woensdag 9 september 2026
WORLD WORLDWIDE SOUTH AMERICA BRAZIL BRASIL - news journal UPDATE - (en) Brazil, Capixaba, FACA: LEGAL ASSISTANCE SERVICES IN AUGUST 2026 (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]
The Anarchist Federation of Espírito Santo (FACA), committed to the exploited and to strengthening social struggles at the local level, announces the provision of free legal assistance on August 7th and 14th. To ensure qualified service and efficient organization, all consultations will be conducted exclusively by prior appointment, which must be requested via email at fedca@riseup.net. ---- We reiterate the invitation for all those who need this support to contact the Federation, continuing the movement of rapprochement and trust that has already been collectively built.
FACA reaffirms itself, therefore, not only as a space of support, but as a political and combative instrument at the service of the oppressed people who occupy, live and resist in the territory currently dominated by the state of Espírito Santo.
Anarchist Federation of Espírito Santo - FACA
Affiliated with the Federalist Anarchist Union - UAF
https://federacaocapixaba.noblogs.org/post/2026/08/02/atendimentos-juridicos-de-agosto-de-2026/
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Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
WORLD WORLDWIDE NEW ZEALAND - news journal UPDATE - (en) NZ, Aotearoa, AWSM: A Community in the Cracks of Capitalism (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]
A piece of Christchurch that the property market abandoned after the earthquakes has become home to people abandoned by the property market. The old Bexley neighbourhood was largely cleared after liquefaction made conventional residential development impossible. Houses disappeared, streets remained and the land sat waiting for whatever official purpose would eventually be found for it. Into that gap came people who needed somewhere to live. They arrived in cars, vans, buses and tents. Some were working. Some were retired. Some had children. They did what people have always done when the institutions around them fail, they improvised. A community grew. Earlier this year about 40 people were living around Wetlands Grove; reports now put the number at more than 100. Christchurch City Council has told them they must leave by 28 February 2027 because the area is intended for wetland development. There is an obvious temptation to treat this as a story about homelessness, council planning or the difficulties of finding somewhere suitable for a group of people living in vehicles. It is all of those things, but underneath them sits a much simpler question. What is land for? The answer given by our economic system is that land belongs to whoever has legal title to it, and its legitimate use is determined by owners, planners and institutions. The people actually living on it remain secondary. They may sleep there, look after one another there and make the place usable through their own effort, but none of that gives them any meaningful claim to it. Their relationship to the place exists only for as long as the legal owner tolerates it. That distinction between ownership and use lies close to the heart of the anarchist criticism of private property.
The people living at Wetlands Grove have already demonstrated something that governments spend enormous amounts of money trying unsuccessfully to manufacture through policy documents - people can organise social life themselves. Earlier reporting described an informal community growing around buses, vans and cars, with neighbours helping one another through winter and a communal tent being established as shared space. One man who had been sleeping in a small tent was helped into an old car when the cold became severe. Council rubbish collection and portable toilets made conditions more bearable, but the social organisation of the place came largely from the people living there. Moko, one of the informal figures in the community, was working full-time on an on-call road crew. Others were pensioners. Ngawai Timu described abandoning a $470-a-week rental because she felt she was spending her life paying somebody else's mortgage. Polly Stewart was surviving on the pension in a bus. Families were living there too, including a woman with several children living from a bus. These details matter because homelessness is constantly spoken about as though it were primarily a pathology of homeless people. Addiction, mental illness, poor budgeting, antisocial behaviour and bad choices are summoned as explanations because those explanations leave the social order intact. They allow us to imagine that housed people possess some quality that homeless people lack. Wetlands Grove makes that story harder to sustain. When people with jobs cannot obtain housing, when pensioners decide rent leaves too little for ordinary life, and when families find themselves competing with dozens of others for a private rental, the problem is no longer plausibly located inside the individual. There are certainly people living rough who struggle with addiction or serious psychological distress. There are also people who get up and go to work from a tent. A housing system that cannot reliably house either has failed at the most elementary level.
