NEWS CENTER – My political certainties and doubts are currently based on events that disturbed me during these last four months of my life. These big changes mainly consisted of a profound questioning of the activist landscape in which I had been evolving for almost two years. Time when my process of politicization began. This led me to self-doubt and self-criticism about my own way of life and thinking, but it can also be seen in the more global political and historical context of all far-left activism in Western Europe (France and Germany, from what I experienced).
In the following text, I will try to synthetically develop what these interruptions include.
- The ZAD under neoliberal influence
The critical understanding of the neoliberal mentality, the importance of critical and self-critical practice, ideological work, organization, internationalism… Beginning to understand these values allowed me to visualize with impressive clarity the shortcomings of our social movements and spaces of struggle in the France and Germany, especially in the autonomous/schooled/ZAD scene.
The occupation of Lützerath, where I lived for a few months the previous summer, appeared to me as a new guiding light: the typical example of a ZAD contaminated by neoliberal ideology. Aesthetics and symbolism take the place of real political action to make the place attractive; consequence = massification of the struggle, but there is no politicization. Events in the occupation are mainly made up of parties and consumption, they come to fill the good conscience (and their own Instagram feeds!) of the student, urban and very privileged public, who exhaust the forces of the inhabitants using all their energy to receive them for a weekend…
There is no community life organized by dwelling places and different groups with strong bonds of camaraderie, with their own autonomous structures, but general assemblies and centralized tools of “self-organization”. For example, thanks to the organizational charts in which one’s own name is inserted, individuals and their immediate desires are linked to tasks to be carried out for the proper functioning of the occupation. There was no need for social interaction for the process, and it was hard to build friendships with people who were just passing through, with whom you only spent an hour or two at any given time before heading off on a new assignment, with a new team. So it was literally possible to spend the whole day doing collective tasks, without talking to almost anyone.
Militant radicalism was negatively associated with violence, the hooded, and thoughtlessness, as media discourses were adopted by the activists themselves, and bourgeoisie and state propaganda went unchallenged.
In our own place of struggle, it was difficult to build a radical alternative to pacifism, to reformism, to “being pleasant and consensual with everyone, at any cost”. The eviction was an opportunity for me to find companions with whom to share and carry out these criticisms.
Before the evacuation of Lutzerath, I was obsessed with one question: how to make a political impact on the throngs of students who would come and go over the next two weeks? Rather than wanting to be in the middle of the action, surrounded by police and journalists, my group of peers and I decided to do a job of sharing and spreading ideas by recording radio programs about the eviction. It was difficult for me to accept not physically resisting the police with most of the “ZADistas”, not defending our shacks and our barricades.
I understood that the urge to act was partly motivated by a self-centered need for recognition. That was the case for many of us. But this could also evolve through self-education and critical work.
By participating in the radio, I understood in practice what the complementarity between direct action and ideological work meant. I understood that the ZAD would be physically destroyed, but that the revolutionary mentalities of the ZAD still needed to be built.
Resistance to the police was important because it would mark all these young people who were going through this for the first time. But resistance to the neoliberal mentality was nonexistent, and that’s why I chose to make it my priority, even today in other places of militancy.
- The insurrectionary fantasy
At the same time, I was reading a book about the evolution of anti-militarism, because the military question has always interested me a lot. Since the ZADs, the occupations, the evictions, the riots, I had developed a very clear vision of the strategy that needed to be adopted to attack capitalism: the material destruction of all its power structures should be our main objective. As I took this idea to its logical conclusion, I encountered a barrier that impeded my progress:
Capitalism and its states have armed forces that will defend their interests at all costs. And we are unarmed, we have no tactical knowledge, no physical and psychological training.
For almost a year, this idea horrified me and spurred me to action: how to build effective barricades? How to transmit the practices I learned in the black-blocks? How to build a military counterculture, develop an anarchist ethic of the use of violence, anti-authoritarian forms of command? How to bring this issue to the table in a left-wing scenario that seems to be in denial and ignorance about these issues? How to overcome the leftists’ dogmatic anti-militarism, making them reject anything that even remotely resembles the color of the uniform?
Tristan Leoni’s book has given me very valuable insights into these issues, because it has similar findings to mine but different conclusions.
I was convinced that I had to train myself militarily and then train as many activists around me as possible. I understood that this was my role to fill that gap. But the book also criticized this view, deeming it useless and dangerous. Considering the military sphere as autonomous, separate from the capitalist state, and therefore imagining that the revolution will be reduced to a confrontation against the armies of the capital state, is unrealistic. This point of view leads to a purely technical and tactical preparation, it does not take into account the social context, the neoliberal influence that divides populations. Tristan Leoni made me understand that the most realistic risk of war is that of civil war, which would mean the division of the people into different clans, killing each other in the interest of the ruling classes. The triumph of neoliberal ideology over the opportunity for a social revolution.
This confirmed my ideas:
In order to destroy the armies of the capital State, it is necessary – before thinking about weapons – to attack the legitimacy of the State in the minds of the population.
We must point to neoliberalism as the common enemy of the peoples, overcoming the divisions that this enemy managed to create among us. Who will fight for him in an army if this psychological warfare is won?
