Anarchic update news all over the world - 26.08.2019

Today's Topics:

   
1.  Czech, afed.cz: Lessons from government repression - A small
      summary of the situation after the August protests in Russia by
      Mikola Dziadoka [machine translation] (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
   
2.  Aotearoa Workers Solidarity Movement awsm.nz: Brexit -
      Against Britain and Europe (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
   
3.  [Basque Country] Anark Herraia: CommuniquéHerria: "We
      condemn the G7" By ANA (pt) [machine translation]
      (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
   
4.  [Espanha] Passeio libertário por Zamora By A.N.A. (ca, en)
      [machine translation] (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
  
 5.  anarkismo.net: London Anarchist Communist Group - "The
      soldier has fallen": Mandla Khoza, ZACF anarchist-communist and
      Swaziland activist, 22 May 1974-26 July 2019 
     (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)


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Message: 1





Summer in Russia is marked by mass protests against discrimination against Putin's 
opposition. The text of our friend Mikola relates to these events, but the "lessons" from 
their course have a more general overlap (even if we consider the soft version of protests 
in our country, for example). ---- On Saturday, August 3, 2019, one of the biggest 
protests took place in Moscow, where 1001 people were arrested. In Russia, as in Belarus, 
autocratic governments are spending enormous means to suppress any popular protest, and it 
is good to learn from the experience of Moscow and then to make the protests more 
effective. ---- It is quite obvious that the government has prepared itself very 
thoroughly. Somewhere up there are people who aren't stupid at all and could imagine what 
they were going to do and how to deal with it effectively. They did not do so by simply 
launching a lot of heavy-garrisons into the streets to beat up and scatter everyone. They 
used a whole complex of thoughtful and complementary means.

The experience can be briefly summarized in the following points:

1. Cops are afraid they will stop being anonymous. In the last protest, unlike the 
previous one, they were disguised, because those who showed their faces last time were 
naming themselves on social networks. They are worried about their personal security and 
are increasingly aware of their own vulnerability. It is well. It is also interesting that 
the police-propaganda policeman persuaded protesters to break up by appealing to national 
unity: "Dear citizens, do not disturb public order. The Russian National Guard is on duty 
to ensure your safety. Most of them are your sons. Do not disturb public order and law. 
"This is what we often hear in Minsk from the" moderate opposition ", various 
spokespersons and compromise seekers who come out of the holes as soon as the throne 
shakes under Lukashenko. But this is a separate topic.

2. The government does not really save on its measures: in addition to tens of thousands 
of cops, for example, it uses helicopters. Private companies are also being pressured by 
pressure: YouDrive, a car-sharing company, refused to leave cars in places of protest; 
operators turned off mobile internet and internet in cafes.

3. A lot of activities have been initiated by the police virtually: attacking opposition 
sites; activated pro-government trolls in comments and groups on social networks; 
intensified rumors...

4. As always, the government is afraid of radicalizing protests. They checked bags for 
casual passersby and looked for anything that could be used as a weapon. They rated 
middle-aged men as a risky category. This fact speaks for itself.

5. The detainees shall be mobilized for two weeks on the pretext that this is evidence in 
a criminal case. They are trying to get into them (equipment for this activity is supplied 
to authoritarian countries by Israeli and Chinese firms). Encrypt all mobile devices! 
Update your operating system in time.

6. Without hesitation, criminal cases are launched with the sole purpose of intimidating: 
we will deprive anyone of a cozy home and family and put them in a prison cell for years.

Lessons learned:

1. Decentralized protests work. Generally, with the same number of people, the government 
has to spend more than centralized protests to suppress such organized protests.

2. However, legal mechanisms do not work. Do not let detainees be detained? To beat those 
who do not resist, not to provide medical help, to take fingerprints by force? It is easy. 
Hajzl with ranks do not protect the law, but the elites' privileges, their power and 
property. Therefore, direct, insolent and protracted violations of the law do not become a 
case. And it logically follows that attempting to keep protest and self-activity within 
the law, indefinitely invoking the law as a higher value, and thereby exposing as 
"provocateurs" protesters who break the law (it is the representatives of systemic 
opposition doing it) and myopia. It's like trying to win by the rules of your enemy. So 
all the pathetic declamation of the constitution to members of the riot squads is very 
nice, but naive and irrelevant.

