anarchism

Solidarity in ruins. A reflection on the Freedom bookshop bombing.

Written by Paolo Mossetti, 17.03.2013

Much has been said on the coward aggression Freedom bookshop was victim of. Founded by Charlotte Wilson and Peter Kropotkin and based in Whitechapel since the 1970s, Freedom was the oldest anarchic bookshop in the English-speaking world, home of the renowned Freedom Press - which sent into print names such as Clifford Harper, Vernon Richards, Colin Ward and his 'Anarchy' magazine, Murray Bookchin, William Blake and Errico Malatesta. It was already attacked by fascists in 1993 and since then metal bars were installed on the windows and the entrance door.
 
All major publishers, bookshops and leftist groups promtly expressed their solidarity, especially because Freedom Bookshop wasn't exactly a steady market competitor, but - like many anarchic organisations - a volunteer-run entity, struggling to survive. A spontaneous 'clean-up' soon followed, and many sincere militants, armed with broom, took part in this Red Aid intervention.
 
Ironically, with all due respect to those affected by the bomb -no one was hurt-, we could look at the bombing as exciting news for anarchism: for once, radical literature wasn’t confined to the spider webs and dust of academia. Not just another talk, another conference of self-boosting egoes and parboiled lectures. Most importantly, not another publisher whining about censorship before billing their authors as 'dangerous' on the back cover of their books (dangerous for whom, and how?). It was, surprisingly, a physical target to be physically attacked.

Tame Beasts: on obedience

Written by Federico Campagna, 04.04.2012
In 1959, Dr. Dimitriy Belyaev and his colleagues of the Institute of Cytology and Genetics in Novosibirsk, Russia, started a long-term experiment in the domestication of the silver fox (Vulpes vulpes). From an original population of 130 farm-bred foxes, the research team  progressively selected those who showed the least avoidance behaviour towards humans and separated them from the rest of the group. By allowing them to breed only amongst themselves – while avoiding interbreeding – by 1985 the researchers had managed to have 18% of the tenth generation of foxes showing extremely tame behavior. Their experiment was interrupted in that year, but other, more recent experiments have shown very similar results. Foxes, some of the least domesticable animals in nature, can be tamed as a species.[1]
 
Let’s compare the transformation of the Vulpes vulpes over the relatively short time-span of ten generations, with the evolution of humans over the vastly longer period of History, which we presume began in 3200 BC, with the first written records in Mesopotamia. That is, over 200 generations ago.
 

Squandering: the case for disrespectful opportunism

Written by Federico Campagna, 21.03.2012
Hitherto you have believed there were tyrants.
Well, you are mistaken: there are only slaves.
When nobody obeys nobody commands.
Anselme Bellegarigue, 1850
 
 
Promises
 
Why do people work? If they are not insane, they do it for the money. And what do they need this money for? To buy freedom from work. At the same time, money seems to be necessary to escape from the money-obsession of the poor, just like work seems to be necessary to escape from the work-obsession of the unemployed. The apparent non sequitur of these connections is the description of the logical loop in which most humans live and function in today’s society. Strangely enough, the very origin of their endless tail-chasing seems to be their desire to achieve a state of freedom, that is, an escape form the loop itself.
 
How could the human desire for freedom turn into a self-perpetuating and enslaving mechanism? Within the contemporary landscape, the answer lies in the way capitalism, as it always does, manages to take our requests to the letter, and to return them to us realized, if slightly modified. That slight modification, as we all know, is the tiny poison pill that turns all our ‘realized’ demands into even stricter chains. This is how, over the years, capitalism realized the requests for flexible work, sexual liberation, democracy, and so on. Capitalism always gives us what we want, but it does so in such a way that brings to reality the darkest warnings of the old saying, ‘be careful what you wish for’.
 

A Reading List for #Occupy - Part I

Edited by Paolo Mossetti

Cover by Kaf & Cyop. Image courtesy of the artist

While the Occupy Wall Street "People's Library" was being brutally dismantled by the police, last November, I asked some officers why they were seizing those books and throwing them into trash cans.

Only one of them replied by saying, simply, "I don't know."
Then I decided to ask some of my favourite writers, activists, and academics to help me compile a list of books that would recreate, though only virtually, the OWS library.