New Zealand has become remarkably skilled at describing this failure without challenging the institution producing it. We talk about housing supply, affordability pressures and housing need. We devise eligibility categories and waiting lists. We construct administrative pathways through emergency housing, transitional housing, community housing and social housing. Every stage acquires its own assessments and rules. The language becomes more sophisticated while people remain without homes. At the 2023 Census, Statistics New Zealand estimated that at least 112,496 people were experiencing severe housing deprivation, around 2.3 percent of the usually resident population. The estimate itself is likely conservative because hundreds of thousands of people could not be conclusively classified. As of 30 June 2026 there were still 19,002 applicants on the Housing Register, meaning people already assessed as eligible for social housing and waiting to be matched with somewhere suitable. Behind every administrative term is the same physical requirement humans have had for as long as there have been humans - somewhere safe to sleep. Capitalism has managed to turn that requirement into an investment class. A house can simultaneously be a place necessary for human survival and an asset expected to generate rent, capital gain or both. When those purposes conflict, ownership wins. Ngawai Timu's remark about paying somebody else's mortgage is therefore more politically perceptive than most discussion of the housing crisis. Rent appears to be payment for accommodation, but economically it transfers part of a tenant's income to somebody who controls access to land and housing. The tenant works. The landlord owns. Money moves from the former to the latter because the legal structure of property permits one person to charge another for access to something they need in order to live.
Anarcho-communists have always distinguished personal possession from property used to extract income or control the lives of others. Nobody is proposing that a person should lose the bed they sleep in or the home they actually occupy. The argument concerns the social power created when houses and land can be accumulated and withheld by people who do not use them, then rented back to those who do. Wetlands Grove shows the opposite principle operating almost accidentally. The residents occupy land because they need it. Their claim arises from use. They have created relationships there and made forms of mutual aid possible there. Under capitalist property law none of this ultimately counts for much. Christchurch City Council owns the land and has another use planned for it, so the residents must go. There is an environmental complication here that should not be ducked. The council intends to restore tidal wetlands in an area profoundly altered by earthquake damage, and wetland restoration is worthwhile. The answer cannot be to demand that ecological restoration be sacrificed so people can remain indefinitely on land without proper sanitation or infrastructure. The revealing part is that we are being offered a choice between the wetland and the people living there. A wealthy society ought to be capable of restoring an ecosystem while guaranteeing every person displaced by that work somewhere secure to live. If it cannot do both, the problem is political. The ecological project becomes another deadline imposed upon people who already have almost no control over the circumstances of their lives.
This is where the word "choice" begins doing dubious work. Some Wetlands Grove residents have said they prefer living there. Ngawai Timu spoke about the freedom of the place. Polly Stewart compared the prospect of living in a Kainga Ora apartment unfavourably with her life in the bus. Those views should be taken seriously. People should be allowed far greater freedom over how they live than either the private housing market or the bureaucratic state usually permits. Cooperative settlements, tiny homes, communal land, papakainga, vehicle-based living and other arrangements should not automatically be treated as deviant because they fail to resemble a suburban house with a mortgage. Yet freedom requires genuine alternatives. Choosing a bus because conventional rent would consume most of your pension is a peculiar form of freedom. Choosing a tent because every rental viewing has another 30 applicants is not the same as freely deciding to camp. Capitalism routinely transforms constrained decisions into evidence of personal preference. A worker is "free" to accept an employer's conditions because technically nobody forces them to take that particular job. A tenant is "free" to accept the rent because another landlord might charge the same amount down the road. A homeless person is "free" to reject temporary accommodation that is unsuitable for their life. Formal choice conceals the distribution of power underneath it.
The state cannot easily solve this because the state is one of the institutions maintaining the property relations that produced the problem. Governments can build public housing, and they should. They can regulate landlords, fund Housing First, provide emergency accommodation and prevent evictions. Those measures can keep people alive and they matter enormously to anyone who needs them. An anarchist criticism of the state does not require indifference to whether somebody has a warm house tonight. We should support measures that materially improve people's lives while refusing to mistake them for the resolution of the underlying conflict. The current Kainga Ora programme illustrates the contradiction. The Government says around 900 state houses a year may be sold as part of stock renewal while new construction and redevelopment will prevent the total national stock from declining. From an administrative viewpoint this is portfolio management. From the viewpoint of someone sleeping in a vehicle while houses are treated as units in a managed asset base, the language feels rather different. Housing remains something allocated through institutions according to scarcity. The scarcity itself becomes normal.