Of course, this does not mean that violence must be used headlessly. Just remember that we 
have an a priori right to self-defense.

Finally, it is important to mention that among the fizzy was spotted former deputy 
commander of Berkut (Ukrainian police intervention unit) Sergei Kusyuk, characterized by 
unprecedented brutality in the suppression of Majdan, who fled Ukraine. The Russian 
government is smart, hiring those who have burned bridges behind. This man has nowhere to 
run and hide. If the regime in Russia fell, such as he awaits death or life. That is why 
his fingernails will fight for this government to the very end. Such monsters must be 
properly confronted by all who are also determined to fight to the end - but on the good 
side. So the lesson is simple: get ready.

Source: https://avtonom.org/author_columns/uroki-moskovskih-protestov


https://www.afed.cz/text/7013/pouceni-z-vladnich-represi

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Message: 2





Analysis of Brexit from an Anarcho-syndicalist, World Systems Analysis perspective arguing 
that both the EU and the British state must be opposed. ---- In 2016 the British public 
voted in a referendum to leave the European Union. Now the British state is clamoring to 
secure some kind of exit from the supranational institution. Theresa May's successive 
attempts at scoring a deal failed, one by one, eventually leading to her resignation as 
Prime Minister and the ascent of Boris Johnson to the office. Johnson has promised to 
carry out the exit by October 31st, even if it means not striking a deal with the EU over 
how to handle trade with Europe, protections of Brits living in other European countries, 
and the flow of goods through Britain from and to Europe.

Despite the nationalist and xenophobic bent to the leave vote leftists have taken to the 
leave campaign, arguing that it is a needed step in fighting neoliberal attacks by capital 
against labor and the environment. This conception of the EU as a mechanism of capital 
against social change goes back to the 60s when socialists believed that EU legislation 
would prevent nationalization of industry. Thus leftists have called for "Lexit", i.e. 
British exit from the EU on the basis of popular movements against neoliberal policy and 
for democracy and equality. For the British population who voted leave, the issue is two 
fold. Firstly, the EU as a bureaucratic institution, seemingly above the member states 
themselves, has fueled the sentiment that the EU is a barrier to national sovereignty. 
Second, tied to this conception of national sovereignty is the idea that the EU's 
authority will, is, or could force Britain to take in migrants and immigrants.

Thus the choice seems to be between Brexit for leftist, or reactionary reasons, or 
remaining in the EU for stability, economic, or social equality reasons. This choice is a 
false one. The reason on the part of the British ruling class for leaving is that EU 
imposed regulations that protect labor and the environment would no longer hold capital 
back from exploiting the former two. Yet the EU is not a mechanism that protects labor and 
the environment from capital, nor is it a mechanism of democracy.

The EU was created during the cold war as 1; a bulwark of states against the threat of the 
Soviet Union and 2; a pan-European institution for the development of the common 
accumulation of capital in the world economy. With the end of the Cold War the EU's 
function has turned fully to the latter, especially in the late 20th century when Europe's 
production of surplus value.1 severely declined. The EU being an institution of the 
capitalist world economy, as all political institutions are, has come to favor the core 
states that control the profitable industries, as a mechanism of control against the 
peripheral states which control the least profitable industries and thus have the weakest 
political and economic control (Germany's domination of the EU is well known, for 
example). It is thus a bureaucracy over the European working class that facilitates the 
exploitation of the former by capital. The EU even imposes austerity policies on it's 
member states.

Despite the EU's function as a bulwark over workers in favor of capital Lexit is not a 
meaningful path to positive social change. What Lexit seems to ignore, forget, or both, is 
that the British state is no less a bulwark over labor, for capital, than the EU. It's 
hard to believe that a former colonial power, which produced the leading figure of the 
neoliberal offensive against labor in Thatcher, and who's labor party has been controlled 
by the right for years, achieving autonomy against the EU will somehow lead to social justice.

