Showing posts with label anti-authoritarian. Show all posts
Showing posts with label anti-authoritarian. Show all posts

Wednesday 27 March 2019

Feminism, To Be Or Not To Be, That Is The Question!

 
         I'm sure, that within the anarchist groupings this article will annoy some, irritate more, and raise others to fury. I'm also sure that there will be others in the anarchist groupings who will agree wholeheartedly with Anna. All the more reason to share it and and see what transpires.
From 325:

Words from anarchist comrade Anna Beniamino
Anna, Women’s prison of Rebibbia
Degenerations – Between pride and gender victimhood
(An article Degenerazioni Tra orgoglio e vittimismo di genere
Published in issue 3 of the anarchist paper Vetriolo)
       I am anarchist, I am not feminist because I see feminism as a sectorial and victimist withdrawal, I have never made any gender discrimination although I don’t use gender-friendly linguistic conventions, on the contrary I often use dirty politically incorrect language. I think that the annulment of gender privilege and similar oppression is already contained in the search for anarchy, that is to say in the practice of antiauthoritarian relations, and should be cultivated there. Ah, I forgot, I loathe consciousness-raising in public meetings and I also consider assemblies to be blunt instruments. I understand and also have the will to meet. But I see how all too often the assembly degenerates into sterile self-representation.
        You see nowadays you risk having to start off with such a preamble in order to enter the thicket of clichés on gender and feminism, disentangling yourself in the intricate incapacity to relate to the anarchist galaxy, with a range of behaviours going from hyper-emotiveness to the bureaucratic calculation of what stand (and degree of negotiable compromise) to take in a struggle. I don’t think that authoritarian and sexist behaviour can be fought by trying to spread new linguistic conventions or by cooking up shreds of mainstream indignant rhetoric (among which #nonunadimeno [enough is enough], the feminicide count on TV, pride, red shoes and rainbow ribbons) in an alternative sauce.
          Rather these should be recognized as signs of yet another operation of the deconstruction of real meaning and recuperation in act. Convinced that one is opposing them, in actual fact one is adapting to the very behavioural and normative codes conceded by dominion as ways of releasing tension.
It’s nothing new that economic and political power is tending to swallow up and redigest everything, faster and faster; consider for example the pearls of anti-sexist, antiracist or whatever it might be neo-conservatism and conformism that are being dispensed by the media every day.
          I believe that the first misunderstanding is the inability to put certain kinds of behaviour into context, within what should be a wider critique of relations and communication and interaction between individuals in the antiauthoritarian sense, reducing them to the level of questions of gender.
Gender categorization, in LGBTI (XYZ…) style, should be left to those who need to feel themselves a protected category, in pigeonholes more suited to a Linnaean categorization of individuals than free bodies and minds. Instead, we find such pigeonholes in antiauthoritarian milieus, which should already have internalized their refusal.
         By the way I’m far from believing that so-called liberated spaces really are such, in fact they often become parking lots for various forms of malaise and instead of enhancing the quality of life and relationships they risk lowering it even more. For example it’s not possible to see every inability to interact in a meeting as sexism, authoritarian imposition or gender violence: I read in a pamphlet [1] that was around last year stigmatizing the latent violence in relations between comrades ‘the oldest exercises power over the youngest, those with more experience impose themselves on those who have less, whoever is stronger on the not so strong, mirroring the relations of the existent we say we want subvert.’
      This is supposed to be a critique of authoritarian attitudes in antiauthoritarian milieus and it would be valid, were it not that it banalises and flattens everything: there is a fundamental difference between imposition of strength and the expression of experience. The inability to express oneself or to act is neither authoritarian nor antiauthoritarian, and can only be solved individually… otherwise we come to the idiocy of praising inability and inaction.
The concept of emotive violence or the violation of emotional integrity is even more ephemeral, because it promotes this analytical junk amongst antiauthoritarian individuals who should have far sharper critical weapons and practical capacity of intervention. As well as emptying of meaning the inflicted and brutal violence it is being compared to.
