Signalfire

WHO KILLED THE UNBORN BABY, ALSO? [ crossposted from act forfreedomnow  slightly edited for clarity]
An insurrectionary destructionist perspective on the dead bodies of the uprising which were in a burned/locked bank in Greece;
Let’s cry for the baby, too
And have rage against capital and capitalist moralists, in order to attack better!

The workers who were locked in a bank, why did they not break down the door of the bank when they saw that people, -COMRADES- were shouting and fighting with the “weapons” that they had decided to use; stones, molotovs, bottles, sticks of the banners etc…
Were they afraid of losing their job? Were they afraid of losing their job when they knew better than anyone that the building had no fire-exit; they could also die because of an electrical fault, couldn’t they? Were they afraid of living in hunger? Other than the pregnant woman did they have children to feed? Were they afraid of living in a worse situation; getting less money then the -present-, when compared with the unemployed situation/unemployment? Do they really like to count the meaningless amounts of the capitalists’ profits? Who forced them to be inside and why? What kind of guard is this? Do they like to have money for their holidays which is like paying money for making love?
Or were they waiting for a revolution which is in a process by: “revolutionaries, marxists & socialist parties, anarchist pacifists, unions, intellectuals; the ones who have the map for the way that goes to the “free society”, the ones who are sitting in the “bourgeouis-homeland of pacifism”?
We are, and we will just think and discuss it, but for sure, it’ll be impossible for us to learn,because they are – all  “four”- dead. And nobody can speak for them, anarchists included. But we have a letter from another worker who was in the same bank on the same day, too. And we know also, when comrades wanted to burn the TV station vans they forced them to get out; they forced the “workers”: journalists, to get out of the van, and AFTERWARDS they burned the van as happened many weeks ago, also.

“All great things must first wear a terrifying mask
in order to inscribe them in the heart of humanity”
Nietzsche

Did the comrades do something “bad” in burning the bank? Of course not, we wish we could destroy them all, along with prisons, courts from now on, too. But also we would prefer, – as comrades- when they are empty as we can see and we are sure about that; when there are no innocent people, unborn babies. But if the situation is different, if it is fascist police that we are talking about, isn’t it something practical, isn’t this desire of destruction poetic, full of the desire for life?

Did the comrades really burn the bank when they knew that there were workers, who did not want to join the protests, and the feast of destruction? We are sure we can say no. But also we are sure, and ready to ask, what about the locked doors? What about the bastard ones, “anarchists” or leftists who are blaming the – comrades -, – if they did it for sure- that they burned them all, laughing at them and shouting and attacking the police at the same time?

To make a “critique” like this, especially if they are “comrades”, they must be in a situation which is encircled not only with fear, which stops their thinking. It should be the State and society attacking pyschologically masking themselves as fears too; more than just one that blocks faced with the realities of chaos’ feast.

There are also some voices who are afraid of crying. And manipulating the purposes and for sure, this is a moral of order, and it’s also to have the present order again, the order of things, the order of this world, something totally different to the natural order of things; chaos, destructionist and creative anarchy at the same time body and soul.

To fight and destroy – this world -, we should just be ourselves to feel, to think, to attack.

To take back our lives into our hands again, to destroy “everything”, everything which is beautiful when dying, when it lives in the other form. As it was happening and as written on a wall in December 2008, after Alexis’ murder…

For a poetic life with love. With tears and rage, with attack and escape.

You are not forgotton Alexis, along with the unborn and unnamed children. The murderers and planners of murders are clearly on the other side of the doors.

If we can’t cry – with or without a voice -, how we can live and enjoy life?

Let’s stop negotiation and attack the bosses of the power and prisons. Greetings to the comrades who are fighting more than symbolically.

Then, radical self critique is always necessary.

