#Worldwide Information Blogger #LucSchrijvers: Update: #anarchist information from all over the #world - FRIDAY 17 JULY 2020

Today's Topics:

   
1.  Greece, rocinante: ncements - The government, advancing its
      plans for further integration of the State [machine translation]
      (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
   
2.  Czech, AFED: Police killing and settler state by Peter
      Gelderloos [machine translation] (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
   
3.  Britain, Leeds Solidarity Federation: What a Japanese
      Anarchist taught me about British politics (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
   
4.  Greece, anarchist group "bad horse" APO: [Patra] New March
      against state repression. On the streets to defend our struggles
      [machine translation] (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)


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Message: 1



...as a true defender of the "law and order" doctrine, expects the bill to be put to a direct vote against the rallies in a time choice that
is not just coincidental. ---- Recently, a number of PNPs have been imposed that have enabled employers to turn the health crisis into a
financial opportunity and employees to bear the brunt of the damage. Respectively, the deeply racist policy of refusing to include in the
asylum process those refugees and immigrants who come inside the country, their confinement within the Greek territory as well as the
eviction of refugee families from camps and their violent treatment within the city was followed as in Victoria Square.
However, this agenda of the attack launched by the government does not stop there as with the "environmental" law huge areas of greenery and
some of them characterized as Natura are destroyed for the benefit of privatization, profitability and development. For similar reasons, the
center of Athens is transformed into an urban ghetto with the entrance of the "big walk". The new design delivers the center of Athens to
tourists and shopkeepers away from any need of today's residents, just as will happen with the "park" under construction in Elliniko.

But society has reacted to each of these reforms and to the policy as a whole. Either through the struggles that took place in the middle of
quarantine in the workplaces, or with the direct and practical solidarity of the refugees found on the street, or even with the actions that
are carried out on a nationwide scale against the privatization of public goods.

The government fears this move, dropping a bill that silences any foreign voice from the one it wants to hear, suppressing any form of
spontaneous demonstration and shutting society within walls and barbed wire that looks like a disciplined camp. The social forces will not
let the State decide when it is good to demonstrate, on what terms and for what purpose. Demonstrations, rallies and any form of protest are
expressions of the social movement, they certainly have no representatives and we will certainly not let anyone or anyone be criminalized by
the letter of the law because he chooses to resist the misery that the rulers dream of as everyday.

The Rosinande Anarcho-Syndical Initiative invites and participates in the demonstration on the day of the vote against the criminalization
of the rallies on Thursday (09/07), at 19:00 in the Propylaea in Athens and supports the demonstration at the statue of Venizelos at the
same time in Thessaloniki.

http://rocinante.gr/den-tha-afisoume-tin-kivernisi-na-kirixi-siopitirio-gia-tis-politikes-tis-olesi-stis-diadilosis-enantia-ston-nomo-chrisocho%CE%90di-1900-propilea-kamara/

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Message: 2



Peter Gelderloos writes about the history of settler states in the context of today's racism. ---- In a new article for Freedom written
following anti-racist protests which have reverberated around the globe, Peter Gelderloos considers how history acts to inflect today's
racism in the US, UK and settler colonial states worldwide. ---- As many people have pointed out in the weeks of international revolt that
have spread outwards from Minneapolis since the police murder of George Floyd on May 25th, systemic racism requires systemic solutions.
While police rally to defend their right to murder and abuse whomever they choose, the myth of the "bad apples" is finally being put to
rest, as is the notion that racism is a question of individual prejudice rather than of how society itself is constructed. Understanding and
dismantling racism on the society-wide level requires understanding the history of how it was constructed in the first place.

People in the streets have already been pulling at the threads of this history, when they dumped the statue of British slave-trader Edward
Colston into Bristol Harbour, or when they set fire to the Daughters of the Confederacy building in Richmond, Virginia.

The Bristol rioters were particularly eloquent in their gesture, because of how lucidly this one act revealed the construction of racism to
be an international affair that went hand in hand with colonisation and the expansion of capitalism.

BLM signs near the empty plinth formerly topped by a statue of slaver Edward Colston
The lesson is particularly important, because there is a quiet battle being waged amidst all the solidarity protests, particularly in
Europe. In large part, there is a discrepancy between the white voices that have typically controlled progressive and anti-capitalist
movements in Europe, who profess support for the victims of barbarous North American racism while paying mere lip service to the fight
against racism in Europe; and predominantly racialised activists who want to extend the rebellion, commemorating police victims and
targeting racist structures in the very cities where they live.