Of coarse the desire for national autonomy is a farce. In the first place Britain is not 
one of the peripheral states that the EU exploits through loans. Nationalism, when all is 
said and done, is an ideological mechanism of legitimization for the capitalist state, 
itself the political unit of the capitalist world economy, itself based on the 
exploitation of labor by capital. Equally obvious is the fact that the demonisation of 
immigrants and migrants is based on the racist nationalist ideology that those who are not 
arbitrarily designated as "citizens" are fundamentally different than us and a threat to us.

The Brexit situation is fundamentally one of the interstate system of the capitalist world 
economy. The British state and the EU are doing and will do only what is in their 
interests as units of that world economy. Meanwhile the situation is further fueled by 
nationalist ideology, racism, and public alienation from the EU bureaucracy. There is no 
horse in this race for popular transformation of society towards democracy and equality. 
As an alternative to leaving, or staying, an international socialist movement should be 
built up on the European continent. This movement should be created through and facilitate 
the direct action of workers against the British State and the EU bureaucracy, and the 
capitalist world economy as a whole, in the interest of workers and oppressed peoples as a 
whole.

1. Surplus value is the mass of commodities produced by workers which are then extracted 
by capitalist firms to be sold on the market.

https://awsm.nz/?p=3429

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Message: 3






The G7 Dome in Biarritz does indeed create an exception state in a part of Euskal 
Herria[Basque Country]. This police and military occupation is causing the local 
population to see limited freedom of movement and expression. ---- 13,200 French police, 
2,800 Spaniards and 4,000 Basques collaborate to restrict the civil rights of the Basque 
population and anyone passing through this part of the Basque territory. Biarritz Airport 
is closed to society and is occupied militarily, most of the closed Lapurdi, Biarritz and 
surrounding train stations are taken by police and their access controlled through limited 
passages, sports fields and schools have been militarized, communications are tightly 
controlled, Hendaya's detention center for migrants serves as a place of custody, and 
Bayona Prison has been emptied for future detainees. These are just a few examples of what 
this exception state assumes. There have already been five arrests and a journalist was 
"preemptively" expelled from French territory.

This increase in authoritarianism on the part of states is no exception, it is the 
tendency of current global capitalism that considers the freedoms of bourgeois formal 
democracy that old capitalism establishes in the territories where it seems useful and 
necessary for its development to be obsolete. Anarkherria is aware of the danger of this 
rise of authoritarianism in the European states. We condemn the G7, not only for what it 
supposes as a state of exception, but as a sign of this totalitarian tendency that 
pervades the bourgeois formal democracies.

Given this, Anarkherria advocates for real neighborhood-based democracy and meeting in a 
free and egalitarian Basque country.

Anarkherria , August 22, 2019.

Source: http://sareantifaxista.blogspot.com/2019/08/g7-biarritz-ananher-communicate.html

Translation> Sol de Abril

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Message: 4






Na tarde da sexta-feira, 16 de agosto, as ruas de Zamora acolheram a atividade cultural 
"Um passeio libertário. Percurso caminhando pelos lugares emblemáticos do movimento 
libertário histórico zamorano". ---- Foi um ameno passeio, rememorando os lugares urbanos 
onde o anarquismo e o movimento obreiro deixaram sua marca na história e nas pessoas de 
Zamora. Visitaram suas ruas, sedes e edifícios, rememorando greves, escritos, ofícios, ou 
suas criações literárias, assim como seus nomes e as propostas que desenvolveram para 
tentar melhorar a sociedade. Um divertido percurso entre histórias e vivências, guiados 
por especialistas nesta pesquisa. ---- Atenderam ao chamado um bom grupo de interessados, 
desejosos de conhecer a história ácrata zamorana, recordando destacadas figuras históricas 
como: Visitación e Baltasar Lobo, Agustín García Calvo, José Durán, Jacinto Torhyo, 
Palmira San Juán, Antonio Vara Calvo, os irmãos Lobato Quevedo, José López Martín ou José 
Justo Bruna.