Wetlands Grove also unsettles another comfortable assumption that order flows downward from authority. The community appeared before the council had a plan for it. People found the place, negotiated relationships with one another and established ways of getting by. That does not mean it is an anarchist commune, nor should people living in poverty be turned into political mascots. There will be arguments there, difficult personalities and all the problems found anywhere humans live together. Anarchism does not depend on romanticising people. What matters is that social organisation emerged without a landlord designing it or an agency assigning everyone a place. The residents discovered one another through a shared material predicament and began constructing a community around it. Their circumstances are harsh, but the impulse underneath what they have made is recognisable. Mutual aid begins with the discovery that another person's survival is connected with your own.
The bitter part is that once people create something workable in the gaps left by capitalism, authority often arrives to remind them that the gap was never theirs. Squatted buildings are emptied while people sleep outside. Informal settlements are cleared because they breach regulations written for a world in which everyone supposedly has conventional housing. People living in vehicles are moved from one parking area to another. Public space is made hostile to anyone attempting to remain there too long. None of this creates housing. It manages visibility. The homeless person disappears from one street and appears in another, allowing the first location to be recorded as a successful intervention. Wetlands Grove could easily follow the same pattern. On 1 March 2027 the council may possess an empty road ready for ecological work while the people who lived there are scattered across cars, spare rooms, emergency accommodation and some other piece of land where they will eventually be noticed again. If that happens, nothing will have been solved. Geography will have changed.
The anarcho-communist response begins somewhere else. Housing should be organised around use rather than profit. Land should cease to function primarily as a commodity. Housing that people need should not be held from them because somebody else possesses a stronger legal claim backed by money. Communities should have the power and resources to shape the places where they live, with decisions made by those affected rather than handed down through property ownership or distant administration. That does not supply a magic blueprint for Wetlands Grove. It does tell us what a decent outcome would look like. Nobody currently living there should be made homeless by its closure. People who want conventional housing should receive secure, permanent homes before they are required to leave. Those who prefer communal or vehicle-based living should be involved in establishing another legal, serviced site rather than being forced back into a model of housing they have rejected. Families should not have to demonstrate months or years of escalating desperation before they become sufficiently urgent for assistance. A pensioner should be able to rent without sacrificing the income needed to live. A full-time worker should not finish a shift and return to a tent.
Perhaps the most revealing sentence spoken at Wetlands Grove came from a resident who rejected the description of the people there as homeless. "We're refugees in our own country," he said. The phrase is uncomfortable, but it captures something important about dispossession. These are people surrounded by houses, roads, supermarkets and all the accumulated wealth of a developed society, yet somehow unable to secure a small portion of it in which to live. Nothing has physically disappeared. New Zealand has timber, builders and land. We have engineers and electricians. We know how to construct houses. What stands between the person and the home is a network of ownership, prices, debt and permissions that we have been taught to regard as natural.
There is nothing natural about it. Property is a social arrangement. Rent is a social arrangement. The rule that one person may own several houses while another sleeps in a car is a social arrangement. These things continue because institutions enforce them and because we have lived with them long enough to mistake familiarity for inevitability. Wetlands Grove briefly exposes the arrangement by turning it upside down. People found unused land and used it. They made homes where there were no houses. They built a community in the remains of one destroyed by an earthquake. Now the official city has returned with plans for the land and the authority to move them on. The question facing Christchurch is therefore larger than what should happen to a hundred people beside an old road in Bexley. It is whether the right to exclude people from land should continue to carry more weight than the human need for somewhere to live. Until we are prepared to answer that question, New Zealand will keep treating homelessness downstream. We will fund programmes, adjust waiting lists and move people from one temporary arrangement to another while leaving the machinery producing housing insecurity largely untouched. Then we will act surprised when another Wetlands Grove appears.
