, "whoever does not arm, dies." Whoever suits, dies. "He dies slowly -
slowly, eating ice cream in parks or mats, or in outrageous affections, or in an igloo
parody." Or, as the punks used to say, "Outside of us there is only death." We recognize
our contradictions and we know that we are dipped to the throat within them. Alas. And who
did not burn his hands in the fire of the world this way? However, we do not invest in our
contradictions, we do not build identity, desires, and what we propose to each other
around them, but on overcoming them. In their overcoming, which can happen through the
sharing of life and struggle. It may have been a decade since the revolt of 2008, and from
the Revolution an eternity separates us, but we will not even flag our defeat, resignation
and self-destruction. We will even fight against ourselves. and the revolution separates
us from eternity, but we will not even flag our defeat, resignation, and self-destruction.
We will even fight against ourselves. and the revolution separates us from eternity, but
we will not even flag our defeat, resignation, and self-destruction. We will even fight
against ourselves.
The view of the salaried metropolitans, immigrants and proletarians who, instead of being
organized, sell their work force to the mafias, and some of them finally go to the rival
camp, friends and acquaintances deprived of loneliness. We do not want to get used to the
sight of people dissolved on the sidewalk. We are hated by the overwhelming attitude of
those who feel superior to the "presses" simply because they are still standing on their
feet, but it saddens us that our fellow men do not manage to resist the loneliness that
surrounds us and to fight and even more frightens us that we do not manage to do anything
about them. We do not tolerate seeing people quenching, we do not enjoy when we feel that
we are losing our minds, we are not proud to lose friends from drug and frustration
cocktails. The fate that this world holds for us, we do not embrace it, because we are not
strong enough to defeat it, nor do we distract it as an alibi of distancing itself from
the fronts of the struggle. We struggle to live, we are struggling for a world without
surplus populations, which no man will spare. We are not the "toxic" of this society, we
are the most healthy part of it and we must be its embankments in the face of death and
horror.
To whom do Exarchia belong?
These distorted fantasies have created a reputation around Exarchia, which for the first
time in its history is very close to reality. Nowhere in Exarchia does anyone who seeks
to come into contact with movements and ideas, whoever wants to fight against capital,
state and its mechanisms, but whoever wants to exploit the supposed absence of these
mechanisms to sell drugs undisturbed, for to steal, to kill, to rape, to take on, to feel
strong on someone else, as well as to various unexplained consumers of money-borne
drugrock n violence culture, with a little exoticism from Morocco or Algeria before
returning to his safe somewhere in Central Europe, or in some suburb of Attica. Exarchia
therefore does not belong to them.
Exarchia does not belong to that portion of the inhabitants or bosses who, in good
cooperation with the state and the partisan, rub their hands for the future transformation
of the neighborhood into another super-consuming triangle, at the same time they break
their garments for "State of lawlessness" that prevails. Equalizing the mafias with the
struggling people, describing the situation as a war between rival gangs, while they know
well that the way for the "upgrading" of Exarcheia goes through the "downgrading", that
is, the complete alteration or even the extermination of the neighborhood features. They
know it well because at the beginning of the 2000s, we were the ones that we threw out of
the square. And these, and their concrete mixers, and their cement,
Exarchia is not owned by the state and the forces of repression that set up operations
with surgical precision, capturing as many as a few drug traffickers according to the
balance of forces they want to secure, producing a work capable of rendering them
necessary in the eyes of terrified residents but improbably incapable of putting at risk
one of the biggest business of the era.
Exarchia belong to the residents who fought together against the redevelopment of the
square, against the installation of mobile telephony antennas. The inhabitants who had so
many years back when the area where they lived became a focus of social and class
struggle, inhaling tons of chemicals that might have been resent when accidentally burning
the car or risking their home, but still remaining in Exarchia, opening up to us their
doors to hide and feel proud of their neighborhood. Those who are now being expelled from
companies that buy massive apartments and apartment buildings and the gangs that threaten
them directly. Exarchia belong to us, that is to the movement. Not because we were more
bastards to take, but why we fought for them. Because when we thought it was necessary, we
defended our presence, our speech, our action and nearly every decade with the blood of
one of us. That is why we define the characteristics of our neighborhood, the living space
of the struggling people. Because if we do not do it, the mafias and all sorts of dwarfs
will do it.
We, the world of resistance, self-organization, and solidarity, define what behaviors are
tolerated and what is against what we believe, who fits among us and who with its culture
stands opposite to us, as we do in our occupations, our assemblies and our paths. And
for years we have decided that Exarchia does not have room for ruffians, fascists,
paratroopers, rapists and bullies.
Exarchia and the Polytechnic were never "unobtrusive." It was never an asylum that the
state gave us. It was and is an established land. And we do not intend to surrender it to
anyone unarmed. Exarchia has History. A history of 80 years since the students were
shooting the fortress-guards who were fortified in Kolonaki. 40 years since fighters fell
dead under the jungle tanks. 10 years since we experienced the unique generalized social
uprising of our time. We have history. And we do not intend to be that generation that has
inherited a region with a racing past of nearly a century and handed it over in less than
5 years to the enemy-the state, the partisan and their minions.
REAR CABINETS - FRONT FOOTWEAR
Y.K. From Exarchia Square to Polytechnic they are less than 500 meters away. At this
distance, apart from the clearings of accounts that leave behind the dead on the sidewalks
and are now a monthly routine, there have been 2 rape attempts and 4 other (known)
murderous attacks in recent months. Always against the one perceived - based on the
perpetrator's criterion - as an easy target, as a weak ... a woman, an elder, a lone
passer. We are writing slogans on the walls "Do not get used to death". And yet we seem to
have become accustomed to it. Political death and biological death. How much more blood
should run to mobilize?
Y.K. 2 This text is touching on issues such as what is force of violence and what is anti
-bia, what is drugs, what is a metropolis and what is margin, what is protection and what
does organization mean. Issues that have been more or less open to discussions that took
place in the last month in the Polytechnic between comrades. At the same time some people
were screaming and some others were stabbing passers-by. The important and essential thing
for us, what we have tried to highlight, is not so much the positions as one of us can
have and on which we agree or disagree, the fact that we will soon have neither the
geographical space , nor the political possibility of being, discussing and agreeing or
disagreeing.
Anarchists
https://ipposd.wordpress.com/2018/11/09
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