  Além dos movimentos libertários na cidade, se repassou brevemente a força de sua gente 
no mundo rural, por exemplo: entre os obreiros da construção da via-férrea nos túneis 
sanabreses nos anos 30, na obra do Salto del Esla ou nos trabalhadores do viaduto Martín 
Gil; assim como a força sindical em algumas localidades tais como Villalpando, Losacio de 
Alba, Requejo, Lubián, Vigo de Sanabria ou nas partidas do maquis anti-franquistas.

  O ato terminou junto ao monólito do parque de Olivares, onde se homenageou os 
represaliados pelo franquismo, tocando umas peças musicais o cantautor Buterflai.

  A iniciativa partiu da organização do XII Encontro do livro de Salamanca, interessado em 
divulgar nesta edição a tradição libertária zamorana, mediante uma divertida atividade 
informativa.

  Fonte: https://www.cnt.es/noticias/paseo-libertario-por-zamora/

Tradução > Sol de Abril

agência de notícias anarquistas-ana

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Message: 5






Comrade Mandla Khoza (or "MK," as his friends and comrades knew him) passed away on Friday 
26 July in his home town of Siphofaneni, Swaziland (Eswatini). He had long suffered from 
sugar diabetes. He leaves behind four children. One of the pioneering members of the 
Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Federation (ZACF) (Zabalaza News) founded in South Africa on 
May Day 2003, MK was committed to a social revolution that would place power and wealth in 
the hands of the working class, the peasants and the poor. As he would often say: "It 
doesn't matter if you change who sits on the throne: you have to get rid of the throne 
itself." This obituary commemorates his life as a militant. ---- MK was born on the 22 May 
1974 in Swaziland, a small country in the iron grip of the Swazi royal family under the 
Tinkhundla regime, and economically dominated by neighbouring South Africa as well as by 
Britain. Siphofaneni is near the large town of Manzini, and close to the sugar cane 
plantations. Like many Swazis, MK came to South Africa to escape the grinding poverty of 
his homeland. MK and his cousin, Mandla Dlamini (also a pioneering ZACF member), worked at 
a Coca Cola factory but lost their jobs. The two were living in the Motsoaledi squatter 
camp in Soweto, Johannesburg by 2001. Here, Mandla Dlamini's father ran a spaza shop[1]and 
shebeen[2]from his house, and the two young men assisted. A friend remembers that "The two 
cousins used to assist school kids with school work, help neighbours with chores and were 
appreciated by people."

They joined with South African comrades to form the anarchist Black Action Group in 
Motsoaledi around this time, which helped found the ZACF in 2003. Together, these comrades 
also founded the Phambili Motsoaledi Community Project in the squatter camp (in 2002), 
which ran a food garden, library and meeting centre, a newsletter called "Vuka 
Motsoaledi," and subsequently, a community action structure called the Motsoaledi 
Concerned Residents (MCR; founded 2005). Like the ZACF, with which these two structures 
were closely linked, these were part of the Anti-Privatisation Forum (APF). The APF was a 
broad coalition of unions, township groups and left formations, founded in 2000: it 
covered much of Gauteng province, Africa's industrial heartland, including Soweto.

MK periodically returned to Swaziland, where the ZACF built a small presence and 
distributed materials. For example, in 2003 ZACF was in contact with dissidents in the 
Swaziland Youth Congress (SWAYOCO), youth wing of the banned People's United Democratic 
Movement (PUDEMO). Some young and upcoming revolutionaries were interested in moving 
beyond a reformist agenda. On one occasion, a South African ZACF comrade was arrested at 
the border gate on the Swazi side, coming from a May Day rally in Swaziland, and carrying 
anarchist political materials.

