India has exploded into protests against a citizenship law that explicitly discriminates against its 200 million-strong Muslim population. Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government has responded with police firing on demonstrators and assaults on university campuses. The global wildfire of street protests, from Sudan to Chile, Lebanon to Hong Kong, has finally reached the country whose 1.3 billion population is mostly below the age of 25. The social, political, and economic implications couldn’t be more serious.
It was only last month that students on the campus of Hong Kong Polytechnic University were throwing petrol bombs at the police, and fielding, in turn, teargas, rubber bullets and water cannons.
This violent resistance to an authoritarian state is novel to Hong Kong. The Umbrella Movement that in 2014 first expressed a mass sentiment for greater autonomy from Beijing was strikingly peaceful. The campaigners for democracy in Hong Kong today have also traveled very far away from the Chinese students who occupied Tiananmen Square in 1989, and to whom they have been wrongly compared.
Those students back in 1989 were deeply respectful of their state: Photographs of student petitioners kneeling on the steps of the Great Hall of the People are no less eloquent than the iconic picture of a protester facing a tank. That acknowledgement of the state’s authority as ultimate arbiter is now rapidly disappearing, in not only Hong Kong, but also India and many other countries. It is being replaced by the conviction that the state has lost its legitimacy through cruel and malign actions.
Today’s protesters, who are overwhelmingly young, are usefully compared to the French student demonstrators in Paris in 1968. The latter occupied places of work and study, streets and squares. They also met police crackdowns with makeshift barricades and Molotov cocktails.
Like today’s protesters, the French students erupted into violence amid a global escalation of street-fighting; they claimed to reject an older generation’s values and outlook. And they, too, couldn't be simply classified as left-wing, right-wing or centrists. Indeed, the French radicals confused many people at the time because they loathed the French communist party almost as much as they did the parties of the right. The French communists, in turn, dismissed the protesting students as “anarchist.”
This commonplace pejorative confuses anarchism with disorganization. It should be remembered that anarchist politics is one of the modern world’s oldest, if little remembered, political and intellectual traditions. Today, it best describes the radical new turn to protests worldwide. Anarchist politics began to emerge from the mid-19th century onward, originally in societies where ruthless autocrats were in power — France, Russia, Italy, Spain, even China — and where hopes of change through the ballot box seemed wholly unrealistic.
The anarchists — one of whom assassinated U.S. President McKinley in 1901 — sought freedom from what they saw as increasingly exploitative modes of economic production. But, unlike socialist critics of industrial capitalism, they aimed most of their energies at liberation from what they saw as tyrannical forms of collective organization — namely, the state and its bureaucracy, which in their view could be communist as well as capitalist.
As Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the pioneering thinker of anarchism (and robust critic of Marx), put it, “To be GOVERNED is to be kept in sight, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right, nor the wisdom, nor the virtue to do so.”
For many anarchists, the state, the bureaucracy and security forces were the deepest affront to human dignity and liberty. They sought to achieve democratic freedoms by a drastic reduction in the power of the hydra-headed state, and a simultaneous intensification of the power of individuals from below through coordinated action.
Democracy for the anarchists was not a distant goal, to be reached through vertically integrated political parties, impersonal institutions and long electoral processes. It was an existential experience, instantly available to individuals by jointly defying oppressive authority and hierarchy.
They saw democracy as a permanent state of revolt against the over-centralized state and its representatives and enforcers, including bureaucrats and the police. Success in this endeavor was measured by the scale and intensity of the revolt, and the strength of solidarity achieved, rather than by any (always unlikely) concession from the despised authorities.
This is also how protesters today seem to perceive democracy as they struggle, without much hope of any conventional victory, against governments that are as ideologically driven as they are ruthless. Let there be no doubt: More open and unresolvable conflicts between ordinary citizens and authorities are likely to become the global norm rather than the exception. Certainly, militant disaffection today is not only more extensive than it was in the late 1960s. It also connotes a deeper political breakdown.
Negotiations and compromise between different pressure groups and interests that have defined political society for ages suddenly seem quaint. Old-style political parties and movements are in disarray; societies, more polarized than ever before; and the young have never faced a more uncertain future. As angry, leaderless individuals revolt against increasingly authoritarian states and bureaucracies from Santiago to New Delhi, anarchist politics seems an idea whose time has come.
The capitalist system will not abolish itself.