Guerilla Group Of Libertarian Destructionists and Terrorists, Rain Cell

1:
Building the Party, between co option and self inflicted marginality:
currently the revolutionary project is lost in the interplay of social democratic hegemony through the mediation of  class antagonism and the isolated and disorganized critique in words and action on the part of the ultra left in its various manifestations .
On the one hand their stands the whole established structure of the social democratic apparatuses, the NGO’s, activist projects, unionist organizations, left parties of the electoral and armed types, and on the other, the isolated tendencies which assert the necessity of a communization process that can only articulate itself as a process of antagonistic rupture with capital and its institutions of social pacification.
However the communist tendencies are handicapped by a lack of coherence, organization and strategic orientation, and display an affinity for the retreat into nihilism, fatalism and a romantic individual rebellion, which  corrodes the possibility for a development of  class autonomy as a process on the level of social reproduction.
The affinity group interpreted as a lose and highly unstable coalition, without a clear group identity, can not function as an effective means of agitation and finds itself in practice as barely distinguishable from any a-political friendship group, and the theory of “informal organization” tends to become a cover for the perpetuation of isolated social scenes, opaque not so much to the state, as to the broad mass of the working class.
Clandestine action deprived of its context as part of a process of class recomposition, becomes a panacea in and of itself, a purely emotional expression of frustration, without political calculation, a sort of primitivism carried out by those who deny their potentiality as vanguard of the class.
In the absence of professionalism and discipline, projects and interventions are short lived and inconsistent, the necessity for the development of a social infrastructure capable of rapid absorption of human material into its functioning is foreclosed upon, leaving no basis for future interventions and maintaining a vicious cycle of marginality.
The psychological colliery to this is the development of magical thinking and missionary ideals as a substitute for  militant analysis  and calculation, waiting for objectively generated collapse and crisis,  belief that people need only to “hear the
truth and be saved”, exultation of conflict, violence and total negation as stylistic poise and abstraction.
As a result of these dysfunctions, most people after a certain point lose interest in a project that lacks realism and serves  more then anything as a mechanism of emotional gratification.
Many individuals  sympathetic to a social revolutionary perspective are in fact lost from the beginning to the social democratic structures in the absence of a functional alternative.
In the opinion of this author, the first step out of the present malaise is the shameless and unapologetic rehabilitation
of the figure of the professional revolutionary and the concept of the party.
Not in the form of a Leninist dogmatism and a push in favor of centralism, but as an orientation towards the construction of coordinated disciplined and politically coherent nuclei capable of consistent long term intervention in the class struggle, a new type of organically constituted, immensely flexible cadre party without central committees, congresses and initials.
The audacity of focused minority action is a necessary subjective precondition of any revolutionary process, a rejection of the function of class vanguard is at the same time, rejection of the possibility of communization and thus of combatant class politics.
In terms of historical experience the perspective of social revolution is upheld first and foremost in all cases by the conscious minority, the PLM in the Mexican revolution, the anarchist battle detachments and SR-maximalists in Russia, the KAPD in the Germany of the 20′s and so on.
This fact is obscured when undue emphasis is placed upon spontaneous mass eruptions, which is to say:
insurrection is misapprehended as a moment of destructive negation, with the riot as the be all and end all of subversive aspiration.
In actuality the process of insurrection is the long drawn out process of the imposition of communist institutional norms through the steadily accumulating disruption of the frictionless perpetuation of bourgeoisie hegemony, a positive and richly structured phenomena which finds its essence in the formation of new organs of social power and generalization of cultural norms which formulate capital as alien and its power as occupation.
The motor of the process of insurrection is the party defined practically as that element of the class that articulates its absolute antagonism to valorization and the extraction of surplus, through the constitution of a self organizing infrastructure that develops through the escalation of expropriation and sabotage across the social terrain.
The development of the party is no mere slap dash and alcoholic affair, it is produced by the interaction of the willed effect of the most conscious elements of the class manifesting themselves as a coherent political force, coordinated, discipline, endowed with martial ardor and strategic sensibility, with the objective conditions of social tension that are generated by the nature of commodity relations themselves.
2:
political abstraction and the discourses of privilege:
The post 68′  milieu of the radical left in the imperialist metropolises  has beached itself on the sand bank of grandiose abstraction and moralistic denunciation of privilege and complicity, and thus lost the capacity to swim in the waters of its own social environment, a certain recipe for political impotence.
This is a thread of fundamental continuity that links modes of political expression, that on the surface appear disparate and opposed.
In the post war consumer democracies of the united states, the frg and japan, the most serious and militant factions  of the 60′s insurgency oriented themselves towards anti-imperialism, separation from the daily realities of local and concrete exploitation in favor of a Manichean and apocalyptic analysis of the world situation in which the metropolitan/white proletariat was forever dammed for its favored position in the world market structure and the international division of labor, while the global will to power of the Stalinist national bourgeoisie was exulted as the spear point of the revolutionary subject.
In the context of such a world view, the role of revolutionaries in the “mother country”,  was armed action in support of
national liberation movements  viewed in terms of moral imperative, and by implication separation from the reality of the immediate class contradictions.
