I am going to make a very brief review of anarchism shortly before,
during, and after Venice 84. But in these days, those of 2024, whichconstitute a kind of return to the present of Venice 84, it is
unavoidable to mention the organizers of the event forty years ago
because, even before it took place, their initiative and their action
were already in full consonance with what were to be the characteristics
and meaning of the event itself. ---- To organize it, the support of a
powerful anarchist organization was not necessary; the firm will of a
small collective was enough; a good dose of audacity was enough,
because, of course, the risks of calling such an event in Venice were
enormous; it was enough to have patiently woven an informal
international network of solidarity, friendship and exchanges; It was
enough to trust in the capacity of the participants to responsibly
manage their presence and their activities during the days; in short, it
was enough to want to create a space of freedom and coexistence so that
the anarchism of that moment could express itself, debate, confront
ideas and, with that, keep moving.
All that was enough, but all that was necessary, and bringing it
together represented an enormous challenge. It seems to me that
gratitude towards those who took on that challenge will never be intense
enough, and I would not forgive myself for not expressing it here, at
this very moment. So, Grazie di cuore, compagni e compagne del
ottantaquattro!
Even if they were very important in their time, there are events that we
just surf over, we slide over them as if they had no depth. However,
there are others whose mere mention makes our eyes shine and awakens the
desire to immerse ourselves in them. This is the case, for example, of
the great Woodstock festival in 1969, which remains in our imagination
as a privileged moment of the counterculture, because it symbolized a
cry of rupture where the promise of new times nested and where the
desire to blow up the suffocating tyranny of the dominant norms was
manifested.
Leaving aside the differences and limiting ourselves exclusively to the
anarchist sphere, Venice 84 represents one of those great events that
are full of a strange magic, and that remain deeply engraved in the
hearts of those who have lived through them. It awakens an avalanche of
images and memories of shared moments, evokes the presence of friends
who have passed away, and represents an endless number of dreams that
suddenly became reality in the framework of a meeting that is
unforgettable because, among other things, it allowed us to savour the
pleasure of living for a few days as anarchists, among anarchists, in a
mythical place.
The thousands of young libertarians who came were pleasantly surprised
by the atmosphere they found there, by the hybridisation that took place
between, on the one hand, the reflection and confrontation of ideas,
sometimes very opposed, and, on the other, its eminently festive
dimension, imbued with all the fraternal anarchist affection. However,
although they celebrated having come in such large numbers, they did not
express great surprise at the numerical magnitude of the attendance.
On the other hand, that surprise overwhelmed those of us who, being
somewhat older, had been following the paths of anarchism for a longer
time. We rubbed our eyes in amazement, unable to believe what we saw,
because anyone who had dreamed, or simply dreamed, at the beginning of
the sixties, of a meeting like the one in Venice would have immediately
been accused of delirium under the influence of hallucinogenic substances.
Indeed, after the crushing of the Spanish revolution in 1939, anarchism
found itself in a long and arid desert journey that lasted some thirty
years.
Certainly, in the first half of the 1960s, there were some beautiful
flares of anarchism in the great British marches against the atomic
bomb. Marches lasting several days in which the famous Committee of One
Hundred, chaired by Bertrand Russell, called for direct action, and in
which the anarchist network of "peace spies" had achieved the incredible
feat of hacking and divulging the secret location of the atomic shelters
charged with protecting the government, leaving the population out in
the open, of course.
And then there were the Amsterdam Provos, who already in 1965 were
stirring up Dutch society and sowing anarchist seeds through, among
other things, their famous white-painted community bicycles.
However, in most countries, anarchists were at that time no more than a
few dozen, or at most a few hundred, forming small collectives. So when
a European meeting of young anarchists was organised in Paris in 1966,
we were delighted with the "enormous" success of having brought
together... a few dozen participants.