This discrepancy is significant, because the European mainstream systematically consumes the spectacle of racism in the US in order to
reproduce its self-image as a more gentle, progressive, and civilised place. And this self-image has always been at the center of Europe's
racist drive towards colonialism and neocolonialism. It is a handy alibi that covers up a number of shocking realities, like the facts that
21% of black people in Ireland had been assaulted six times or more in the prior five years due to their skin color or immigrant status,
that nine out of 10 people in the Czech Republic say they would not want a Romani neighbor, or that half of Germans believe Romani and Sinti
people are to blame for the discrimination they face, and an equal number believe there are "too many" Muslims in the country. Across
Europe, police kill people of colour at the same or more disproportionate rates than in the US, though the statistics are hard to come by
because they often don't compile information on the victims.

Of course, US police kill many more people every year than the police of any other wealthy country. Is that an effective measure for more
racism, meaning other countries are less racist, and therefore the problem is less urgent?

Invade, supplant, exploit
The death tolls inflicted by US police cannot be understood without grasping the history of police in the US, which requires analysing the
history of the country itself. Ultimately, three characteristics explain the way the police operate in the US: it is a settler state, with a
significant portion of indigenous inhabitants, that historically had an economy based on the enslavement of Africans.

Point by point. A settler state is a type of colonial society in which the so-called mother country or metropole tries to replace the
indigenous population with waves of immigrants and genocide, to essentially create a copy of the colonising country on another continent.
Settler states are, or aim to be, majority white. Examples include the US, Canada, Argentina, Australia, and New Zealand. Chile is an
interesting case because the Spanish tried to make it a settler state, but effective armed resistance by the Mapuche kept a huge territory
off-limits to them.

Settler states, therefore, are based on a lie; they have to create an alibi for all the white descendants of genocide. The more indigenous
survivors there are, the more that alibi gets interrupted.

Finally, while all colonies and really all capitalist societies force people to work one way or another, some colonies relied on the
enslavement of Africans to provide their labour force. A couple things are worth pointing out. Though many states throughout history have
practiced some form of slavery, the so-called chattel slavery that Europe inflicted on Africa during the Triangular Trade period was the
most brutal form to have existed in human history. Furthermore, it was a global system organised by European powers and settler colonies,
and ethical responsibility was shared across the entire system, from the plantations where people were forced to work, to the industrial
areas that refined the raw materials produced on the plantations, to the financial centers that reaped the benefits of the Triangular Trade.

The colonies that would form Canada did not practice slavery, while many of the 13 colonies that would form the United States did. All of
these were colonies of Great Britain, one of the main organisers of the slave trade, they were ethically equivalent, but the northernmost
colonies were not suited to plantation economies. The brutality of slavery undoubtedly created intergenerational traumas among those who
survived it, and among those who oversaw the practice, a sociopathic lack of empathy that could also leave its mark on future generations.
But the bookkeepers and financiers who learned to profit off it without ever seeing its ugliness up close surely also developed their own
ensembles of psychological evasion; moreover, these techniques would provide advantages in a capitalist economy in any age.

Without ignoring that white supremacy, historically, has been every bit as present in the London Stock Exchange as on a Louisiana
plantation, we can acknowledge the particular effects of its brutality that guide social organisation in a post-slavery settler state. So
how do these three characteristics combine to create especially murderous police forces today? It has already been widely mentioned how
policing in the US originated out of slave patrols. But this needs to be considered in tandem with another fact: nearly the entirety of
territorial expansion, the creation of the United States on lands where hundreds of indigenous nations existed, was accomplished in large
part by paramilitary groups of settlers waging terrorist campaigns against "soft targets."

Furthermore, this is a history that continues into the present. Though settler states maintain the myth that colonisation and land theft
were an evil from the distant past, land theft, resource theft, and environmental racism are frequent occurrences that repeat up to the
present day in the history of any indigenous nation. Likewise, in every settler state with an economy based on the enslavement of Africans,
when slavery was abolished, the state instituted other measures to keep the hierarchy intact. Freed slaves were not allowed to keep the
estates they worked with their labour, they were not given reparations, they were not given hundreds of years of back wages. Instead they
were terrorised, dispossessed, surveilled, and managed-in a word, policed-so that they would continue playing the same economic functions
and occupying the same place at the bottom of the social hierarchy as they had under slavery.

