Statements On The Current Situation
The dream lived in the void of my spirit.
-Roberto Bolano, member of the Anarchist International
The Ignition Of The Fire:
We have all observed the emergence in Tunisia of a vast energy that spread to Egypt. In Tunisia as well as Egypt, unstable dictators were unseated. We distrust the people who helped push for these limited goals. Specific people and organizations (such as the April 6 Movement) persistently agitated and organized to implement technocratic capitalism in Tunisia and Egypt. In Tunisia, elections have been held and a new prime minister elected. Now that Tunisia has a reliable capitalist democracy, the actors that exacerbated the insurrection have mysteriously vanished. There is still rebellion and the population knows how to utilize the tools of the democracy-bringers, but the absence of these actors is very clear. In Egypt we see a similar pattern catalyzed by these same actors, fighting for technocratic capitalism.
These people are attempting to create a stable capitalist international in the face of impending disaster. That is their plan. The old world of dictators and overt fascism is being liquidated. Taking its place will be diffuse control, managed chaos and total transparency. Every decision regarding the rate of decay and the severity of austerity will be displayed to everyone on the nightly news, on the internet, over the radio. Control will be visible. It will no longer be a secret. This is the nightmare they are hoping to create.
The invasion of Iraq and the execution of Saddam Hussein was the first assault in this war to stabilize the capitalist international. Once an active participant in the communist international’s assault on capitalism (providing asylum and logistics to actors in the offensive), Saddam had quickly degenerated into a despot willing to collaborate with the highest bidder. No longer could he think of arming and providing a haven for guerillas. Instead, he threw the people of his country into war with Iran, created a totalitarian dictatorship, and thrived off the riches of his oil. During the first assault on Iraq, the capitalist international showed the world that it would tame and pacify rogue leaders if they did not obey the dictates of systemic stability.
The assault on Iraq in 2003 was an effort to stabilize a world system that would soon reach its limits. The resources in this country and its proximity to Israel and Iran made stability in Iraq necessary for the world system to remain sustainable. In 2011, we witnessed the liquidation of Muammar Gaddafi and his government. This effort was identical in intent (if not in form) to the liquidation of Saddam and his government. Gaddafi had continued to fight the traditional imperialist enemies (funding the IRA and other guerrillas) while maintaining an overtly totalitarian dictatorship in his country.
It was highly disturbing to observe how the energy that had spread from Tunisa into Egpyt was being used to achieve the capitalist international’s goal of removing all unstable rulers from the world network. When it was clear that the opposition in Libya was not strong enough to defeat the dictator on their own, the capitalist powers intervened, guaranteeing either the eventual surrender or death of Gaddafi. We would have been discouraged by the developments in North Africa had we not also observed what was happening elsewhere.
The Course Of The Fire:
A man set himself on fire in Tunisia and triggered the current intrusion of the world revolutionary Geist into our time. The fire that has been traveling the world can never be properly contained by our enemies. At most, it can be manipulated by them. But they cannot stop neighborhoods in Bahrain from rising up and fighting the police, nor can they stop people in the United States from breaking out of their narcosis and taking their first steps towards freedom.
In Spain, people began to occupy their central squares and attempted to replicate what they had seen take place in Egypt. Just as in Egypt, there were people in the Spanish plazas who frantically worked for a more efficient and humane capitalism. They failed to create a counter-power as strong as the one created in Egpyt and so diffused out from the plazas into smaller assemblies and groups that still strive for the same limited goals. In the wake of these groups, a whole landscape has been opened for our offensive. A perfect example of this are the events currently taking place in Greece.
The square movement arrived in Athens just as the anarchists of that city were struggling against a fascist pogrom and a nationalist backlash against the murder of a Greek citizen by an immigrant. The occupation of Syntagma Square then proceeded to open up a space in which the entire crumbling structure of the government was consistently viewed as the enemy by many people who did not view themselves as belonging to any political tendency. The endless hours of fighting in front of the Parliament, the brutal assaults by the police, and the eventual clearing of the square served to fracture the core of the movement and send it outwards, just as had happened in Spain. Now, a broad constellation of forces are in motion, their goal to destabilize the current rulers of Greece by encouraging the non-payment of fares, tolls, utilities, groceries, etc. The current rulers of Greece are the ones the European Union and the capitalist international want installed and everyone knows this. In Greece, as in other places, the world revolutionary Geist is working against their plans.