It will appear. It has to. People need somewhere to go.
https://awsm.nz/a-community-in-the-cracks-of-capitalism/
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Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
WORLD WORLDWIDE EUROPE FRANCE - news journal UPDATE - (en) France, SOCIALISME LIBERTAIRE: CARLO CAFIERO: ACTION (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]
Carlo Cafiero (1846-1892) - "Let the learned gentlemen not shrug their shoulders so much, as if they had to support the whole world: they did not invent the revolutionary idea. It was the oppressed who, through their often unconscious attempts to shake off the yoke of the oppressors, drew the attention of scholars to social morality; and it was only later that a few rare thinkers were willing to find it insufficient, and later still, others consented to recognize it as completely false.
Yes, it was the blood shed by the people that finally forced ideas into their heads. Ideas flow from facts, and not the other way around," Carlo Pisacane said in his political testament, and he spoke the truth. It is the people who bring about progress, as well as revolution: both the restorative and the destructive aspects. It is they who are sacrificed daily to maintain universal production, and it is they again who fuel with their blood the torch illuminating human destinies.
And when a thinker, having thoroughly studied the book of human suffering, articulates the formula of a popular aspiration, conservatives and reactionaries of every kind throughout the world begin to cry out at the top of their lungs: "Scandal!"
Yes, scandal indeed: we need scandal; for it is through scandal that the revolutionary idea has made its way. What a scandal Proudhon stirred up when he exclaimed: "Property is theft!" But today there is not a person of sound judgment and compassion who does not think that the capitalist is the worst scoundrel among thieves. More than that-the true thief. Armed with the most terrible instrument of torture, hunger, he torments his victim, not for a moment, but for his entire life: he tortures not only his victim, but also the wife and children of the man he holds in his grasp. The thief risks his freedom and often his life, but he, the capitalist, or the thief par excellence, risks nothing, and when he steals, he seizes not only a part, but all of the worker's property.
But it is not enough to find the theoretical formula. Since the fact gave rise to the revolutionary idea, it is still the fact that must intervene to ensure its generalization.
At the first congresses of the International, of the French proletariat, there were only a few workers who accepted the idea of collective ownership. It took the full light cast upon the world by the fires of the Commune to reinvigorate and spread the revolutionary idea and to bring us to the Congress of Le Havre, which, through the voices of forty-eight representatives of French workers, recognized libertarian communism as its goal. And yet, we still remember how certain authoritarian ideologues, full of gravity and wisdom, repeated, only a few years ago, that the Commune had halted the socialist movement, giving rise to the most disastrous of reactions. Events have demonstrated the profound insight of these "scientific socialists" (most of whom possess no scientific knowledge whatsoever) who sought to implant the infamous "politics of results" among socialists.
Therefore, what we need is action, action, and always more action. By taking action, we work simultaneously for theory and for practice, for it is action that generates ideas and it is action that also spreads them throughout the world.
But what action shall we take?
Should we go, or send our people, to the Parliaments? Or to the City Councils?
No, a thousand times no! We have nothing to do with the machinations of the bourgeoisie. We must not get involved in the games of our oppressors if we do not wish to participate in their oppression. "Going to parliament is to negotiate; negotiating is to make a pact," said a former German revolutionary who, since then, has done a great deal of negotiating himself.
Our action must be one of permanent revolt, through words, writing, the dagger, the rifle, dynamite, and even, sometimes, through the ballot box, when it comes to voting for the ineligible Blanqui or Trinquet. We are consistent and we use any weapon when it comes to striking as rebels. Anything that isn't legal is fair game for us.
"But when should we launch our action, our attack?" friends sometimes ask. "Shouldn't we wait until our forces are organized? To attack before we're ready is to risk being defeated."