The fundamental role of all coppers
The implications are clear. Policing is fundamental to the existence of US society, and the form that policing takes is completely tied to a
necropolitical intervention designed to inflict social death on Black and indigenous people. The daily murders carried out by police are
just one of a broader set of violent measures that preserve racist hierarchies that have remained intact since the days of slavery and
"Indian Wars". Other policies that continuously impoverish racialised communities, while preserving white political dominance, include
gentrification and redlining, the War on Drugs, and turning indigenous land and black neighborhoods into energy sacrifice zones. The results
of all this structural racism has come to the fore amidst the disproportionate death tolls of COVID-19. Simply put, a settler state, created
through genocide and enslavement, must be constantly prepared to subject entire sectors of its population to lethal conditions if they do
not conform to the ideals of white citizenship (which, by their nature, are exclusive and competitive, and so, by definition, cannot offer
protection to everyone).

The killing of Mark Duggan sparked riots in London in 2011
Police in European social democracies also murder, and their targets are also disproportionately people of colour, but the murders happen at
a much lower frequency because their particular history of social control points to the possibility of integrating marginalised or exploited
populations through bureaucratic dependencies, redistributing a part of the wealth stolen through racist processes in other parts of the
world. Europe's colonies have always been external, kept at a comfortable distance, whereas the US is wholly constituted by the violence of
colonialism. This is why one system keeps the peace with healthcare or welfare checks, and the other keeps the peace with bullets.

The racist disproportions in policing and imprisonment are present everywhere, but they occur at a much higher scale and frequency in the
US. In the US, black people are 12% of the total population, and 33% of the prison population; in the UK, they are 3% of the total
population and 12% of the prison population (disproportions of a factor of 3 and 4, respectively). In Australia, it is even more extreme,
with Aboriginal peoples making up 2.4% of the general population and more than 25% of the prison population. As for deaths in police
custody, it's 12 for every 100,000 arrests in the US, five deaths for every 100,000 arrests in Australia, and two for every 100,000 arrests
in the UK. It is worth noting that Australia practiced legal slavery through the 1950s, but unlike the US, its population is white by an
overwhelming majority, due in large part to extremely racist immigration policies that historically has been designed to only allow the
immigration of white people.

In Spain, statistics are notoriously hard to come by, a reflection of official avoidance of the problem. An incomplete survey reveals that
nearly all deaths in police custody are people of colour. And one study on police stops in Madrid found that nearly every person of color
was stopped on the basis of racial profiling, and 42% reported being subjected to racist insults or physical violence. Practically the only
category where the US leads is in the total number of police killings, and not in other measurements of discrimination.

To find a place where the scale of police violence is similar to that of the US, we have to look to another major country that fits all
three criteria: a settler state, a significant surviving indigenous population, and an economy historically based on the enslavement of
Africans. The main country that fits that bill is Brazil, where police killings certainly rival those in the US. Brazilian cops killed more
than 4,000 people in 2016, whereas US cops killed over 1,000, and possibly as many as 1,300. The higher rates in Brazil are likely related
to that country's greater material poverty, as systemic oppressions are intersectional and police are likely to target people for reasons of
economic class, immigration status, mental health, and gender identity, as well as race. In any case, the frequency of killings by police in
the US and Brazil is on the same order of magnitude, which is not the case for countries like the UK or Australia. And in Brazil, such
killings undoubtedly show a racist disproportion: in Rio de Janeiro, whites make up half the total population, and only 12% of police victims.

Understanding the history of police, as well as the direct relation in the US between increasing police funding and decreasing social
services, makes it clear that abolishing the police is a more realistic proposal than reform. Body cameras and review boards have not
decreased police murders, and it seems that only riots have ever led to police accountability. Meanwhile, the push towards community
policing after the last wave of major uprisings in the US only increased the effectiveness and violence of police interventions into
racialised communities.

Understanding how the history and the behavior of the police is part and parcel of the history of a country as a whole-in the case of the US
a genocidal settler state with an economy historically based on enslavement-favors an anticolonial view in which piecemeal change is
impossible. The police do not do what they do by accident. We cannot realistically address their violence without also addressing the
ongoing ramifications of colonisation and enslavement, across questions of land, the distribution of wealth and legitimacy, wage labour,
health, education, and more.

At the same time, the existence of capitalist states that have been fully complicit in the global structures of white supremacy, yet do not
make such an active use of the police in their strategy for social control, should make us suspicious of any proposals for defunding the
police that come from the government itself. We need to clearly link the calls for police abolition to an all-encompassing vision of change.

Beyond velvet cuffs
When we struggle effectively, the state will begin to throw reforms our way, and we can certainly accept and appreciate things like
healthcare and daycare, or mental health and gender violence first responders who won't make the situation worse. But we also need to be
aware of the ways states can use social services to impose dependency and surveillance, undermining community autonomy.