This is the variable we have identified in what has been called the Occupation Movement. It can act as a containment vessel for anger and rage, but when it fractures or transcends itself, that energy is released and continues to articulate itself. After undergoing the process of reclaiming space, facing repression and learning to fight, people across the planet are learning the first lessons of what it is to battle a world system that is determined to subjugate them. Each movement, from Cairo to Oakland, know themselves to be connected. Because the capitalist international is liquidating its traditional opponents, it is now much easier for people to identify their common enemy. Without rival nation states or economic systems to blame or cling to, people are seeing capitalism and its police as the unifying antagonist. The fact that this knowledge is now common across the world has vastly helped expand the ranks of the Anarchist International.
Circling The Square:
The world revolutionary Geist cannot be constrained into a coherent form for more than a brief moment in time. If these forms persist after the Geist has departed from them they will become hollow shells and dead fruit, doomed to forever replicate only themselves in the same manner as a hologram. This is how the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat was able to sustain itself in Russia for over seventy years, how the terror of the guillotine persisted throughout the French Revolution, how the shadows of former failures have followed us into the present moment.
Whenever the Geist intrudes upon linear time it leaves its imprint, sometimes in the form of deranged cults worshiping the form it took upon its intrusion. The idea of occupying a central plaza has been circling the planet ever since images of Tahrir Square implanted themselves into the minds of millions of people. This tactic was replicated in Spain, Greece and then, in September of 2011, it began its replication in New York City. Upon its arrival in the United States, the idea of occupying a plaza became intertwined with the idea of the 99%. While we may empathize with the grandness of attempting to unify all but the high-capitalists, we find the presupposed unity of the 99% to be a deception.
Before anyone could conceivably confront and destroy the high-capitalists, they would have to first confront the small-business owners and petite-bourgeois, dismantle their own respect for property and capital, and learn to create areas free from capitalist logic. From September 17th to December 6th of 2011, we have seen the deception of the 99% become clear to a large number of the movement’s participants. In some instances, this has been caused by the work of the Anarchist International. The occupied squares and parks have either been raided or have started to decompose, but before that occurred, some of them were able to launch wonderful attacks against the capitalist economy and create truly free areas for the participants to taste and experience. Now, with the initial fixation on the form of plaza occupation crumbling and the false unity of the 99% in question, the Anarchist International now finds itself in an open landscape of possibilities that did not exist in the United States before September.
Oakland created a temporary commune, flooded the city with people, shut down its port, and showed the world that the new offensive had finally reached the pacified and hollow plains of the dark center of our reality. Seattle initiated a fluid movement of people that has consistently challenged the government of the same city that houses Starbucks, Microsoft, Boeing and Amazon, causing large disturbances, creating a street commune and taking over buildings. New York fostered the fledgling movement by consistently causing large incidents in one of the main centers of global capital and centering everyone’s attention on the international capitalist network. Everywhere between these three cities, there have been numerous examples of rebellion and freedom. In the midst of these occurrences and events has been the Anarchist International, fostering free areas where chaos can bloom and discover itself.
On the day we write these words, in the eternal city of Athena, people have walked up to the Parliament that stands above Syntagma Square and thrown molotovs at a cowering group of police. (They did this for Alexis, a young anarchist murdered by police on December 6th, 2008, in Exarchia, Athens.) The authorities did not anticipate such a bold attack and raided Exarchia that night in retaliation. Three years after the murder of Alexis, seven months after the occupation of the square, the people of Athens have grown accustomed to pushing towards the Parliament and it will not be long before we will see it burning. Imagine this in London. Imagine this is New York City. Imagine this everywhere.
