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Sep 15, 17
Filed under: Anarchist Movement, Critique
“It’s useless to wait-for a breakthrough, for the revolution, the nuclear apocalypse or a social movement. To go on waiting is madness. The catastrophe is not coming, it is here. We are already situated within the collapse of a civilization. It is within this reality that we must choose sides.”
The Invisible Committee, “The Coming Insurrection”
The New York Times recently published an article titled “The Storm Reaches Puerto Rico: ‘There Is Nothing Like This’” in which the author notes:
“Hurricane Irma, one of the strongest storms ever recorded in the Atlantic, hit the eastern Caribbean on Wednesday with winds of up to 185 miles an hour… The Category 5 storm leveled Barbuda, damaging 95 percent of its buildings and leaving the island ‘barely habitable.’ It has since begun lashing Puerto Rico and is also threatening havoc and destruction in the Virgin Islands, the French Caribbean, St. Martin, the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Cuba. The Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos Islands will also be at risk on Thursday.”
With record-setting temperatures and unprecedented fires from California to Canada and the immense deluge of floods in Texas, many people are once again at the mercy of material destitution and vulnerability like never before. Recently, Hurricane Irma—as well as related disasters in the Global South—has thrown climate change into the center and has created ruptures in the minds of people all over the world. The crisis of the current global system and colonial-disaster capitalism are increasingly unable to divorce themselves from the catastrophes they have produced. With these events, however, comes the prospect of continual state of emergencies, repression, and unparalleled counter-insurgency operations.
Just about a week ago, the NYT also reported that “police departments will now have access to military surplus equipment typically used in warfare, including grenade launchers, armored vehicles and bayonets, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced on Monday, describing it as ‘lifesaving gear.’” This change comes just in time with attempts by federal and local governments to militarize their police forces, as well as to label “Antifa” as a terrorist organization (while at the same time removing neo-nazi groups from such formal labels) and to be subject to the possibility of gang injunctions. In fact, a report from Insurge Intelligence written the in spring of last year both predicted this militarization and foreshadows much of what is yet to come:
“The next five years will see the international market for ‘riot control systems’ boom to a value of more than $5 billion at an annual growth rate of 5%, according to a new report by a global business intelligence firm. The report forecasts a dramatic rise in civil unrest across the world, including in North America and Europe, driven by an increase in Ferguson-style incidents and ‘extremist attacks.’”
And, just today, the Detention Watch Network website has announced the following:
“… Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) plan[s] to conduct a nationwide immigration enforcement operation from mid- to late-September. Multiple sources within and close to ICE have shared information with advocates about the operation, which ICE is calling ‘Operation Mega.’… These raids are intended to be historic in size, targeting between 6,000 and 10,000 immigrants.”
With most of the Alt-Right white supremacist movement on the run from the Bay Area to Boston, previous energies and potentialities are now able to shift and redirect themselves. Whereas the vicious cycle of reactionary action comes to a close—from the inception of Trump’s presidency earlier this year to the mass mobilizations against white supremacist terror—many recent movements and mobilizations have created an unprecedented momentum and an impending possibility for general upheaval. With the situation finally morphing in our favor and toward the cusp of the unknown, we are left with many questions and apprehensions on where to go from here.
We offer an analysis of this current situation as an assessment of where these flows and ruptures can channel into and multiply in ways they haven’t previously. We identify a few problems from which the anarchist, autonomous, and anti-authoritarian milieu (and even the milieu form itself, which we concede to be a part of) can learn from. We do not seek to ground proposals but to offer some thoughts on possibilities for proceeding. We do this first by a quick exposition of “Now/Maintenant”, the new forthcoming piece by our friends over at the Invisible Committee to be released in English later this year; the excerpts that follow from their text are taken from an Autonomie post. If anything is to be taken away from this article, it is this: we hope that our friends, comrades and loved ones taken action now, and not wait until agendas of the state and white supremacy are finally taking place because it will, then, be too late.
Thus, the text begins with the relevant acknowledgment that “tomorrow is cancelled.” It continues:
“The reasons for carrying out a revolution are present. None is missing. The sinking of politics, the arrogance of the powerful, the reign of the false, the vulgarity of the wealthy, the cataclysms of industry, rampant poverty, naked exploitation, ecological apocalypse – we are spared nothing, not even that of being informed. ‘Climate: 2016 breaks the record of heat’, tells us Le Monde on its first page, as almost every year nowadays. All the reasons are united, but it is not reasons that make revolutions, it is bodies…
… This world that babbles so much has nothing to say: it is devoid of affirmation. Perhaps it believed that it thereby rendered itself unassailable. But it above all placed itself at the mercy of any consequent affirmation. A world whose positivity arises from so many ravages well deserves that what is affirmed with life first takes on the form of pillaging, smashing, rioting. We will not fail to be taken as desperate, on the grounds that we act, we build, we attack without hope. Hope, here is at least a sickness with which this civilization has not infected us. We are not nevertheless desperate.
No one ever acted through hope. Hope is related to waiting, to refusing to see what there is, to the fear of breaking in on the present, in short: to the fear of living.