This trajectory can be illustrated practically by the history of the Red Army Fraction in West Germany, who although beginning with the intent of integrating themselves with the day to day struggles of the German working class ( I.e the  positions expressed in “Serve the people: the urban guerrilla and class struggle”) , rapidly devolved to the point where  armed actions against their own potential basis of support ( Mogadishu 1977) could be justified without apology, and
collaboration with soviet imperialism became the logical outgrowth of a romanticist and geopolitical  Third worldism.
In japan a significant element of the communist student movement removed itself completely from its own social reality in order to wage “revolutionary armed struggle” half a world away in Palestine.
While at the same time in the United States, that element of the New left that had escaped derailment into the world of Marxist newspaper vending and the bucolic idylls of hippie communes, lesbian separatism and so on, melted down into a neurotic excrescence of racial guilt guarding its moral purity through ever more isolated acts  of mostly clandestine solidarity with equally isolated movements in the U.S internal colonies and with Stalinist controlled mass movements abroad.
While the militant minority isolated itself, the reformist majority of the New Left beginning its march through the institutions, carried out the legalistic mirror image of the same politics of abstraction, with its hollow discourses of privilege and moral purity.
And for the next few decades the Left dissolved into an elitist farce of “non violent direct action” and “critical race theory”,
hack sociologists  announced that the class perspective which they had never understood in the first place ( identifying  it with the bureaucratic behemoths of  the third international) , was now obsolescent, to be replaced by the “new social movements” and “civil society”.
The logical excrescence of  this poisonous degeneration are the single issue movements based around spectacle and civil
dialog, ecology, opposition to sweet shops, anti-globalization, anti-war, a great procession of  placards and puppets , based in the phantasmal world of moral sentiments and image mediated relation with the fetishsied suffering of the distant other.
Here in the United States what has passed for a revolutionary movement has for a long time satisfied itself with riding the coat tails of these transitory stage plays, and presenting itself as the radical wing of the performance.
Thus the “spirit of Seattle”  a mediatric spectacle driven by the controlled dissent of the soft state, become a prioritized focus of intervention for pro-revolutionary factions, who greeted the inevitable ( not to mention irrelevant) demise of this mirage with considerable dismay.
However the anti war movement soon stepped in to fill the void,and choreographed rituals of dissent under the management
of the usual suspects and far removed from the every day lives of the participants, were once more misidentified as the “real thing” by over eager idealists.
When tears are shed over the usually rapid dissipation of such astro-turf concoctions, the salient fact that nothing of substance was lost is typically omitted.
Class consciousness, the awareness of the necessity for the destruction of the world of exchange value is not generated from homilies on the moral duty of alliance with the wretched of the earth, or from academic contemplation of the injustice of global capital flows, it originates from the concrete texture of lived experience, the crushing maddening awareness that control over the conditions of your own life has been expropriated by systemic and omnipresent brutality.
Acts of transcendent antagonism and the discourse of critical theory only bring this universal experience of torture into a potentially creative awareness of the historically determinate origins of its immiseration.
When practice is detached from the actual, immediate and local circumstances of its agent, the only basis for the development of sustainable social antagonism is cut off at the start.
A position of insurrectionary rupture is the only position around which authentic community at this historical juncture, which is to say negative community, the community of the dispossessed negating their dispossession can be formed.
By the same token, the only basis for the sustainable unfolding of insurgency, is the broadest diffusion of ties of mutuality and affinity within the class.
3:
Fighting where you stand:
Towards a practice of communist localism:
for contemporary American anarchism political practice all too often devolves into a spectator sport punctuated by epic set piece battles.
“Greece” becomes the source of a whole mythology, and the practice of distant comrades becomes a point of mechanical reference even when this practice itself has borne fruits that are hardly enviable ( Italy and Oaxaca come to mind), and the organization of summit demos becomes a sort of obligatory chore regardless of tactical or strategic considerations.
A durable social basis will never be constituted through small and isolated factions expressing their undying solidarity across national borders, nor through the mobilization of vast and heterogeneous crowds to confront this or that ruling class conference with incoherent and ill defined opposition.
The proletariat can only begin to construct itself as a force, neighborhood by neighborhood, and district by district, international circulation of affinity is pointless without the precondition of  local accumulation of forces.
The active minority serves the function of the bringing into self awareness, the qualitative and quantitative heightening of class contradictions, through the consistent and long term mobilization of specific intermediate struggles across the entire terrain of exploitation.
At the points of value extraction through waged employment, in relation to the state apparatuses that discipline the working class through terror and social integration, in every aspect of the process of social reproduction ( housing, transport etc),    one must begin by means of practical agitation to formulate a diffuse counter power capable of sabotaging the smooth daily functioning, plans and projects of capital.
Through such practice communism asserts itself as a practical and current alternative to the hegemonic relations of domination and exploitation, in the absence of autonomous and antagonistic social practice, it is completely impossible a hold a social revolutionary point of orientation in a meaningful sense, fine words, grand hopes and “prefiguration” are better left to the evangelicals.
What this means is digging in for base building in a long term war of position, it means constructing an infrastructure and abandoning the prevalent cultural values of individualism, instant gratification, and sub cultural identification as a defective cipher for political engagement.
By a Communist