In fact, it will always do all that it physically can to preserve itself and its control over our lives. While it likes to pretend its structures of domination amount to “democracy”, this is not the case, because it could never leave the door open to the possibility of its own abolition by democratic means. The only changes possible via the fake-democracy of the system are limited reforms, which leave the system very much in place. When we say “limited”, we perhaps mean “extremely limited”, because even the mildest of social-democratic tinkering, undoing some of the worst excesses of contemporary neoliberalism, is beyond the pale for the system.
corbyn smear
However, when the system draws the line too tightly around its preferred outcomes and uses its vast powers of manipulation to prevent these limited reforms, it risks exposing its so-called “democracy” as a sham. A whole new raft of people suddenly become aware of the true nature of the system and its fake-democratic window dressing. Their eyes are opened to the fact that there is no point in playing by the rules devised by the system, no point in walking time and time again into the same traps that it sets for us.
These moments are risky for the system, because they risk radicalising people who, up to this point, had bought into much of its charade. The UK is currently experiencing one such moment. A vast amount of enthusiasm and hope had been invested – naively, from our perspective – in the possibility of an election victory for Corbyn’s Labour Party. The reforms proposed by Labour were far from fundamental and yet remained unacceptable to the system.
The unprecedented blatancy of the propaganda assault on Corbyn has left many people, particularly young people, asking themselves some serious questions about the nature of British “democracy” and the approach that is needed if real social change is ever to be brought about.
Athens, Greece: It's ironic. While the greek government has been terrorizing the neighborhood of Exarcheia since the summer with squat evictions, attacks on people inside coffee shops and bars and brutal beatings and arrests for no reason -especially following the protests on 17 November and 6 December, where an atypical martial was imposed in the area-, few days ago made an attempt to cover up the riot police crimes against the people in the area, by decorating Exarcheia Square with Christmas lights and a Christmas Tree.
[You can find links to videos documenting some of the police crimes in the area during the last few months r at the end of this]
To get an idea of what is happening in Athens at the moment a few things have to be noted: The greek government has gone into war with anarchists and anti authoritarians, following the end of a 15 days ultimatum issued by the Ministry of “Public Order”, towards the dozens of political and refugee squats across Greece (some of them more than 30 years old), threatening them with violent evictions by the riot police and police special forces, if they did not evacuate within the deadline. The deadline ended on Thursday night on the 5th of December 2019, a political decision by the greek State aiming to agitate and create an “explosive atmosphere”.
Following the first wave of attacks and evictions, mainly against squats housing refugees during the fall, the second wave of attacks has just begun, this time against political squats and social centers. Coinciding with the arrest of antifascists and the proposed judicial acquittal of neonazi leaders in the Golden Dawn trial, the right wing greek government and its self proclaimed socialist Minister of Public Order have proceeded with the eviction of “Kouvelou Mansion” Squat in Marousi, Athens on Tuesday 17 December, while another three squats have been evicted today 18 December in Koukaki, Athens, following a massive police operation, that terrorized a whole neighborhood with police brutality, attacking people living in adjoining houses that were no squats. Brutal images of greek SWAT policemen having their boots on people's heads on the ground and a mother bound on the floor of her terrace with a hood on her head, reminiscing of Abu Ghraib torture images, have been circulated in the media.
As an obvious result at about 22:00 yesterday 18 December, approximately 200 anarchists held a sudden demo around Ermou Street, the most commercial street of Athens and proceeded to attacking several shops and banks near the main square of Athens at Syntagma. At about the same time, several miles away, the christmas tree at Exarcheia Square was set on fire. While the greek government has proclaimed that more than 20 squats, just in Athens, will be violently evicted until the end of 2019, the police attacks seems like the match that will put fire in an already explosive situation during Christmas and New Year's festivities.
Links from Exarchia under police siege in the last few months:
6 December 2019
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNYU_NBgsVs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEfEjJ_63X4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgz6Qb7b0nk
17 November 2019
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eELKbWnPz8c
7 November 2019
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tz_vsjSN3tU
1 September 2019
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KS4oh28OK9o
On the repression that exists in Lo Hermida, Gonzalo Llancoa a doctor and a young villager talked with left Diario and counted the plight of constant police repression faced by and neighbors of Lo Hermida, and includes dozens injured with buckshot, people who are attacked by carabinieri in their own homes, fields and plazas violence against children, adolescents and people of the sector, among others.
Total
deaths in police custody or otherwise following contact with the
police, England & Wales, 1990-date
Type Met Police Other forces Total
Custody
273 832 1105
Pursuit 54 355 409
Shooting 30 42 72
All deaths 382 1346 1728
Total deaths in police custody or otherwise following contact with the police England and Wales 2019.
RTI=Road Traffic Incident.
Custody 2 10 12 Pursuit 4 11 15 RTI 4 1 5 Shooting 1 2 3 Total 11 24 35 | |||
 Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk | |||