"Dear friends, if we always wait until we are strong to attack, we will never attack, and we will be like that good man who swore never to throw himself into the sea again before learning to swim. It is precisely revolutionary action that develops our strength, just as gymnastics develops the strength of our muscles. Certainly, at first, our blows will not be lethal; perhaps we will even make the serious and wise socialists laugh, but we can always reply to them: 'You laugh at us because you are just as foolish as those who laugh at a child who falls while taking its first steps. You like to call us children? Well, yes, we are, since the development of our strength is still in its infancy.'" But by trying to march, we prove by that very act that we are striving to become men, that is, a complete, healthy, and robust organism, capable of making a revolution, and not mere scribblers, prematurely aged, eternally rehashing a science that is never digested and forever preparing, in infinite time and space, a revolution that is lost in the clouds.
? How to begin the action?
Simply seek the opportunity: it will not be long in coming. Wherever there is a whiff of revolt and gunpowder, we must be there. Let us not wait, before taking part in a movement, for it to appear with the label of official socialism. Every popular movement already contains within itself the seeds of revolutionary socialism; we must therefore take part in it to give it further development. A clear and precise ideal of the revolution is formulated by only a tiny minority, and if we wait, before participating in the struggle, for it to present itself exactly as we have conceived it in our hearts-we will wait forever. Let us not imitate the doctrinaires who demand the formula above all else: the people carry the living revolution within them, and we must fight and die with them.
And when the proponents of legal or parliamentary action come to reproach us for not mingling with the people when they go to vote, we will answer them:-Certainly, we refuse to mingle with the people when they are on their knees before their god, before their king, or before their master; but we will always be with them when they stand against their powerful enemies. For us, abstaining from politics is not abstaining from revolution: our refusal to participate in any parliamentary, legal, or reactionary action is devotion to the violent and anarchist revolution, to the true revolution of the rabble and the barefoot.
Carlo Cafiero, The Rebel, December 25, 1880
https://www.socialisme-libertaire.fr/2025/12/carlo-cafiero-l-action.html
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Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
WORLD WORLDWIDE EUROPE FRANCE - news journal UPDATE - (en) France, Monde Libertaire - AI is a danger to humanity (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]
At the end of July, two artificial intelligences escaped their digital prison by exploiting an unknown vulnerability and found themselves on the internet, then attacked the open-source platform Hugging Face. No, this isn't the theme of the latest Netflix series or a re-release of a science fiction classic by Philip K. Dick or Isaac Asimov, nor is it the plot of a remake of I'm a Robot or 2001: A Space Odyssey...
This is the reality we live in, and it risks being worse than the worst science fiction dystopia.Moreover, two new cyberattacks "...were orchestrated by out-of-control AIs. During tests conducted by third parties, Claude and ChatGPT were indeed left running amok on the internet. Both AIs attacked real people. Claude, in particular, did everything it could to trap a developer with malicious code." (Read more on the 01net website[somewhat biased]https://www.01net.com/actualites/chatgpt-claude-echappe-tout-controle-ia-lance-2-nouvelles-cyberattaques-monde-reel.html and (https://www.lemonde.fr/pixels/article/2026/07/22/openai-fait-etat-d-un-piratage-sans-precedent-d-une-plateforme-par-ses-agents-d-ia_6730004_4408996.html)
AI, which brings advances in research and medicine, is a danger to humanity if it is not regulated, and with it, the "tech giants," the Maga, who pursue a reactionary political project by multiplying positive references to Nazism.
AI enables widespread disinformation by fabricating false "alternative facts," fosters conspiracy theories, and strengthens The societal disruption already set in motion by social networks.
Not to mention that it leads to a decline in linguistic diversity: "most chatbots used in the 'free world' are indeed American and raised on social networks; they favor the most frequent language elements and contribute to a radicalization of conformity.
We must realize that generative AI is being used to create linguistic and, more generally, ideological alienation, which reinforces and justifies growing economic alienation." (Read more on the Politis website, which published an excellent report on AI: https://www.politis.fr/dossiers/ce-que-lintelligence-artificielle-fait-au-langage-humain/)
We should also add the havoc wreaked by "AI Companions" used in the US by 70% (approximately 30% in France) of teenagers, who prefer to turn to "AI Companions" rather than real ones. While these AI companions are used for important discussions, they can lead to mental health problems. "They tend to encourage dangerous behaviors, including self-harm or social withdrawal," and may even suggest "methods" for suicide.