        How can we claim to engage in an unrelenting struggle against authority and dissertate on revolutionary and liberatory violence if we cannot even react individually to some ‘undesired comment in the street’ (by taking it for what it is, and dealing with it accordingly with the person who spat it out) or keep up an animated discussion during a meeting without having recourse to the shield of violated sensitivity? Why do we find ourselves reading the disarming and obvious idiocy that advises making love with a woman in order to avoid an unwanted abortion? [2] Why codify, even in the field of gender, only for “female gangs”, like conquest, self-defence from aggression and harassment? Isn’t this a problem common to all genders among liberated beings?
      Why should we revisit the most outworn products in the wardrobe of 1970s feminism, such as separatist meetings… maybe calling them workshops (a really ugly term that combines work and shop, borrowed from business conventions and unworthy of free discussions)?
       I read the spectre of the same reductive and banalising mechanism in another recent publication, the Italian edition of the Rote Zora claims [3], i.e. the intention to sensitize only a female audience about a group of women who carried out armed struggle in the 1980s and 90s in Germany, insisting on the choice of gender, of very great interest on some feminist topics, as a privileged discriminating factor for taking them out of oblivion… given that one doesn’t want it ‘to belong to official history. It is written by men’ [4]… What?!? Is it not that official historiography tends to not talk about them because they were angry, not angry feminists? Just as it doesn’t deal with – or distorts – the history, actions and writings of so many other angry men and women? The partial vision is not that of Rote Zora who experimented their own path of individual and collective struggle and liberation in the context of wider anti-imperialist and anti-capitalistic action, but of those who try to make a flag out of it in order to give more credibility and specific weight to their own theorizing, to then reduce themselves to looking for ‘paths of self-defence’.
      Why entrench oneself in a ‘feminist and lesbian’ discourse [5]? Why yet another protective cage, rather than develop the beauty and infinity of more advanced ideas of the critique of domination (not only gender), put forward and tested?
        ‘Sisterhood’ has always seemed to me to be a form of allusive alienation of transversal political alliances between oppressed and oppressors, between ‘inter-classist’ as it has become fashionable to say again… adverse parties. I also happened to see a booklet [6] recently containing an Italian feminist’s interviews of some female veterans of the Spanish revolution in 1936, aimed at finding a questionable ‘sisterhood’ between women anarchists engaged on the frontline (and in the background with Mujeres Libres), the POUM and Stalinist women.
       It was quite significant that almost centenarian anarchist revolutionary women were far more lucid and open in their critique about the limitations of feminism than their interviewer imbued with 1970s’ clichés was: in the extreme calm of a life lived to the full, they were able to explain simply the equal relations between male and female comrades, and how they managed to ridicule and neutralize the machismos that emerged among the most retrograde and stupid of their comrades. In short the practices and theoretical contribution of these women are far more advanced along the path of liberation of the individual and the negation of authoritarian dynamics than those of feminists who glean from their experiences, defending simulacra of struggle instead of the struggle itself. The need for auto-da-fé, the ‘deconstruction of one’s male privileges’, the search for separate places for discussions, self-awareness and self-analysis in public seem a little too much like signs of these times of over-exposition and woolly thinking, parading ‘struggles’ by category and interior struggles, to end up not struggling at all.
Anna,
Women’s prison of Rebibbia
October 2018
[1] Violenza di genere in ambienti antiautoritari ed in spazi liberati [Gender violence in antiauthoritarian milieus and in liberated spaces], Italian edition translated from Spanish in 2017
[2] Critica all’aborto [Critique of abortion], Jauria – Trans-feminist publication for animal liberation, issue 1, Summer/Autumn 2015
[3] Rote Zora – guerriglia urbana femminista [Rote Zora – Feminist urban guerrilla], Autoproduzione Femminista, 2018
[4] From the introduction to the same book
[5] Which the Rote Zora women themselves didn’t think relevant. From a 1984 interview with Rote Zora: ‘Some of us have children, many others don’t. Some are lesbian, others love men’, page 51, ibidem
[6] Donne contro [Women against], Isabella Lorusso, ed. CSA editrice, 2013
Visit ann arky's home at radicalglasgow.me.uk