Discipline: on writing and collectivity

Written by Federico Campagna, 07.03.2012
If you meet the Buddha, kill him.
Linji Yixuan
 
 
It is common practice to look at humans through the filter of the collectivities they supposedly belong to. This is particularly evident in conservative discourses, such as those on Nation and Ethnicity, or in the marketing categorization of different Consumer typologies. But also discourses which self-define as emancipatory rarely constitute an exception to this norm. When fighting for gender equality, for example, it is always through the filter of Gender that we look at our fellow humans kettled inside the various gender categories. Even when talking about humanity tout court, it is once again through the filter of Humanity that we look at the singular lives that are gathered on this planet. This is how we often end up fighting for the Woman, the Migrant, the Human, and so on, and hardly ever for the individual woman, the individual migrant, the individual human. Fooled by the pretense of such abstract collectivities to truly embody those who are comprised within them, we often find ourselves fighting, not for the emancipation of our fellow humans, but for that of their collective, capitalized names.

To Do and Do Not

Written by Federico Campagna, 20.02.2012
Stuff
 
The supposed invasion of the being by the having has been a recurrent theme throughout the history of Western civilization. Long before the advent of capitalism, one’s material possessions and social status in the community were already deeply intertwined. It was not by accident that the mention of a king in the pages of the Iliad was often followed by the endless list of his possessions, as if the number of sheep and pigs one possessed helped in some way to express the personality of the individual.
 
As time went by, the crass simplicity of the lists of the Iliad, turned into a more sophisticated catalogue of belongings. As already noted by Suetonius, first, and by Sallust later, at the time of the Roman empire fashion had already entered the equation of material wealth and social subjectivity. Above a certain threshold of wealth, It wasn’t just the sheer amount of stuff that one owned that was used to define his (rarely her) social status, but it was what he owned. His possessions did not simply have to be opulent and abundant – they also had to be filtered by the whims of fashion.
 
This trend proved unstoppable even during the so-called dark ages, and when private wealth could not keep pace with a minimum level of sophistication, the Church stepped in by prodigally investing in the assertion of its hegemony over fashion. If, out of laziness, we did not want to look back to those remote times for proof, we would simply have to look at the obsession for fashionable opulence of the current Pope, Benedictus XVI, rightly considered by many as the reincarnation of a medieval Pope in present times.
 

The politics of adventure - part 1

Written by Federico Campagna, 23.01.2012
It is surely not in vain that I myself am in need of thy words:
those of the future norms of strength,
those of the future norms of a valorous heart,
those of the future norms of fervor.
Nothing now, among all things, inspires my heart with valor.
Nothing now points me to the future norms of my existence.
 
Guarani prayer, as recorded and translated by Leon Cadogan (1966).
 
 
It
 
It I have often encountered a problem, when talking or writing about anti-work politics. While busy producing my proclamations against the dictatorship of Work’s ‘activity of repetition’, the strangulating theism on which it lies, the unforgivable sacrifice of one’s life which it imposes, and so on, I found that the alternative which I was able to offer did not match the narrative and environmental qualities offered by the ideology I was opposing.
 

Radical Atheism

Written by Federico Campagna, 11.01.2012
in loving memory of Pierre Clastres and Max Stirner
 
 
Few places in the world are more secular than the United Kingdom. The laughable origins of the Anglican church, mixed with the centuries-old hegemony of capitalist ethics seem to have finally killed the religious spirit of the people of Albion. Religion, in the UK, is a mark of underdevelopment usually reserved for impoverished ethnic minorities or for the inhabitants of rural areas.
 
As a migrant from Catholic Italy, when I first arrived in the UK I thought I couldn't have asked for more. Not only were the remnants of the church so liberal and progressive that even homosexuals were allowed to be priests, but also people did not feel the need to fight off the presence of the church by indulging in God-oriented swearing, as is the common habit in Italy. God seemed to have finally disappeared, both as an unrequested father figure and as the millenarian oppressor of all living creatures. Back then, I thought I had arrived in the promised land of ‘really existing atheism’. And yet, I couldn’t have been more mistaken.
 
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