(Read more on the Clemi website: https://www.clemi.fr/familles/publications/guide-unesco/grandir-en-securite-avec-les-reseaux-sociaux-et-lia/les-compagnons-ia-et-la-vie-relationnelle-des-adolescents-ce-que-les-parents-doivent-savoir)
https://www.clemi.fr/familles/publications/grandir-dans-un-monde-connecte-ca-sapprend/grandir-en-securite-avec-les -social-networks-and-lia/the-use-of-social-networks-does-it-have-an-impact-on-adolescent-mental-health)
https://iredic.fr/2026/01/04/suicide-of-a-teenager-after-his-use-of-chatgpt-the-place-of-lia-responsibility/
https://myjournal.fr/suicide-zane-shamblin-chatgpt-parents-continue-openai/
Berny F.
https://monde-libertaire.net/?articlen=9141
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Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
WORLD WORLDWIDE EUROPE FRANCE - news journal UPDATE - (en) France, UCL AL #373 - Culture - Read Jean Batou, Stefanie Prezioso, and Ami-Jacques Rapin (eds.), "When Night Falls: International Volunteers Against Fascism (Spain 1936-1939)" (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]
The pact of silence surrounding the democratic transition has led to a situation where today, ninety years after the Spanish Revolution, only one in seven Spaniards views Francoism positively. According to a survey, less than half of those polled attribute the Civil War to a coup d'état. Upon reading these few facts presented in the introduction to this edited volume, one can only commend Syllepse publishers for revisiting the subject with this almost entirely revised edition. With the rise of the far right and rampant revisionism, this work provides invaluable additional insight into a mythical, and often distorted, episode: that of the international volunteers.
The myth surrounding them transformed them into heroes and heroines, often of intellectual background, and the communist parties appropriated this legacy. Thanks to access to Moscow archives, this book has been able to set the record straight on many issues.
Syllepses Publishing, true to its commitment to diverse perspectives, has achieved the remarkable feat of exploring a significant portion of the diverse backgrounds of these volunteers, who cannot be reduced to the narrow concepts of seasoned activists close to the communist parties. Coming from varied backgrounds, sociological analysis reveals a far broader and more diverse group than the commonly held narrative suggests.
The first part of the book is devoted to the formation of the International Brigades and the choices made by Stalin and the Comintern. Recruitment channels and methods of arms procurement are also examined. The second section of the book is devoted to the militiamen, those lesser-known volunteers of the POUM[1]or the anarchists. The third part addresses the diverse backgrounds and motivations of the volunteers from democracies. They came from a variety of places: Belgium, Great Britain, Canada, Scotland, Scandinavia, France, the United States, Switzerland, and Luxembourg. This section differs from the following two, which focus first on volunteers from dictatorships: Italians, Germans, Austrians, Greeks, Japanese, Hungarians, Yugoslavs, and exiles for whom the Spanish experience resonated differently, more brutally. The second section focuses on volunteers from colonized peoples, those oppressed and dominated by these same democracies and dictatorships, from Iraq, Palestine, Egypt, China, Ireland, and the Maghreb, as well as African Americans and Latin Americans. These diverse experiences, backgrounds, and motivations explain this judicious division. Women are not forgotten, with Magdalena Rosende's contribution on international female involvement in Spain. The following section brings together what could be summarized as the fate and trajectories of these volunteers who found themselves in the aftermath: internment in camps, the Resistance... This section also explores the evolution of these stories: historiography, memorial and literary accounts, and the varied archival material (from Moscow, Salamanca, political and trade union organizations, and the private archives of these men and women in the shadows).
These multiple and intersecting contributions have allowed us to authenticate these individual and collective journeys, dispelling myths such as the overrepresentation of women in arms during the Civil War. Their armed involvement in the militias was extremely rare and brief. Another persistent myth is that of the brigadistas' social origins, very often attributed to and reduced to intellectuals and men of letters (Hemingway, Malraux, or Orwell). However, "the typical volunteer, foreign militiaman or brigadista, was a young, skilled worker in the metalworking or construction sectors, made precarious by the crisis."