Monday 17 July 2017

Bad News And Angry Voices.

           B(A)D NEWS – Angry voices from around the world“ is a monthly news program from the international network of anarchist and antiauthoritarian radios, consisting of short news segments from different parts of the world. As an international network of radio projects, we believe in the importance of international solidarity. And we also recognize the importance and the need to create and disseminate our own media and counterinformation. We hope, with this effort, to reach out to other anarchist and antiauthoritarian projects, groups and individuals, and to strengthen our connections and our struggles in sharing our stories. Although this program is in English, we recognize that even this ‚international‘ language can be alienating to some and we want to encourage others to create and share similar content in their own languages. We want to hear the Bad News first! Enjoy! And please feel free to share! 
         Our network website (http://a-radio-network.org) is not ready yet, but will be up very soon. You'll find the audio here:   http://aradio.blogsport.de/2017/07/17/bad-news-angry-voices-from-around-the-world-episode-2-072017/ 
         The first episode from June 2017 can be found here: http://aradio.blogsport.de/2017/06/16/bad-news-angry-voices-from-around-the-world-episode-1-062017/
  Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk

Tuesday 21 June 2016

No Borders!!!


          No Borders! People tend to see borders as those imaginary lines drawn on the surface of the planet by various power-mongers. However within those “borders” that surround “your” country, there are borders. There are areas of “no-go” territory, places of confinement, prisons are borders, those in can’t get out, those out can’t get in. Schools are borders, again once in, your not supposed to get out until the authorities tell you, you can go. They are all around us, detention centres, military property, places of employment, you can’t just walk in, and once in you can’t just walk out, you need somebody’s authority, or you pay a price. Even the glitzy shopping mall, you may go wandering in and leave, in fact you will be encouraged to come in, and you can just walk out, but the owner controls the right of entry, you can be banned from entering and you can be removed, if you don’t function as “expected”, it is not a public space. 
         Then there are the other type of borders, things you can't have, places that you can't go, barred for financial reasons, these borders are probably the most insidious, they slither through our society, separating the "haves" and the "have-nots", herding the poor into areas of deprivation, and making sure they stay there.
        Borders have become so entrenched in our psyche that there are borders we don’t even recognise, they become part and parcel of our life, an accepted fact of this society. This makes it all the more difficult for people to see the dropping of those imaginary lines that the power-mongers drew on the surface of the planet with our blood, but fall they must. 
 
         We can never claim to be free when we live in the midst of so many lines we cannot cross without a “higher” authority. We have to recognise all the borders within borders, a place of work should not be a place of confinement, but a place of willing creativity, schools should be an integrated part of our society, not a camp for shaping people to suit the needs of a capitalist “economy”. Prisons should be seen as what they are, an abomination and a scar on humanity, a system of repression. 
       Freedom means just that, freedom of movement, but must be linked to freedom to stay, with or without “documentation”. Borders are an anathema to freedom, our love of freedom means they will always need to be enforced, by a "higher" and "powerful" authority.
Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk
 

Tuesday 31 May 2016

Even Animals Shouldn't Be Caged.

        A call for solidarity from inside the cages. Most of us outside those state cages of repression, have no idea of what it is like. Apart from the separation from family and friends, there is the restriction on your actions and movements, continuous surveillance, and control, on top of this there is the arbitrator punishment and the brutality. Prison and civilised society, can't co-exist, most of accept that even animals shouldn't be caged. If we aim for a civilised society, we have to bring down the prisons.



From a comrade of ABC Brighton:

         A secret world exists within the high security prison estate in England, known as the Close Supervision Centre (CSC) system. The dehumanisation of CSC prisoners begins at a very early stage, in the official justification for the creation of the CSC system, which focuses on the need to contain a new breed of unmanageable and unpredictable risks. It continues with the creation of classificatory categories of ‘dangerousness’ which objectify prisoners and make more of the category and less of the human in them, and it is reinforced by the tightly controlled and highly regulated routines.
         In addition to isolation and extremely restricted movements, prisoners’ in-cell belongings are carefully regulated and subjected to relentless scrutiny and inspection.
         Prisoners remain in CSC units for years, decades even, made frustrated, angry and bored by their experiences with few avenues to vent their anger and with almost no opportunities to advance through the system. All perceived acts of disobedience or non-compliance by CSC prisoners, even of the most petty kind, are responded to brutally by gangs of prison officers clad in full riot gear who show no mercy when demonstrating their authority and power, sanctioned by Prison Service management at the highest levels.
        Rather than controlling violence, as it officially aims to do, this hyper-controlled environment breeds it. Having now spent six years subject to the unofficial punishment of allocation to the CSC myself, it is clear that without real pressure to force the required change nothing but more negative and oppressive measures will be added.
          Please lend your support for the abolition of the CSC system by attending the protest demonstration:
         21 July between 12.30pm and 2.30pm outside the offices of the Prison Ombudsman and Independent Monitoring Board, Rose Court, 2 Southwark Bridge, London SE1 9HS.

Kevan Thakrar A4907AE
Close Supervision Centre,
HMP Wakefield,
5 Love Lane,
Wakefield
WF2 9AG

www.justiceforkevan.com
www.Facebook.com/JusticeForKev
Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk




Friday 18 March 2016

Greek Anarchists Show Of Strength Against Drug dealers.

From Anarchist News:

       Massive show of strength as anarchists, antifascists and anti-authoritarians took to the streets of Exarcheia against drug dealing mafias and police. The demonstration was guarded by comrades armed with openly displayed guns (who can be seen on the video from 01:53), something that has not been seen at demonstrations in recent times but was deemed necessary due to the serious threat posed by the heavily armed drug mafias who work in collusion with the police.
        This show of armed strength and solidarity was in response to ongoing tensions in the area with drug dealing mafias including a recent incident where 3 anarchist comrades were violently attacked by a drug dealer.


Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk



Sunday 4 January 2015

Solidarity Is Our Winning Weapon.