The program of the classical worker’s movement and revolutionary left, was almost always articulated within the frame work of a progressive ideology, the development of the productive forces generated by capital, beyond the constraints inherent in its valorization process through the liberation of abstract labor.

this orientation transcended the anarcho-Marxist divide, in the end both the Bolsheviks and the CNT saluted the logic of industrial mass production, and the requisite labor discipline.

now that the long march of “socialist construction” in the 20th century, has proven to be no more then a method for the transition of capital from formal to real domination in colonial and neo-colonial regions, often by means of the most barbaric and genocidal violence, its almost impossible to take the idea of “progress beyond capital” seriously.

in response to this anti-modernist and neo-traditionalist ideas have permeated segments of the left, from Bahro to Jensen, bringing with them a romanticism of the “primitive”, wholesale rejection of rationalism, misanthropy, fantasies of apocalypse, and in some cases a return to the fascist project of “restoration” of “natural” hierarchy.

to attack these lines of thought, by mere reiteration of classical socialist dogma, does nothing to resolve the real issues which are brought up by anti-modernist critique, on the other hand a retreat into new age mysticism, glorification of subsistence production and illiteracy , a essentialist cult of the “indigenous” etc, is to leave any project of collective emancipation behind.

the communist project is not a linear progress beyond capital, nor a reactionary return to an idealized past, but a new direction entirely.

“It is true that there existed among us “social study groups”, but we know how ephemeral and precarious they were: born out of individual caprice, these groups were destined to disappear with it; those who made them up did not feel united enough, and the first difficulty they encountered caused them to split up. Furthermore, these groups do not seem to have ever had a clear notion of their goal. Now, the goal of an organization is at one and the same time thought and action. In my experience, however, those groups did not act at all: they disputed. And many reproached them for building all those little chapels, those talking shops.”
Amédée Dunois

“I think the fundamental mistakes made by everyone, from groups on the radical-left in general to the RAF itself, was that we weren’t based enough in reality and were too obsessed with ideology. There were meetings, papers, concept discussions, events, campaigns – but these weren’t reality”

Helmut Pohl.