So what had happened so that, a few years after this rather discouraging
panorama, thousands of anarchists flocked to Venice, just as, in very
special circumstances indeed (the end of the Franco dictatorship), they
had also flocked to the Libertarian Days in Barcelona in 1977? The
answer lies largely, though not exclusively, of course, in the
extraordinary event that was May 1968.
Of course, this lightning-fast and unexpected, totally unexpected,
conflagration of a part of society did not take on the features of a
revolution in the classical sense, but it was a moment of enormous
revolutionary creativity that opened a gap between a before and an
after, putting an end to a set of political practices that suddenly
became obsolete, and formulating conceptions that renewed the ways of
thinking, fighting and behaving.
Incidentally, what remains quite surprising is that this powerful
explosion, which had very strong anarchist overtones, took place
practically without anarchists, or at least without anarchists having a
significant numerical presence, except perhaps in the run-up to May 1968
at the University of Nanterre. And that presence was completely
insignificant when, spontaneously, the fuse of May 1968 was lit on
Friday 3 May in the vicinity of the Sorbonne. And yet, there is no doubt
that the shockwave that began in 1968 and spread over the following
decades drove both the renewal of anarchism and its numerical expansion.
Because, of course, the seeds that May 1968 scattered to the four winds
also fell into the gardens of anarchism, so Venice 1984 brought together
an international anarchism that had already been impacted by 1968, even
though certain sectors remained immune to that influence.
These seeds, some of which were already present in anarchism from its
beginnings, included criticism of revolutionary political action
centered on the proletariat as the almost exclusive, and in any case
principal, revolutionary subject, and also brought with them the
displacement of struggles towards everyday oppressions, which led to the
corresponding multiplication and diversification of the fronts of
struggle; they also formulated a very strong criticism of vanguardism by
encouraging the autonomy of individuals and collectives to decide their
own path; They promoted the renunciation of eschatological objectives in
favour of an emphasis on the present, the here and now; and, above all,
they encouraged the radical rejection of authoritarian principles and
hierarchical relations, etc.
The spread of these seeds in the social fabric represented a kind of
swarm of anarchism outside its own identity space, to the point that,
carried by the ethos of May 1968, some of its principles infiltrated the
political habits of the new social movements, without these claiming to
be anarchist in the least. It was the beginning of the extramural
anarchism that would emerge a few years later and to which I will return.
Venice 84 perfectly exemplified the fact, long known, that anarchism
cannot be approached as if it were a monolithic and compact entity, a
homogeneous block. Anarchism is a multiple entity, a kaleidoscope or a
kind of Harlequin's costume. In fact, its most appropriate
representation is undoubtedly that of a galaxy, the anarchist galaxy,
that is, a set of diverse elements that, however, form a whole that is
identifiable as such, and it is this constitutive diversity that often
makes it much more accurate to speak of anarchisms in the plural,
anarchisms, than of anarchism in the singular.
On the other hand, as we well know, anarchists are recognized by their
way of being, by what they do (which also means by what they refuse to
do, for example, refusing to achieve quotas of power or social and
economic success, as Marianne Enckell likes to point out), they are
recognized by their way of behaving as much or more than by what they
say. That, of course, brings us back to the imperative demand for
coherence between what is said and what is done, and between what is
intended to be done and the way of doing it, that is to say, to the
enormous importance of ethics.
We might ask ourselves how anarchism has changed, not just between the
1960s and 1984, but between 1984 and 2024.
In fact, there has been no sharp bifurcation, no abrupt change, because
in anarchism changes do not deny the past, even if they criticize it
radically, but rather they rely on it to continue advancing and building
new formulations.
Between the anarchism of 1984 and that of today, rather than abrupt and
sharp differences, what we can discern are evolutionary lines that
include attenuations, or even eliminations, of certain characteristics,
while others are accentuated and reinforced.
