The loneliness of violence

If you are privileged enough to live with a source of income in a first world country, it’s possible to maintain this illusion that violence is something that happens far away—in time, space, class: it happens to other type of people, to poor people who live in distant countries, in wars we read about in our history books. Everyone knows that this peace is an illusion; but it’s still a shock when it’s your turn for the illusion to shatter.

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The ‘Zapatista Manifesto’: A poetic translation: Excerpts

Hello friends! Have y’all heard of the Zapatistas? So ok, the Zapatistas are an indigenous-led, anticapitalist, autonomist movement in México. They seized land back from the Méxican government, as in by force, as in with guerillas, guns, everything, back in ’94, and then implemented stateless, ecological, bottom-up democracy. They’re still there in Chiapas, resisting.

The Zapatistas have announced themselves to México and to the world with the Declarations of the Lacandona Jungle, originally by pirate radio. And look, I don’t have anything against spectres haunting Europe, but if you think the Communist Manifesto is poetic you ain’t seem nothing on Mayan political communiqués. So today, I want to share with you some of my favourite passages of the Fourth Declaration of the Lacandona Jungle, in a translation that tends to the music and the dance of the words.

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How to do politics like a marginal in 11 easy steps

We could not find a group we wanted to be in, so we’re starting our own. This list is a collective chorus of the lacks we felt in our scenes, and how we’re fulfilling them. They do not describe what are our politics; they describe how we want to politics.

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Ten theses on First World leftism, spoken from a place of bitterness

  1. The First World leftist is depressed and anxious.
  2. The cause of their depression and anxiety is their lack of freedom. The First World leftist lives a domesticated life, where the body is constantly policed by external and internalised authority, by law and social norms and shame. Every hour of every day is decided by some authority since infancy, from parents to teachers to bosses. Cross-culturally, most of humanity would look at this and call it a servant’s life.
  3. The First World leftist finds relief from their bondage in consumer goods. But this relief lasts but an instant.
  4. The First World leftist feels permanently guilty over their own oppression: “I have all this privileged wealth yet I’m miserable”.
  5. But it is the privilege which makes you miserable in the first place, because the price of privilege is submission. The system always takes more of you than it gives. The dice are loaded and the house always wins.
  6. Therefore, privilege guilt works to obscure the scam: like all scams, by tricking the scammed into believing themself to be complicit to their exploitation. Privilege guilt serves the system.
  7. The system maintains control through normalised terror. By obscuring any possibility of freedom, the system offers wealth as the only source of joy. Because the joy of wealth is short-lived, this sets up the leftist to be terrified of losing it: “If I’m this miserable even with all the good stuff, how much more miserable I would be in prison, poverty, a house without heating!” Thus invested, everyone is too terrified of police to do anything.
  8. By never letting the First World leftist experience freedom, the system denies them the knowledge of who they are under material conditions of freedom. They only know themselves under bondage, and so believe themselves to be utterly dependent to all the little treats the system gives them—without realising this dependency is constructed by the system in the first place.
  9. This is the dynamics of an abusive relationship, massified.
  10. The only way to break out of the terror is to taste freedom, to learn in your body how much more empowering it is than wealth. The only treatment for the First World leftist’s chronic depression is burnacopcartherapy.

Bretch (1935), “Questions of a Worker who Reads Wikipedia”

Who built Thebes of the Seven Gates?
All articles name the names of kings; I gather the kings
brought those boulders on their royal backs?
And great Babylon, who fell and fell again,
Who put'er back together, every time? In which flats
of gold-paved Lima lived the road-pavers?
The night the Great Wall of China was finished, where did
the construction crew hang out? Awesome Rome
is full of triumphal archs.  Who arched them up? Also—
who did the Caesars triumph over? We sing the palaces
    of Byzantium—
the whole thing was just palaces? Even Atlantis of tall tales
shouted, choking, as the seas swallowed it whole—

for its slaves.
Young Alexander conquered India.
All by himself then?
Caesar defeated the Gauls.
Did he bring along a cook at least?
Felipe de España, el Prudente, cried when his Armada
sunk into the sea.  And nobody else cried that day?
In the Seven Years' War, Federico Secondo grasped
victory.  Who else grasped it with him?
All these pages, all these conquests.
All those feasts—who did the dishes?
Every ten years a new Great Man.
Who covered the budget?
So many headlines.
So many questions.

This land belongs to the meadow, or: Eulogy for the living utopia of Lützerath

For some two-and-a-half years, activists occupied the old German village of Lützerath to prevent the expansion of a brown coal mine, Garzweiller II, owned by the RWE megacorp. Nature defenders made of Lützerath a prefigurative space, a living example of what a better world could be, until the brutal eviction of 2023. I’m writing as their machines still finish their job of destruction, because I want to talk of Lützerath: his life, his people, his politics.

The village of Lüetzerath, among woods and farms, standing at the edge of a cliff as if an island over nothing. All around it, the enourmous crater of the coal mine.
A line of plush toys sit on a hill at the edge of the mine, surrounded by flags and the yellow X-shaped crossbars that symbolise the movement.
The Plush Vigil, standing watch over the mine.
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Eine Frau Ist Meu Pau: A speech upon a terf talk on the wake of the Colorado shootings

(Warmly): Lovely siblings, dear allies, thank you! I’m not actually involved in any of the orgas doing this protest, but we’re all anarchists so I’ll speak for them anyway: thank you so much for being here on such a short notice, when you all are still coping, as am I. And ag-do, thanks for the space for my little speech.

But it gets a little bit heavy, so here’s the content warnings. (Softly:) Content warning: Feminist theory. (Increasingly loudly:) Content warning: Academia. Content warning: Terfs. Content warning: Europeans. (Screaming towards the university hall): Content warning: The definition of woman. Content Warning: ANTI-TRANSGENDER HATE. Content warning: ANTI-TRANSGENDER VIOLENCE. CONTENT WARNING: ANTI-TRANSGENDER GENOCIDE.

(Happily warmly again): I have three things to tell you: one about the terfs, one about the fascists, and one about you.

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The Violence in Me is Holy: A speech/performance for the Trans Day of Revenge 2022

(In standard-issue antifa windbreaker, latex black pants, pink mask covering face and head:)

My lovely siblings, I’m so sorry my voice is hard to hear. The police took our microphones. Today, you see, is not only TDoR but also Totensonntag, which is a mandatory silent observance. The cops make our dead speak softly, so as not to bother the Christian dead.

I have ten comments for you, and I will shout.

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What is the revolution in Rojava anyway? 11 reasons to care

1. Communalist democracy

Since 2012, an area in northeastern Syria is self-managed without a State or centralised government, with a novel form of bottom-up coordination called ‘democratic confederalism’.

People there reorganised society into communes of 100~250 families each (the medium-term goal is even smaller communes). Most decisions that directly affect a commune are done locally by assemblies and committees, via discussion and voting and consensus.

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