From 10 to 15 August, the eighth Rencontres du Maquis pour
l'Emancipation were held in the south of Hérault. ---- La Commune duMaquis is a small local federation whose spirit is not unrelated to many
ideas expressed by Pierre Kropotkine, among others. It is established on
the Bois-Bas estate, a hamlet of the small village of Minerve, located
in the countryside 12 kilometres from the heart of the village. Situated
between the foothills of the Montagne Noire and the Cesse River which
borders it, the estate extends over nearly 270 hectares, some 45
kilometres from Narbonne, 60 from Béziers as well as Carcassonne and
Mazamet. Two large buildings and a developed campsite are the basis of a
comfortable reception area.
Common property of a group of more than 80 individuals and legal
entities, this place was acquired to become a territory for
experimenting with non-authoritarian social relations, in collective
self-organization. Such uses constitute a practical application of going
beyond private property and a path of freedom towards the realization of
self-government by oneself, with others, praised in his time by Fernand
Pelloutier*.
In 2017, after a year of reflection, proposals and exchanges in multiple
meetings, La Commune du Maquis was created. Having adopted a charter, it
was intended to replace the Scop Cravirola collective, which, having
worn itself out holding the place since 2007, was so reduced that, faced
with the fear of a total collapse, it had launched an appeal to
repopulate the place.
Among the collectives federated in the very young Commune du Maquis, the
association Etais d'Emancipation planned the establishment of an
anarchist documentary center in a rural environment, the space for which
had yet to be built. As the administrative procedures for obtaining the
building permit for the premises and the search for the money necessary
for its construction were not expected to be lightning fast, the
Rencontres du Maquis pour l'Emancipation were set up as the first
manifestation of the Fontaine encyclopédique du Maquis (FEM), while
waiting for its installation.
Although these first Rencontres in question date from 2017, it was on
July 10 of the previous year that a first attempt took place. Claude
Guillon had agreed to come and lead a talk-debate that day at this venue
about the popular struggles waged against the bourgeoisie during the
so-called French Revolution, particularly in 1793 with Les Enragés, and
their still current resonances. The resonance among the fifty or so
people present was such that a project to expand this type of event
emerged. The 2017 edition lasted three days, then increased to five in
2018. Attendance has grown from around fifty people a day at the
beginning to two hundred in the last two or three years, with peaks
exceeding two hundred and fifty.
These meetings are the scene of a proliferation of cultural activities,
intended to contribute to the consolidation of the social movement
working to overthrow the Old World with its principles of servitude,
oppression and exploitation. Book presentations, conferences and
debates, exhibitions, concerts, cinema and live shows are held there.
Aimed at a local as well as an extra-regional and even international
audience, they prefigure the permanent basic function for which the FEM
documentation centre was designed: to constitute a place for fruitful
meetings, a radiant focus for exchanges, studies and anarchist actions.
By its nature, the place is suitable for the organisation of multiple
meetings on the most diverse themes, likely to help open up perspectives
allowing us to move towards a society of liberty, equality and
fraternity that are very real, inscribed in the facts of everyday life
and no longer, as is still the case today, on the pediment of prisons.
So many moments particularly conducive to meetings between city dwellers
from large metropolises, semi-rural people and peasants. Worlds for
which it is essential to shorten the distance that keeps them separated.
Without deep connivance between these universes, it is to be feared that
any project to correct the liberticidal, and even suicidal, trajectory
on which humanity is engaged will be in vain.
Because it is not limited to the sole meeting of authors and artists
with an audience, the event fully deserves its title. If the program is
of a beautiful density, the meals and the time spread of the sessions
provide many opportunities for unexpected meetings, which often last
beyond the summer episode and slowly, but surely, weave a society with
an emancipatory movement. If History and memory are generally very
present in the program, it is above all not to make a museum, but
because both accompany, as they are an integral part of it, a social
movement that is still alive, even when in the darkest moments of the
social war it seems moribund. If proof were needed, the yellow vest
movement recently provided it, by resuming the course of the French
Revolution where the Jacobin and bourgeois counter-revolution had
stopped it. The Enragés also wanted neither leaders nor representatives
when they knew how to impose the maximum price of basic necessities by
direct action.
Source of the Maquis Meetings for Emancipation, the FEM recalls at the
time of its creation that "it was in the ebb of the May 68 movement that
a few of us had begun to dream of establishing bases where we could fall
back to recharge our batteries and keep alive some embers of what had
just happened, which would be tools for preserving popular memory,
maintaining, upkeep and developing anarchist culture".
The Encyclopedic Fountain of the Maquis
Note
* Fernand Pelloutier (1867-1901). Having become secretary of the
Federation of Labor Exchanges in 1895, it was under his leadership that
revolutionary syndicalism took shape and the concept of the
revolutionary general strike, or "universal strike", emerged. For
Pelloutier, the primary role of the labor exchanges was to allow the
worker to acquire "the science of his misfortune; it is to know the
causes of his servitude; it is to be able to discern against what his
blows should be directed."
http://oclibertaire.lautre.net/spip.php?article4292
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
Geen opmerkingen:
Een reactie posten