The Rise And Explosion Of The New Guerrilla:
Since the beginning of 2011, we have also seen a rapid articulation of the international anarchist guerrilla offensive. What started as a call to create a rudimentary federation of independent cells has blossomed into a wave of attacks that has spread from Italy and Greece to Russia, Indonesia and Mexico, among other places such as the United Kingdom. The different cells across the world communicate to each other through the communiques of their actions. Besides giving logistical details to aid in the replication of actions, the communiques declare support for specific groups and individuals. In this way, a basic collectivity has been established between separate and diverse groups of people. By basic, we simply mean that all of these groups know themselves to be fighting the same fight against the same targets, whereas in the past this fight was merely presumed to be the same.
We find the construction of the Informal Anarchist Federation/International Revolutionary Front to be a positive development. It is proving itself to be formidable, adaptable and able to live up to its promises of being a fluid, ever changing organism of attack. Some have argued, however, that giving any group or network a singular name promotes a division between the actors and the observers, creating specialization amongst anarchists and alienating people from their own ability to attack. We agree that specialization is created when any minority of an antagonist movement begins to attack their enemy, but we do not believe that a singular name causes this. A singular name, like the singular form of the square occupations, can become a dead shell that has outlived its usefulness. This current experiment that has grown considerably since its inception, has not exhausted its usefulness just yet. It will very soon, however, and on this we all must be clear.
The manifestations of this phenomena in Indonesia and the United Kingdom have remained confined to small groups that consistently attacked targets and, in the case of Indonesia, resulted in some people being captured. But in Mexico, this tendency of claiming membership in the international group has since grown, fractured and then diffused into a constellation of extremely diverse actors who have acknowledged the international struggle and moved onward. There is currently a Mexican Conspiracy of Cells of Fire that is fighting alongside several other named-groups. There is another group that has forsaken its name (Individuals Tending Towards The Wild) and is now operating in secret, proceeding with its objective to destroy industrial civilization. There are currently comrades in jail for attempting to blow up an IBM nano-technology facility in Switzerland who have the knowledge that others in Mexico are acting for the same goals as them. This shared idea or thought, whatever it might be, is the Anarchist International, this simple knowledge that others act for the same immortal and undying reasons.
Every armed or clandestine group that has acted for the same reasons as the population around them has been a catalyst for an insurrection or a revolt. The goal of the armed group should be to act with the world revolutionary Geist, to identify it and move with it. Now that the names of these groups are starting to mutate and slowly be discarded, there is the possibility of a truly fluid offensive that is no longer bound to the duty of replicating itself. We will say it again. These singular networks and groups have not outlived their usefulness, but their future lies beyond them. The International Revolutionary Front will become the Black International only to one day transcend rational comprehension and defy all laws.
To act with the world revolutionary Geist as a fighter is to be swept up, to instinctively know what needs to be done and to do it flawlessly. The choice of the target will be obvious and the resonance of the attack will be extraordinary. To act with the Geist is to become the Geist as it intrudes upon the banal monotony of linear time. But to act with the Geist is also to hear what it is saying in the chaos around you. The chaotic world, the free world, is the world we want to see grow and expand. To foster this is the goal of the Anarchist International.
Conclusion:
We have outlined some of our basic tactics in previous communications, specifically our Three Unifying Tactics Of The Anarchist International. Over the four months that have elapsed since we released that information, we have seen some of the tactics play out within the context of the Occupy Movement that is taking place in the United States. Some chaotic and free areas were created, pushed to their limits and are now diffusing outward into new forms. It is unknown what will emerge next, but our objectives and goals remain the same. If you are missing context, we refer you back to our five previous communications.
We would advise all of you to continue to act relentlessly. There is no danger of the world revolutionary Geist vanishing. It is far too vast and far too necessary to be extinguished by the world governments. Major events continue to take place with an increasing frequency and the moment of our defeat of linear time is approaching. Some have noticed the ease with which one loses track of time when one is wandering the intricate pathways of an occupation or the painted hallways of a squat. Debt, economy, investment, loans, jail sentences, wages, all based and plotted on linear time. Time is our enemy and to defeat it is to achieve total victory.
TOWARDS THE DEATH OF TIME
AND THE BEGINNING OF LIFE
ANARCHIST INTERNATIONAL