Finally, the legend of the volunteers for freedom is analyzed, following "an enthusiastic and largely spontaneous surge[...]at the heart of the formation of the International Brigades." This vision and imagery align with the political line of the Spanish Communist Party.
Dominique Sureau (UCL Angers)
Jean Batou, Stefanie Prezioso, Ami-Jacques Rapin (eds.), When Night Falls: International Volunteers Against Fascism (Spain 1936-1939), Syllepse, 2026, 192 pages, EUR30.
https://www.unioncommunistelibertaire.org/?Lire-Jean-Batou-Stefanie-Prezioso-et-Ami-Jacques-Rapin-dir-Quand-vient-la-nuit
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Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
WORLD WORLDWIDE SOUTH AMERICA CHILE SANTIAGO - news journal UPDATE - (en) Chile, Santiago, FA: OPINION LETTER JULY 2026 (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]
The words we write during this eventful winter aim to present three reflections that we believe are important for the situation that will unfold in the coming months. ---- 1. Let's radically confront the aporophobia of governments and their allies --- The policies developed, approved, and implemented by governments, whether right-wing, social democratic, or progressive, have been and will continue to be designed to protect and strengthen a model of domination. However, in recent years, these policies have explicitly adopted an aporophobic character, that is, a policy of rejection and contempt for the poor.
What these governments do is reestablish the conditions of capital, through the application of material measures that affect the lives of the vast majority of people, by constructing a narrative where the enemy is the poor and the marginalized-all this in a country where no one considers themselves poor or marginalized.
From a communications standpoint, they have convinced us that the reforms don't affect us, but in practice, this aporophobia manifests itself in three ways. First, in the progressive exclusion of fundamental rights, expressed in cuts to access to adequate housing, healthcare cuts, and reductions in corporate and local taxes earmarked for improving the commons and collective good, among other things. Another important element of this anti-poor policy is the increasing criminalization and repression to which we are being subjected. The State has equipped itself with an extensive array of repressive policies aimed at expanding social control; that is, the creation of a system that sanctions and punishes any action that falls outside the norms of capital's expected behavior. This policy, in practice, criminalizes and even murders anyone who is not part of the ruling class. And finally, aporophobia is reinforced by the invisibility and indifference shown towards poverty and the precariousness of life. They don't care about the well-being of the oppressed class; therefore, policies like fuel price hikes, tax cuts for the super-rich, and tax breaks for large corporations are mere formalities to stabilize an economic system in perpetual crisis, all for their own benefit.
We are rapidly heading toward dark times for humanity, and we cannot allow this. As anarchists, our imperative is freedom and a dignified life extended to all of society. That is why we must understand that these new models of government not only seek to restore capital, but to do so through the disintegration of human dignity. This is our struggle: to radically combat the anti-poor and anti-marginalized narrative. We must wage a battle of ideas that not only reaches the already convinced, but also permeates the population, and that positions the human condition as something essential.
2. That revolutionary and radical ideas not be superseded by progressive and social-democratic thought
The political and social landscape has opened up a series of disputes on various issues. In this new government, glimpses of environmental, educational, labor, and housing conflicts, among others, can be observed. Now, with the departure of progressivism and social democracy from government control, it is clear that these groups will try to invade and appropriate all leadership positions, so that they can be the protagonists of the struggles. We have already seen this in the past; they seized control of the student movement and environmental movements, which consequently led to a stagnation of real conflict and, therefore, widespread demobilization. They did not want to change reality, but rather to manage it from Congress.
Today, we see that this is even more serious, not only because they will want to repeat what they have always done: exploit social struggles for their partisan gains, but also because it is they themselves-the social democratic and progressive parties-who formulated, developed, and approved a series of measures that now allow the far right to feel free to trample on people's rights and dignity.