MK got involved in the Swaziland underground opposition movement, joining SWAYOCO to 
promote anarchism. While ZACF was clear that a parliamentary democracy would not solve the 
problems in the country, it would be preferable to the dictatorship, and open space for 
more struggle. Therefore, it argued for democratic reforms, including an end to the 
Tinkhundla regime, political amnesty, the abolition of chiefly privileges, gender equality 
and land reform, full union rights and a living wage campaign in the plantations, 
factories and farms as steps towards a counter-power that could make more radical changes.[3]

 From around 2005, MK and his cousin Mandla Dlamini began to spend most of their time in 
Swaziland, despite the extremely difficult conditions. For example, on Saturday 1 October 
2005, MK was involved in a SWAYOCO demonstration in Mazini against the absolutist system 
headed by King Mswati III, which was attacked by the Royal Swazi Police. He was among the 
eight SWAYOCO activists arrested that day, held at Zaklehe Detention Centre on charges of 
disturbing the peace. Following pressure from below, the eight were released on bail, 
appearing in court on 7 November.

Further pressure came when the ZACF was falsely accused in the Swazi press in early 2006 
of bombing police vehicles. ZACF argued against the turn to armed struggle that was 
drawing in some of the underground, arguing for a mass popular movement, including the 
unions. It advocated struggle "to go beyond the usual bourgeois betrayal and involve a 
destruction of the Swazi capitalist state and its replacement by decentralised popular 
assemblies".[4]Nonetheless it campaigned in solidarity with those jailed for such actions, 
stressing that desperate steps were a response to the oppression that tormented the 
kingdom. Repression mounted, with regular arrests and trials of PUDEMO and SWAYOCO 
activists, often based on bogus charges of "terrorism." At one point MK was forced to go 
into hiding across the border, in South Africa's Mpumalanga province, due to ongoing 
harassment and intimidation for his political activities by the Swazi Special Branch.

MK was in South Africa to attend the December 2007 ZACF congress, which restructured the 
organisation to streamline its operations.[5]One of the major decisions was to replace the 
ZACF's awkward multi-country structure straddling South Africa and Swaziland with an 
autonomous Swaziland anarchist group, allied to ZACF. He participated in the next ZACF 
congress, a year later, reporting modest progress.

An anarchist study circle was formed in Siphofaneni with SWAYOCO comrades. There were 
numerous trips by Johannesburg-based comrades into Swaziland, bringing in material, 
maintaining contact and meeting people from PUDEMO and SWAYOCO. MK wanted to start a 
community project, for oppressed and exploited people. He felt a deep sense of duty. He 
was interviewed in a 2007 documentary on the Swazi democracy movement, "Without the King," 
as a masked "Anonymous Political Activist." He stated "It's very, very tough for us 
here... I have to change the system because I can't leave here. If I can leave, what about 
other people, what can they do? We must fight together to change the system so that 
everything will come right here."

His position was that of a revolutionary: "If we were governing ourselves, we could be 
organised.... There is nowhere the government machinery is helping. If it's not for the 
World Food Programme's food, we could be died[dead]a long, long time ago... He's[King 
Mswati III's]having everything. He earns and controls everything... the people themselves 
must understand what the government's doing to them, then the people themselves, they'll 
reject the elements in the government that are suppressive or oppressive to them. When 
they reject them, that will mean that they want to overthrow the government."

The interview can be seen here: https://youtu.be/12YAgDa0xqY

Results of these years of militancy were limited, and times were always tough: MK was 
unemployed and poor, and sought ways to make a living, while struggling with illness. In 
recent years contact became more sporadic. His passing on is a lesson that we are strong 
through each other, that we must take care of each other and hear each other. MK knew, a 
friend recalls, that for people to be free they have to do it themselves: "that's why he 
was anarchist-communist and didn't believe in replacing one government by another one."

Notes:
[1]spaza shop: informal convenience store, involved in petty trade
[2]shebeen: informal tavern
[3]ZACF, 26 January 2006, "Solidarity with the pro-democratic movement in Swaziland, " 
http://anarkismo.net/article/2195
[4]ZACF letter to the Editor, "Times of Swaziland," January 18, 2006: 
http://anarkismo.net/article/15535
[5]The ZACF was founded as the Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Federation, but reconstituted 
as the Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front at this congress, reflecting the tighter structure.

Verwandter Link: http://zabalaza.net

http://anarkismo.net/article/31514

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