      The Spanish fascist government's Operation Pandora should not be dismissed as something minor and over there in a foreign country. It is the expected vicious reaction from any state that feels its power is being threatened. The greatest threat to the power of any state is from those think for themselves, and encourage others to do likewise. The power of the state relies on a subservient population. Hence, anarchist will always come in for the first and hardest of the state's repressive fight back.
         Over the last few years the Greek state has been trying to savagely crush any autonomous centres, social squats, etc. by a brutal attack on anarchists, and shutting down those centres. Spain is just following the authoritarian rules. If the people start to think for themselves and act accordingly, the repression will be stepped up, and as unrest and anger among the people of Europe grows, so we should expect more of the Greek state reaction and more "Operation Pandora" type scenarios. Solidarity is our winning weapon in this struggle to be free from the cancer of authority.
      On "Operation Pandora" here is an open letter from Brieva Prison, by anarchist Monica Caballero. It first appeared on Anarchist News:

Anarchist comrade Monica Caballero on Operation Pandora from Brieva prison (Spain)



If I were to choose a different life I would not change it for anything.
      I vividly remember the intoxicating feeling that came over me when I began to question authority; I remember the many contradictions and questions. In this discovery of ideas I found many people that made their ideas into practical material in their libraries, publications, social centres, etc. … in their everyday life … they lived their lives in the here and now. It did not take long for me to want to do the same.
     I remember the anxiety I felt when I heard there were comrades imprisoned for putting their ideas of freedom into practise; sisters of ideas in all corners of the world in the jaws of the panoptic beast. That distressing feeling never changed, but is accompanied by gestures of solidarity.
      We are many; the anarchists on the other side of the wall, and after Tuesday December 16 our numbers have grown.
     The tentacles of power dropped into anarchists´ spaces, libertarian social centres, a squatted house and homes of several anarchists in Catalonia and Madrid. The hunt captured eleven companions, of these, seven have been kept in prison, accused of belonging to an armed group of a terrorist nature. It is no coincidence that comrades arrested are part of my immediate circle; indeed, more than half of them frequently visited me in jail. The judicial hammer has punished solidarity.
     I cannot keep silent before such misery, the State´s repressive revenge borders on delirium. The media (spokesmen for the rulers) talks about bosses and subordinates, I stress to them and anyone who harbours any doubts – we are anti-authoritarian, no one is above me, nor am I above anyone!
     The spaces attacked in Catalonia, were not arbitrary, firstly, the Kasa de la Muntanya is an important symbol of the squatting movement, and with its 25 years distanced from capitalist logic they have made their contribution to many generations of dissidents to this system of terror. The libertarian social centres and anarchists spaces that were attacked never hid their ideals, providing fertile ground for sowing the seeds of freedom.
      The costs in this struggle for the recovery of our lives are very high, nobody said it would be easy, but undoubtedly if I were to choose a different life I would not change it for anything. In this fight against domination no cages or walls can silence our voices, but without you, comrades, our voices are transformed in echoes.
    If you, my recently jailed comrades, are ever able to read these words, I tell you that I’m certain you will remain incorruptible and rise to the occasion as you always have.
    I remember every time I read or heard “solidarity is a necessary weapon for anarchists”. Today I hope that those memories come true … making our ideas action.
Brieva prison, December 2014.
Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk



Sunday 9 May 2010

THE NEW WESTERN FASCISM.

       
       Warrantless searches, phone tapping, torture, kidnapping, indefinite imprisonment without charges, denial of legal representation, a continuous assault on our civil liberties, you name it, all part of the free democratic West. We slumbered, we are now in the grip of neo-fascists with an agenda aimed at protecting a privileged elite and using the unbridled power of an authoritarian government to enhance and protect their wealth.
      They are not wearing black shirts, nor stomping down our main streets in their shiny black boots and they are not burning books. To most people Fascist means swastika waving rallies and chants against the Jews. They are wrong. Today’s fascists are radical, conservative, corporate, authoritarian nationalists. They always play the fear card, terrorists from abroad, al-Qaeda, the continuous war against the enemy over there, then claim they need the power to protect us.
       The longer we slumber the tighter their grip until all freedom and civil liberties are a thing of the past. They will not reverse the trend of their own accord, they will never willingly relinquish their power. This is no time for slumber, this is a time to challenge that power, the gangrenous marriage of state and corporate power must be broken, dismantled, atomised and buried in the dustbin of history. Power must belong to the people who make up our society or it belongs to the putrid, pampered, privileged parasites of the new era of the fascist/corporate/state. If we continue to slumber our children will inherit a world of violence, deprivation, control and punishment, while the elite gorge on the fruits of our children’s labour.