For example, although the anarcho-punk movement, which had begun in
England a few years earlier with the musical group Crass (1977), was
already present at the time of Venice 84, it has not stopped growing
since then, and today there are hundreds of musical groups around the
world, whether they are called anarcho-punk or otherwise, who use music
as a militant activity to spread anarchism and, above all, the concrete
struggles that it develops against the multiple aspects of domination.
The anarcho-punks, and similar groups such as Black Bird from Hong Kong,
have found a way to bring anarchist sensibility and protest to broad
sectors of young people who could not have been reached in any other way.
Another example: although in 1984 anarchism had been strengthened by the
explosion of May 1968 and the beginnings of an anarchism outside the
walls were already visible, it was not until the extraordinary
demonstration in Seattle in 1999 against the G8 that we witnessed a real
resurgence and a strong numerical expansion of anarchism, which
proliferated geographically and penetrated a good number of social spaces.
As we know, the Seattle demonstrators articulated forms of struggle
based on direct action, established completely horizontal modes of
organization in which decisions were made by consensus, put on the
agenda the refusal to receive orders from leaders, as well as a visceral
rejection of hierarchies and suspicion of any practice of power, etc.
All of this fully evoked anarchist principles, and was repeated
throughout the following years with the numerous mass actions against
the capitalist summits, but also with the occupations of squares in
various countries.
What Seattle put on the agenda, and what subsequently took place, did
not need to declare itself anarchist to be really so in practice.
Extramural anarchism thus became one of the most important expressions
of anarchism, and this meant that, after the anarchism without
adjectives advocated by certain anarchist currents, what was happening
now was the generalization of anarchism without its name, that is, a
kind of anarchism incognito, not because it wanted to hide its name, at
all, but because it did not know it and, therefore, lacked it, giving
rise no longer to a proclaimed anarchism, but to an anarchism in fact.
Third example, the Black Blocs. The Black Blocs, which emerged from the
autonomous milieu of the German squats of the 1980s, developed after
Venice and gained strength, especially in the anti-globalisation
demonstrations of the early 2000s, contributing to giving media
visibility to the presence of certain forms of anarchism in the
confrontations with repressive forces.
A final example, while anarchism was practically non-existent in the
academic field until the beginning of the 21st century, that is to say
until yesterday or the day before yesterday, in the first 20 years of
this century dozens and dozens of works on anarchism have been published
by anarchist academics, and the presence of anarchism within the
university is clearly visible today with, for example, the Anarchist
Studies Network in England, or the North American Anarchist Studies
Network in the United States.
Moreover, as Venice 84 clearly demonstrated, the palette of anarchism
that was already richly coloured by then was later complemented by new
nuances such as direct action eco-anarchism, radical anarcho-feminism,
postcolonial anarchism, queer anarchism, post-anarchism, etc., etc.
In fact, since Venice 84 anarchism has not stopped evolving to face the
challenges of power and put into practice voluntary non-submission and
the ethics of permanent revolt.
Focused on the present, contemporary anarchism (at least that is how I
see it) gives priority to resistance and proclaims the primacy of practices.
The struggle thus goes beyond the strict sphere of confrontation, and
rediscovers the old anarchist concern for building positive libertarian
alternatives within the existing reality. Alternatives constituted by
spaces and structures that allow, or prefigure, another way of life, an
anarchist way of life.
As Uri Gordon says, and I quote: the development of non-hierarchical
structures in which domination is constantly harassed, persecuted and
fought constitutes, for many anarchists, an end in itself.
Today, without abandoning the struggle in these spheres, anarchist
belligerence is no longer centred in a privileged way on the State or on
the economic structure, but extends to all forms of domination, and it
is precisely the struggle against all forms of domination that most
deeply characterises contemporary anarchism. Forty years ago, Venice 84
made a powerful contribution to keeping anarchism moving, and that is,
for me, its wonderful and indelible merit.
Speech by Tomás Ibáñez on October 18, 2024 in Venice
https://acracia.org/el-anarquismo-justo-antes-durante-y-despues-de-venecia-84-un-breve-repaso
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