Fernando Bárcenas, Mexican Anarchist Prisoner, Calls for Solidarity with Prison Strike

From Anarchist Black Cross – Mexico
Translated by Scott Campbell

Open letter to compañerxs.

Note: The use of the word prison in this text refers to all artificial environments that domesticate us so as to insert us by force into the capitalist system of production; this is a contribution to deepen the reflection of all living beings in the hands of economic powers and the technological project…

Compas, I greet you with insurrectionary love, that these words of war may reach you; greeting as well the coming days of insurrection, as ideas bloom in the fields like flowers we should not stop tending.

We do not know if there will be a victory, but what we do know is that they will not occupy our dreams and our lives…

The only truly free moment is when we fight for freedom, because we prefer to die rather than accept this way of life, and without realizing it we are already free, because nothing occupies our minds except the sole desire to set fire to reality…

But what hides behind this destructive war, behind the somber darkness of the human spirit? Is it not perhaps the reflection and poetic manifestation of beings taking back their lives and actively influencing the organization of the daily life?

If each person that bragged about their “freedom” became aware of their condition, it would be the beginning of the last war, our last opportunity.

I have learned that the potentials for a real force capable of opposing and negating capitalism are revealed in the course of the daily lives of the people.

They are simple linkages of ideas and actions; we don’t want to be palatable to the modern consumerist masses, that is why I believe a true form of self-organization can only exist among the most beaten-down and marginalized people, who daily live in a war driven by instinct and feeling rather than reason…

As an unspoiled and wild conscience, not too manipulated by educational systems, is always more likely to be open to anarchist positions…

To others, who instinctively sense, feel driven towards disobedience, it’s just creating the “spark” to ignite the flame…

But generally, to cause one to reflect, a prisoner, for example, we find that simple words aren’t enough, because this is someone who lives in the war every day and who knows the landscape much better than we do and that doesn’t happen through words, but through real actions and attitudes that are in line with what we think and say.

Many question the “tactics” or “methods” as if it were a competition and with that I’m not saying we should isolate and avoid conscious criticism, but to the contrary; the only problem is that we are dragging along bourgeois influences, like shackles around our necks that historically have permeated the organizational formations of those who call themselves libertarians…

Radically opposite that, I don’t thinks it’s necessary to rationalize all aspects of life. The social revolution is built daily, without manuals or dogmas, as much in our social life as in the shadows, and not because one has to be revolutionary by decree, but because the word revolution for me, and I know for many others, means to take an active role in this war, but always in our own way, and because of that we can’t keep closing our eyes when faced with any doctrine or scientific or religious ideology, as learning and knowledge are acquired in the popular trenches, in experimentation, in confusion, in spontaneity, we don’t want set goals or standards, because it would be sentencing ourselves to ignorance and slavery…

The problem of the great civilizations that have existed so far is that they have all based their worldviews on exact and quantifiable sciences…

The human feels such anguish at the insignificance of its existence given the absolute abandonment that is life under the prison regimes of the cities and prisons; and because of that it seeks refuge and relief by trying to give a fictitious “order” to life; it dedicates itself to seeking to understand everything and reduce it all to its world and size. If we focused more on simply enjoying the exquisiteness of existence we would find relief for all the evils created in us by civilizational domestication, and all the catastrophic wars that the human has brought to this earth by naively seeking to break the natural order of life could have been avoided…

And that is why in this imposed war, in which we live and suffer slavery and misery at the hands of a few who in the name of capital have bestowed upon themselves the right to direct our existence, it is still not too late to realize that the centuries of history that have preceded us have taught us that any form of government is always the same thing; the justification of the right to restrict and to punish in order to exploit…

 

As even the most primitive living organism instinctively knows that if it is not capable of adapting to its environment it will eventually become extinct; the question would then be: Will the human be capable of adapting to the conditions of artificial life imposed on it by the techno-industrial environment?

In wild nature and in ourselves the components exist that make the way forward possible. It is absurd to think about possessing all natural resources and materials in our environment, that is a colonial and anthropocentric vision of life and its reproduction will imminently bring with it the edification of the principles of authority and power and, as a consequence, slavery and war…

Our participation in the war must therefore be radically different from the imperialist way of war…it is not war for war, it is not war for its sake, but for our wild defense…

This is a call for revolutionary solidarity against the slavery and extermination imposed by economic plunder…in north america, latin america, the middle east, europe and all other places touched by civilization, know that we are preparing ourselves within these Mexican prisons, but that will be shown through action…

In the war with our prisoner brothers, the slaves of the United States, who are rising up and coordinating a national strike in the prisons of north america on September 9, 2016, and with all other prisoners and slaves in foreign prisoners…

Until we are all free.

Fernando Bárcenas Castillo.