Anarchy Alive

Just for a binge. This one’s also great, and includes numerous conjugations of the word fuck…

The interview I did with an anonymous comrade about the Far Right in Russia has been printed in issue #30 (October 2007) of the East-European anarchist journal Abolishing the Borders from Below. As I write this the website is unavailable, while the google-cached page for the latest issue states that now “ABB turned from “bi-monthly” into “excitingly irregular” journal”…

Funny thing is – I never knew it was going to happen until a friend emailed me today. According to that friend,

it’s really funny. It starts with a boxed text in which they say they don’t have time to look for the article writer, but that his interview about the Russian right wing got to them somehow, and is really important, so they decided to publish it anyway, and that they invite him, if he is even real, this ‘uri gordon’ to come and give a lecture…it’s printed on 4 pages.

well – I hardly mind! Anyway I’m pretty happy now…

This has just appeared in English – a very sharp and well written analysis + chronology of the 2005 “banlieue riots” in France, from an Italian insurrectionist perspective. Written by a “Filippo Argenti”, who is a character from Dante’s Inferno.

If the claim of putting forward great revolutionary analyses that explain everything and that the proletarians only have to apply diligently has now disappeared, it is time that revolutionary action itself was conceived in a totally different way. Instead of the mission of taking the flag to where the first fire breaks out and the first barricade is erected, there is now the chance to put up barricades or start fires elsewhere, as an extension of the revolt, not as its political direction. In fact, the lamentations of those on the side of the insurgents who complain about the lack of any political programme are quite pathetic.

To extend the revolt, however, does not mean to put oneself at the level of existing practises and multiply them (cars are burning, so we are going to burn them too), but it means deciding what must be struck, and how, to uphold the universal significance of the revolt.

At the same time, to transform the angry youths of the suburbs into the new revolutionary subjects would be equally pathetic. It would be great to think that the students in struggle against precarity had taken the baton from the insurgents of November. It is not quite like that.

OK, one more:

Anger is the expression of strength that has been repressed for too long, offended and abused, the anger of those who suddenly understand that they are ‘too young to go rotten’. Its primary manifestation opens up a horizon characterised by universal destruction. As you are in a blind rage you look around you searching for something to destroy, to hurl at a wall or to break with your own hands; the body is felt to be a damaging instrument. Anything can be destroyed! Anger, therefore, manifests itself as a nihilist horizon. As they can desire nothing for themselves, these second-class lives decide to desire that this nothing be realized (as nothing).

There is also a second part forthcoming, “Days of Refusal”, possibly about the anti-CPE movement.

Kudos to the comrades in Prague, where some 2,000 anti-fascists, anarchists and Jewish youth kicked the shit out of a few hundred fascist skins and supporters. Said tossers (including two bus-loads from Germany) wanted to march through the Jewish quarter on the anniversary of Krystalnacht.

What’s funny is, suddenly everyone in Israel loves the anarchists – Hebrew readers just check out the talkbacks on Ha’aretz. The “enemy of my enemy” logic really works here, especially when Nazis are involved…Meanwhile, the same pubic seems blind to the reality around it: we have not only a religious far right in the settlements and secular fascist leaders like Lieberman – but also poor kids from Russia who decide to be neo-nazis and go beat up immigrant workers like their friends back in Europe. Go figure.

My two Colonos friends have some interesting remarks on Naomi Wolf’s alarm-bells over Fascism in the USA. States of Exception – not what you thought…

Meanwhile in Siberia, the real Far Right is in cahoots with the police and nuclear developers, and delivering serious blows to the ecology movement. The killing of Ilya Borodeanko at an eco-protest camp last summer was only the beginning, reports the Wall Street Journal. Turns out the son of a leading local environmental campaigner was involved – apparently a disaffected kid who fell in with right-wing footbal fans, later recruited (by who?) to carry out the attack:

Allies have closed ranks around Ms. Rikhvanova, but they say the attack and Pavel’s arrest have badly dented the image of Irkutsk’s environmental movement.

“In russia, there is a feeling that in an ordinary family, children support their parents,” said Maksim Vorontsov, a member of the National Bolshevik Party, which has worked closely with Ms. Rikhvanova. “Now people are wondering why children might be attacking their parents. They are saying [ecologists] must be abnormal.”

Ms. Rikhvanova set out her own views on the attack in a letter she wrote to erstwhile allies in the ecology movement. She said she later learned that the security company that hired her son, called Continent, was owned by a top official in the Union of Right Forces, a political party that was once headed by the man who now runs Russia’s atomic-energy agency.

Today she says she suspects that Stepan and possibly her son’s employer had some kind of link with the security services, and that her son was lured into the attack to help ruin Baikal Wave.

What is scarier about this situation: that the state and the fash have struck a horrible blow, or that Baikal Wave was working with the National Bolsheviks to begin with?