- Social class and the <<Gated community>>
When I returned from Germany, I didn’t feel very comfortable going back to my usual activist circles. I had the constant feeling that I was never doing enough, that I wasn’t radical enough, I wasn’t active enough, I often felt in competition with others, despite our discussions about this topic (purity activist, performativity…). It took a lot of energy and I was often tired/depressed. I decided to move to the place where I felt more socially comfortable and tried to find out why. According to my recent discoveries explained earlier, what made sense for me was to study and combat the tactics of social division, starting with my own social category:
Why are radical leftist activists so isolated from society? Why are they marginal? Why don’t the working classes recognize themselves in the voice of those who claim to defend their interests?
The first logical answer I find: the closed, secure and codified aspect of extreme left groups favors self-referential tendencies. No longer having any social relationships, friendships or activities outside the leftist scene. In this way, we fall precisely into a gap in society that we blame the governing elites for.
So I made the effort and walked another 200 meters, to the neighbors of the house where I lived with my collective. These neighbors are young proletarians with views associated with the right-wing, nationalist and conservative political spectrum. A monarchical flag is flown over your caravan. This flag always provokes strong reactions from my leftist comrades: some of them are even tempted to set fire to it and expel our neighbors. It seems that the fact that one of these leftist friends of mine was the son of the owner of our house was not a contradiction, but at the same time we said that “as anarchists, we reject the authority of landlords”.
These reactions strike me as a lack of empathy and of strategy and intelligence.
I began to develop clear arguments, which gave me the strength to knock on our neighbors’ doors. If we leave them out, we are just leaving the problem behind; they will simply live in the next village, which will likely be inhabited by other people with the same profile.
Fighting against our neighbors, even if they are from the right, means fighting against a whole part of society that we claim to defend in our speech.
The distance between the left and the population stems from this contradiction. Leftists hate rightists (often quickly assimilated to fascists), without even distinguishing the ruling classes that disseminate right-wing ideologies from the population, who hardly have any choice but to be exposed to these ideas in order to exist politically. In reality, in our leftist circles, many of our analyzes are crude and undifferentiated, as in this example. We focus on micropolitics, our interpersonal relationships and conflict management, but the social scale and the macropolitical sphere disappear from our discussions and our everyday lives.
We have far more energy to expend on a discussion of the tensions we feel in our affinity group than we do on a discussion of tensions between social classes, between populations and countries. Among my neighbors on the right, the political debate is daily and occupies these different scales. They may have ideas that I deeply reject, but I don’t feel personally attacked and the conversations we have are constructive.
Thanks to your criticisms of the left situated on the right, I now understand the point of view of a whole section of society that I could not understand while trapped in my left socio-political category.
They also opened up to my left-wing view of their right-wing ideas, and together we understood that our first common enemy is neoliberalism. We influence each other and often laugh at the irony of the situation. Sometimes I even feel the collective spirit, the camaraderie, much stronger in them than in the house where I live with anarchists.
However, this remains a difficult and time-consuming exercise, in which I am not always able to balance my degree of immersion and openness to their way of life, their language, their culture and my degree of righteousness, opposition, confrontation and commitment to the ” my own”. In part, I am neglecting my left collective because of the time I spend separately in my right collective, while my goal would be to get the two to cohabit and dialogue better. I’m also developing a deep love connection with one of the neighbors, which, on the one hand, I thought might tactically help our two groups get closer, but also gets in the way of my discipline in organizing my day and my intellectual responsiveness. The calculation of the degree of immersion I mentioned above is logically complicated by the boundless empathy I feel for this fellow.
- The lack of revolutionary values
Therefore, I see the potential of the revolutionary values carried by the movement launched in Kurdistan. I see the curiosity of my colleagues on both sides when we talk about self-criticism, self-discipline and collective responsibility, the infiltration of the neoliberal mindset in our behaviors. I also see in them distrust of the Kurdish revolutionary organization, which is interpreted as “hierarchical, perhaps sectarian, built around a leader, in a political context that has nothing to do with ours”. A few days ago, a collective reading was held with my fellow anarchists and two of our neighbors. We read Lêgerîn Nº8, the special issue on liberalism, and I began to understand how long it would take for these ideas to wear thin in the minds of my friends, and I was surprised at my own impatience to get everything understood as quickly and as deeply as possible. possible.
I often feel alone in this role of bringing ideological contributions to our collective organization; alone to spend several hours a day reading and writing; alone to see the interesting aspects of this work. This loneliness leads to an imbalance in my mind: due to the intense need to find a deep meaning in everything I do, I reproduce an elitist mechanism that consists of putting reflection, analysis, self-education above everything else in my daily life. As such, I wasn’t taking responsibility in the group for any action that wasn’t in line with my ideas, and I won’t until my ideas are clearly defined. I will not devote much time to collective tasks until they give me the impression that they are working towards the revolution.
So I am currently stuck in a theoretical phase of ideological self-formation, which for me is an essential feature of revolutionary action, but I can only get out of it by dragging other people into it. My reading and writing activities, which occupy perhaps 50 hours of my time during the week, will change from an individualistic activity practiced in solitude to a collective activity that awakens our revolutionary mentalities. So this could give me back the sense of helping the collective to function materially and it could allow me to rebalance my daily life without having an internal struggle between theory and practice.