Specifically in North America, where the anarchist and autonomous left is incredibly  weak, there is a certain heroification of radical currents in Europe or elsewhere which admittedly are stronger then our own, this serves to obscure the reality of the global relations of force between proletarian autonomy and capital.

to illustrate this point, one may note the recent police occupation of Exarchia, this district often mythologized by American anarchists as some sort of liberated zone, a awe inspiring base area of revolutionary counter power, has found itself taken over by somewhere around a thousand police without significant resistance.

while in Berlin arguably along with Hamburg, one of the strong points of the revolutionary left in Germany, a fascist street demo, was pulled off without major disruption.

in truth, even in some EU countries where the revolutionary left has built up an immensely greater social base then it possess in the United States, it is still in the grand scheme of things a marginal force.

whatever one may think of their politics, the Maoists in India have more political and social power, then the autonomous and anarchist currents do worldwide.

the purpose of making these points is not to encourage a resigned cynical defeatism, but to challenge the complacent triumphalism  of low expectations that is a common enough feature of radical politics in this country, in the context of a scene in which many people happily announce their retreat from even attempting to build a mass movement, camouflaging their acceptance of their own irrelevance with extremist verbal posturing.

Its becoming more and more clear that the ruling system of capital valorization, is entering into the protracted throes of its final crisis, having reached its ecological and social limits, in terms of the expanded reproduction of industrial destruction, and the direct subordination of almost the entire world population to the dictates of wage labor and the world market structure.

in this context, the best the ruling class has to offer us, is mass unemployment, declining standards of living, the long drawn out global liquidation of the soft face of the “social state”, permanent criminalization of whole demographic segments, all as a prelude to the openly discussed extermination of billions, due to climate change.

the fact is that here in the united states and world wide, we are in a potentially revolutionary situation, the question thus becomes “where are the revolutionaries?”.

objectives:

the objective is the dissolution of the capitalist social organism, not the seizure of hegemony over the global social terrain generated by mercantile-technocratic civilization, but the fracture of its reproduction.

The end of capitalism will not parallel the classical bourgeois revolutions from the storming of the Bastille to the triumph of the PLA in 1949 , so much as it will the fall of the roman empire.

No mass movement will victoriously overcome the global system overnight, and introduce a new order, instead a protracted struggle will be fought against the backdrop of intensifying social antagonism, valorization crisis and ecological meltdown.

In this context, the goal is not a elusive decisive victory, but the constitution of base areas and counter power in an indefinite war of attrition.

The tipping point is the global development of liberated zones, self sufficient and armed.

Organization:

the necessary leap from the isolated individual, to the initiation of collective rupture with capitalist social reproduction is to be found in the development of serious and tight knit informal organizations, which in their turn, become nodes of regional and global networks.

The foundation of this process is the progress of the concept the affinity group, from a merely arbitrary association, to one that is bound by blood ties in all the most literal senses of that term.

Our own anarchist tradition has many historical models to consider in this regard, from the “circles” of the Russian partisans, to the action groups of the FAI.

This sort of organization will best proceed from the seamless integration of the everyday, and the political, and must transcend in the extent of its functions, such familiar forms as the partisan unit, the activist group, and the commune.

Tactics:

the multiplication of a social base is dependent upon the provision of practical solutions to practical problems, and the provision of such solutions rests upon discipline, organizational capacity and a willingness to make certain sacrifices.

Intervention in ongoing struggles, and agitation of the everyday relations of exploitation and oppression is to be preferred to abstract and ineffectual expressions of principle, solidarity and theoretical sophistication.

Coalitions are to be formed among the exploited, not with the fifth column of the class enemy among the ngos, unions and “civil society” groups.

Without the independent social infrastructure outlined above, this is impossible, and we find ourselves with the choice of retreat into a isolated sub cultural scene, or co-option by the state oriented left.

Propaganda, agitation, formation of counter institutions and militant action, form an organic totality, and must on no account be regarded as competing tendencies, but as harmonious elements of a single “grand strategy”.

Insofar as the object is the formation of thousands of localized overlapping communities, and the disarticulation of the hegemonic order of capital, the forms adapted by the partisan armies, and urban guerrillas of the anti colonial liberation movements, are no longer applicable, on the other hand the rejection of the question of power as out of hand is an inviable position.

The tendencies of social struggles in recent years, which can be seen in the Greek and French uprisings,
the new wave of the Basque and Corsican separatist movements, and the low intensity class war prevailing from Brazil to China, set the stage for the constitution of a global “social guerrilla”, which takes as its adversary not merely the state, but the normal functioning of capitalist existence in its entirety.

by a communist