We can better find our way through this maze of traps and pitfalls with an international network of struggles, each fighting the local
manifestations of racism and other oppressions, understanding how those evolved, and how they fit into global structures. By communicating
what we learn, we can stay ahead of the curve, knowing what to expect from reforms or repressive strategies that have already been
implemented elsewhere, while also sharing the enthusiasm and inspiration of these revolts, pointing out common enemies so that our
resistance jumps across the borders they have imposed to contain it.

Racism is every bit as international as the corporations that steal resources and exploit sweatshop labourers in the Global South, or as the
networks of educational institutions and media companies that reproduce the myth of Western civilization. It has different aspects in
different places, but the fight against racism is and must be global, just as it must be an integral part of the fight against capitalism.

Peter Gelderloos is an anarchist and author of several books, including Anarchy Works, The Failure of Nonviolence, and Worshiping Power: An
Anarchist View of Early State Formation. He has lived in Catalunya since 2007.

Main pic: Police show of some of their military-style gear in front of BLM protesters in Seattle, by SounderBruce

Source with lots of links to the data used:
https://freedomnews.org.uk/police-killings-and-the-settler-state/

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Message: 3



At the start of the 20th Century, Japan was in a state of technological, cultural and political acceleration. As a nation, it had been
forced to open itself up to the outside world just 50 years beforehand, but it remained deeply conservative and authoritarian in many ways.
Modern Britain is of course a vastly different context, but both share a deep-rooted deference to traditional power structures, often not
shared by their neighbours (obvious from any time someone proposes abolishing the monarchy). The Japan of this era also had some degree of
parliamentary democracy, though just like modern Britain, its representatives were largely pawns of the ruling class or powerless to achieve
anything against the might of the establishment.
But this did not mean that radical elements could not exist there any more then than they do now in British culture. As British anarchist
John Crump put it, "because Japan was such a highly conformist society, so the reaction against conformity was all the more intense when it
occurred". It was in this small-scale, but fiery and radical context that Kotoku Shusui emerged as a thinker and writer. He is relatively
unknown even among anarchists and the Japanese, but he fascinated me because of his writings on party politics, and the broader nature of
political power.
What is so interesting about Kotoku is that, because the movements and ideas he involved himself with were so new to Japan, he was
essentially living through decades of ideological development in only a few years, while radicals rapidly worked out their goals and means
of action. In fact, his political transformation was so drastic that he was the first Japanese translator of both Marx's Communist
Manifesto, and Kropotkin's Conquest of Bread.
He was first enticed by social democracy as a young, liberal journalist - believing that it was ultimately possible to reform society from
the top down through parliamentary democracy. Indeed, he seems to have wanted to become a representative in the Diet (Parliament) in his
early career (this reminded me slightly of my embarrassing wish to be an MP when I was about 15). Over this period, many of Kotoku's fellow
social democrats became so focused on being ‘pragmatic' and appealing to the general public in an ‘acceptable' way, that they simply
accepted many of the harmful aspects of the imperialist capitalism of the day. Indeed, much of the Left were happy to support the war
against Russia in 1904, which led to Kotoku resigning from the pro-war social democratic publication he wrote for, and becoming more
radically communist (but still while supporting political parties). Kotoku's disillusionment with social democracy was compounded by other
social democrats' lack of interest in abolishing the Emperor, in spite of his archaic, imperialist grip over Japanese society at the time.
Thankfully most of the modern British socialist Left are anti-war (and many more are anti-monarchy), but this still reminded me of the
Labour Party's persistent support for increasing police numbers - in large part because they (correctly) didn't expect the electorate would
support abolition, but also out of a flawed but sincere belief that they were necessary to "keep the public safe". Thus, even at the height
of Corbyn's leadership, one of the most basic anti-capitalist principles was simply not present. So, much as Kotoku did, I began to doubt
the socialist Left's ability or willingness to truly end capitalism solely through elections, due to the limits they began to place on their
aspirations for society, although I was not yet fully disenchanted with the Party.
Throughout that early period, the Japanese Left faced brutal repression by the Government, leading to Kotoku's imprisonment for his
journalism. While in prison, he became familiar with the works of Peter Kropotkin, and therefore increasingly disenchanted by social
democracy - particularly its fixation with changing the leadership at the top, rather than society from the bottom up. In other words,
alongside merely becoming more libertarian (and eventually an anarchist), he began to recognise the need for an all-encompassing workers'
movement. This idea perhaps became validated for him when he travelled to America, where he met many members of the early IWW (Industrial
Workers of the World). Seeing their radical and often successful mobilisation of workers, he thus became more enthused by the idea of
syndicalism (where unions are the predominant mode of organising and the embryo of a future society, as opposed to parties).
Until recently, I myself had only been especially interested in the political party model of organising workers - i.e. we would simply band
together into a big organisation that either takes power in elections or by force, installing a new leadership at the top. But, having seen
the victory of more militant British trade unions like the UVW (United Voices of the World) for NHS cleaning staff, and the almost instant
eradication of Corbyn's influence in Labour after 2019, I became more convinced that entrenched workers' power was more important than any
number of votes. It's not enough to simply tell people who to vote for - you can't just have a movement led by bureaucrats on behalf of
workers, you need a movement led by them too.
On his return from America, Kotoku began arguing in favour of this more militant, union-based action - and thus against parliamentary
politics, which he now recognised was not the route to socialism. Indeed, in his article "The Change in My Thought (On Universal Suffrage)",
he said "we must concentrate all our efforts not on parliamentary power but on developing the workers' solidarity", arguing that ultimately
"It is not laws - but food and clothing" that the working class need. This emphasis on addressing direct material needs within the community
struck a chord with me, since for 5 years I had witnessed Corbynites arguing to empower the working class in Parliament and on the doorstep,
but not spending a single minute actually doing so (of course unions and mutual aid were laudable, but both were essentially separate from
and secondary to the fanciful goal of parliamentary victory).
Unfortunately for Kotoku and other Japanese radicals he began to inspire, their numbers were simply too small, allowing the government to
crack down brutally on all efforts to organise workers and spread propaganda. Strikes and unions were effectively outlawed and activists
were under close surveillance. His dream of a great, revolutionary general strike was never realised and he was implicated in a fabricated
plot to assassinate the Emperor. He was executed in 1911, and became a little-known but powerful anarchist martyr, a short but bright spark
of inspiration in a society too often dismissed as uniform and compliant.
I call him powerful because of what he represents to me (and must do to small numbers of others across the world) - the birth of a
realisation that we do not need to rely on others to fight for us. He diagnosed correctly that power corrupts us when we take it alone, no
matter how well-intentioned we are in trying to wield. I had a lot of love and respect for the Corbyn project at times, but Kotoku and
others brought me to the realisation that it was only a project to change who was at the top of the pile. From then on, no matter how
genuine the movement's intentions were, it could not achieve its aims without corruption or sabotage. In our search for a better society, we
can lose our way easily without grounding ourselves in selflessness and genuine solidarity. This is best maintained through true equality
with our peers, rather than self-aggrandisement or an aspiration to leadership.
Kotoku's writings are often remarkably optimistic (sometimes rather naïve in their level of excitement for an imminent general strike that
never happened), and it was a level of positivity I simply don't encounter from the Left today. The repressive environment of his repeated
imprisonment and constant surveillance would also have had a deep impact on his psyche - creating a strong desire for freedom (which he
found to some extent amongst radicals in the US). This spirit is something many of us need to rediscover, even while excessive idealism has
its dangers.
Overall, Kotoku's short but fascinating life, alongside his frankly small real-world influence and his ugly murder by the state, brought
home the crushing brutality and bleakness of the situation we still face on the Left. The odds are stacked against us, and all we can do is
fight boldly for ourselves without leaders, without middlemen, and without the pessimism that leads so many to give up on their dream of a
better world.
Fabian Newton-Edgar