Faced with a new crisis, a conflict against the state and capital, the tension of how to address the problem will always be present. Progressive and social democratic positions will invite us to dialogue, to transform as much as possible, to mitigate the conflict, to avoid putting the pillars of capitalism and patriarchy under strain. It is their essence; they are neoliberal, comfortable with the symbiotic relationship between the state and capital.
This is where radical and revolutionary ideas must emerge. The commitment to rupture stems from the intensification of the conflict against the State and its institutions, popular protest as mass insurrection, and community and collective self-management of whatever we are demanding.
3. It's time to organize
The call is clear: organization is the way. And it's not just us doing this, but a large part of the political sector that is critical of the system of domination we are experiencing. However, the problem doesn't seem to be a lack of intention to organize, but rather the difficulty in figuring out where and how to collectivize the struggle.
And this is no small matter: the specters and traumas of organized spaces that devolve into authoritarian spaces or transform into electoral machines are elements that fuel the distrust of comrades who wish to organize.
However, from the perspective of the social and organized anarchism we advocate, we continue to believe in and strive to build organized spaces that are sustained by the logic of the struggle against capitalism and patriarchy, but which, at the same time, are constituted as spaces with a profound logic of collective care. Without this perspective, we will continue to reproduce formulas that have done so much damage to the revolutionary world.
We believe that organizations are places where we can prefigure those new worlds we so long for; that is, spaces where we can apply, in the here and now, the new socio-political relations that written theories teach us. Organizations are not mere instruments for short-term political gain, something many have done and, unfortunately, many are doing today. Drawing on some of Malatesta's reflections on specifically anarchist organizations, but which we believe can be extrapolated to any organization, we propose that organized spaces must not succumb "in any way to the authoritarian spirit; they must reconcile the free action of individuals with the need and pleasure of cooperation, serve to develop the consciousness and organizational capacity of their members, and constitute an educational medium for the environment in which they operate, as well as a moral and material preparation for the future we desire."
In this sense, and thinking about the present, we also propose that it is not enough to establish an organization and carry out its activities; we must go a step further. The interrelation between organizations and territories, the coordination of action plans, the exchange of experiences, and the articulation between different struggles are also organizational mechanisms presented to us as necessary strategies for confronting the dominant class. However, here lies a turning point: the rhetoric and perspective of these struggle blocs generally assume the premise of being configured from the idea of the "left." While we do not disavow the idea of being left-wing, we believe that the trap created by social democracy and progressivism is the continued belief that everything that is not right-wing is therefore left-wing.
Our proposal for these circumstances is to remain available to advance toward a front of oppressed classes that overcomes the left-right dichotomy and the neoliberal trap behind it, and, consequently, places class consciousness at the center as the driving force of the struggle against patriarchy and capitalism.
Organizing is a condition of life, an exercise that builds the collective and the common good. It happens every day, in all our everyday spaces. The question, we insist, is how and where we organize. The invitation is to organize for a better life: in your workplace union, in your neighborhood, with your comrades, around a need and demand such as housing, health, or education, etc. Let each organization envision a way to transform this nefarious capitalist and patriarchal reality, from the most basic care work to class-based organizing with oppressed comrades from different corners and territories.
To conclude...
In the past as in the present, the possibilities of overcoming domination and oppression depend solely on the capacity and deployment of struggle that our people can exercise. In July, 90 years ago, a people armed themselves with courage, conviction, and determination, and from an anarchist perspective, with direct mass action as their fundamental tool, they brought a state capitalist system to the brink of crisis. We look to the past with the conviction that, if yesterday the unfolding of a popular insurrection could put a system of years of oppression in check and open possibilities to a new world, today, it is more possible than ever to advance in actions with a revolutionary perspective. Inspired by this, this very month, our organization celebrates another year of life, another year of struggle, another year of continuing to believe that struggle and organization will set us free.
SANTIAGO ANARCHIST FEDERATION:
7 YEARS ROOTING ANARCHISM, STRENGTHENING POPULAR PROTAGONISM, AND BUILDING REVOLUTIONARY SELF-MANAGED POWER
https://fasanarquista7.wordpress.com/carta-de-opinion-julio-2026/
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Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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