To hope is to declare oneself in advance without a hold on what one nevertheless expects. It is to hold back from the process so as not to be held to the results. It is to want things to be otherwise without wanting the means to make them so. It is cowardliness. One has to know to what one holds, and then hold to it. Even if to make enemies. Even if to make friends. As soon as we know what we want, we are no longer alone, the world peoples itself. Everywhere allies, those close by and an infinite gradation of possible friendships. Nothing is close by for one who floats.
Hope, this very light but constant impulse towards tomorrow that is communicated to us day by day is the best agent for the maintenance of order. We are daily informed of problems about which we can do nothing, but for which there will surely be solutions tomorrow. The whole crushing sentiment of powerless that this social organization cultivates endlessly in each of us is nothing but an enormous lesson in waiting. It is a flight from the now.
There never was, there is not and there never will be anything but the now. And even if what was formerly exercises some effect on the now, it is because what was formerly was never anything itself except a now. As tomorrow will be. The only way to understand something in the past is to understand that it was also a now. It is to feel the weak breath of air in which the people of yesterday lived.
If we are so inclined to flee the now, it is because it is the place of the decision. It is the place of the ‘I accept’ or of the ‘I refuse’. It is the place of the logical gesture that immediately follows perception. It is the present, and thus the place of presence. It is the instant, ceaselessly repeated, of taking a position. To think in distant terms is always more comfortable. ‘In the end’, things will change; ‘in the end’, beings will be transfigured. Meanwhile, let us continue as we are, let us remain what we are. A spirit that thinks in terms of the future is incapable of acting in the present. It does not seek change: it avoids it. The current disaster is like the monstrous accumulation of all the deferred moments in the past, to which is added in a permanent landslide that of each day and of each instant. But life is always played out now, and now, and now.”
Students are walking out of South Mountain HS in #Phoenix in protest of #Trump's decision on #DACA. pic.twitter.com/OB12gl1pgi
— Cronkite News (@cronkitenews) September 5, 2017
As we can see, now is the time. It is useless—and, in the end, deadly—to wait for white nationalists to come to our towns again, ICE deportations, man-made disasters, or the inevitable police operations against the people. We can be preemptive or strike when stricken, subordinated to a position of unending defensiveness. Pre-figurative politics have long been dead. It is the time for a post-reactionary age, it is time for constructing. We shout “What do we want?…” in the streets but sometimes fail to actually articulate what we could and want to build.
In addition, now is the time for post-negation and post-antagonism. The milieu is typified by negations against what currently exists and that we have become so good at regurgitating—i.e. “No Borders, No Transphobia, Against Reform, Against Racists, Anti-Authoritarian, Anti-Capitalists”, the list goes on. And these incomplete negations transfer themselves to our actions and projects. It is now the time to build, and to affirm. The positive has been withering way under the boot of nihilism—not that we think the latter is bad on its own, but rather that we need the former now more than ever. There exists a general lack, of the positive, amidst self-ruination of the system itself and our insistence on double negation and denial of what is.
How can we blockade capitalism when we have not built our own infrastructure? How can we burn down prisons when we have not built mass alternatives to policing and developed restorative justice measures? How can we expect others take us seriously when our milieu is so shaped and characterized by negation of the now rather than the affirmation of all the present’s potentialities? How can we concretely start to deemphasize our obsession with and fetishization of anti-politics towards an alter-politic, towards the realm of what we can be? In the creation and search for life, the (re)discovery of life itself, what can we do now to propel the motors of general revolt and new forms of existence with the friendships and relationships that we have established, as well as those that will come to be? How can we continue to find each other, to build the trust and camaraderie needed for the long haul?
We do not have a list of suggestions nor programme, but we did personally find inspiration of the kind of spirit needed for the affirmation of life in recent actions toward the administration’s cancelation of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. From Colorado to New York, youth and high schoolers took to the streets in organized efforts to demonstrate against the lead up to the removal of DACA. Although there were considerable mobilizations on Tuesday, hella youth of color manifested their power, such as youth from South Mountain High in Arizona:
In article interviewing a student who was a part of the walk outs, the article notes: “Zuniga is a DACA recipient and has until 2019 until his permit expires. His students ask him if he’s scared, he said. ‘Scared? No,’ he told New Times. ‘I’ve been here before.’… ‘I hope all these students know the reason they’re doing this,’ Zuniga said. ‘They’re going to remember this day and they’re going to feel empowered instead of defeated.’”
In their campaign that seeks a campus without the presence of police and in their contempt for the administration, the youth took to the streets and realized their power. As a stepping stone toward liberation, the students took action now—they didn’t wait for orders, their parents, nor did they give a fuck about the police or their school administration. By setting aside their fears, a young generation, whose prospects for a good life under the current system are nonexistent and who have nothing to lose and everything to gain, manifested themselves and prove the importance of each passing now and the need to seize the moment without hesitation. It is in their spirit of fearlessness and relentlessness in which we must be able to pursue the life we individual and collectively wish to see and live. We, too, need to seize the day and build endlessly our lives and the ways we relate to each other, without resorting to pre-figurative politics nor to unending reactionary movement. Whatever it is we seek to build, let’s do it now.