This text was first published by Leeds Solidarity Federation.

https://awsm.nz/?p=5851

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Message: 4



AGAINST STATE REPRESENTATION, CAPITALISTIC BARBARITY AND MODERN INTEGRITY - NO REVERSAL - NO TERMINATION - FIGHT BACK! ---- [...]The
far-right and neo-liberal government of ND continues its relentless repressive attack on the world of struggle and society as a whole. From
the bill on demonstrations, the evacuation of squatters, the ban on movement at the Athens Polytechnic and the conversion of the historic
Guinness building into a museum, to the crackdown on labor rights, the deterioration of public health, the looting of nature, the auctions
and the sale of public property. ---- The law on the suppression of demonstrations aims to exterminate anyone whom the state defines as an
"internal enemy." And while in the past the term "internal enemy" may have seemed foreign and distant to some, it was thought to refer only
to some "anarchists, squatters, far-left, immigrants, drug addicts, HIV-positive", but today it is confirmed to refer to many more. That the
characterization and targeting of the former was the beginning of a more comprehensive repressive strategy involving many more.

This is another attempt to prevent the state from shielding and disarming the socio-class resistances that will arise in the near future,
due to the depth of the crisis and the looting that will follow.[...]

Excerpt from the announcement of the anarchist group "bad horse" (7/7/2020)

Gathering at the Branch at 19:00
and March at 19.30 from Pl. Georgiou
anarchist group "bad horse" / FROM
& comrades

https://ipposd.wordpress.com/

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