{
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  "user_comment": "I support your decision, I believe in change and hope you find just what it is that you are looking for. If your heart is free, the ground you stand on is liberated territory. Defend it. This feed allows you to read the posts from this site in any feed reader that supports the JSON Feed format. To add this feed to your reader, copy the following URL — https://crimethinc.com/feed.json — and add it your reader. For more info on this format: https://jsonfeed.org",
  "title": "CrimethInc. : Categories : Geography",
  "description": "CrimethInc. ex-Workers’ Collective: Your ticket to a world free of charge",
  "home_page_url": "https://crimethinc.com",
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  "author": {
    "name": "CrimethInc. Ex-Workers Collective",
    "url": "https://crimethinc.com",
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    {
      "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2020/06/20/a-letter-from-the-other-front-on-rural-anarchist-participation",
      "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2020/06/20/a-letter-from-the-other-front-on-rural-anarchist-participation",
      "title": "A Letter From the Other Front : On Rural Anarchist Participation in the Uprising of June 2020",
      "summary": "Anarchists from a rural area of the United States describe how those who live outside the urban centers can contribute to the movement against police.",
      "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/20/header.jpg",
      "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/20/header.jpg",
      "date_published": "2020-06-20T16:39:49Z",
      "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:44Z",
      "tags": [
        "anarchism",
        "Black Lives Matter",
        "Minneapolis",
        "rural"
      ],
      "content_html": "<p>In this essay, anarchists from a rural area of the United States describe how people who live outside the urban centers can contribute to the <a href=\"https://crimethinc.com/2020/06/17/snapshots-from-the-uprising-accounts-from-three-weeks-of-countrywide-revolt\">movement</a> against police violence and institutional white supremacy that has unfolded in response to the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.</p>\n\n<hr />\n\n<p><em>The authors of this letter are white anarchists living in outskirt areas of the Pacific Northwest that are occupied by a white majority and steeped in white supremacy. This context differs from other rural area; the authors do not wish to speak as experts on any experience besides their own. The authors are not attaching their names or specific location to this letter due to safety considerations in their small town.</em></p>\n\n<hr />\n\n<p>We wake up, roll over in bed, and grab the phone. What news of last night? What information, counter-information, wildly beautiful or unthinkably tragic developments have unfolded? What frantic or exhilarated texts from friends and comrades? Pictures and words blur together—there is so much all at once. George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police on May 25, one of countless victims of a bloody legacy of racist police violence. This nation was built on stolen land, Indigenous genocide, Black enslavement, and the exploitation and oppression of all people of color, and we know that this empire will not concede power willingly. Still, in grief and anger, people across the country are rising up in defense of Black lives and bodies.</p>\n\n<p>A police precinct in Minneapolis was captured and burned. Windows everywhere are smashed, goods expropriated and shared. The National Guard, the Army itself, is invoked to quell the unrest. Protestors are dying in the street—at this point, just a handful of brave and beautiful souls departed, but we fear more to come. White nationalists are trying to seize the moment to actualize their dreams of race war. Liberals work overtime to defang the movement in the streets. We know that any change beyond mere platitude and performance will require the destruction of the entire racist, capitalist system, and we see around us a nation teetering on the brink of open revolt and revolutionary possibility. We see the door begin to crack open, towards freedom, if only there are enough people on our side to push. The cities are on fire for Black liberation.</p>\n\n<figure class=\"portrait\">\n<img src=\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/20/1.jpg\" />\n</figure>\n\n<p>But what about us, the far-flung radicals, tucked away in the hills, the plains, and the backwoods? We are not there—at the heart of this movement—at least not as much we’d like to be. We are rural anarchists, physically grounded away from the metropolis. We inhabit these wilder places because they offer us space to think, a slower pace of life, a connection with the land—room for autonomous projects and ideas to physically expand and grow, like a fern unfolding, out from under the constant oversight of cops, neighbors, politicians.</p>\n\n<p>It would be easy to engage with this uprising as a voyeur, or perhaps as a consumer. We check the news between barn chores, farm chores, fixing the truck. We refresh the feed while caring for livestock and feral children. Text a friend “did you see this?!” as we tend the orchard, hunt rats in the wood shed, check the solar, sweep out the shitter. Rural life has a rhythm to it and an unceasing grind. Living at this physical distance from the cities, it is easy to develop an emotional distance as well. But this moment is too big, too urgent, for us to ignore.</p>\n\n<p>We don’t live in the city, but we know we are connected. Here, the omnipresent oversight of police is replaced by the other arm of racist state control: white supremacists, white nationalists, and their associated militias. Most small town police and county sheriffs support these groups either explicitly or by association. On the rural front, you don’t need a badge to terrorize Black and brown citizens—just a gun and an American flag. Even if police reforms or reductions (or dare we dream, abolition) takes root in the cities, here white supremacy still looms large from every pickup truck with a Blue Lives Matter window decal and a shotgun on the passenger seat. Trump’s calls for resistance to anti-racist and anti-fascist struggle only increase the danger to rural BIPOC folks, visibly queer and trans people, anti-fascists, organizers and anyone else deemed Other.</p>\n\n<p>So what can we do right now as anarchists and radicals living in rural communities? How will we create direct solidarity with the metropolitan areas engaging in mass revolt? How do we agitate in our own communities to bring this struggle for Black liberation home? We have been asking this question and hearing it echoed by those around us. As the terrain of our struggle varies, our needs and strategies will diverge: cities may need to become ruins to be rebuilt, but the fields and forests needn’t burn in the transformation to a just and free world. We are all together, because our project is the same: we are building a new world, we will inherit the earth. And like everyone right now, we wonder what to do, how to situate ourselves, in this wild, frightening moment of unrest and possibility.</p>\n\n<p>We would like to share some ideas that may be useful for other rural radicals trying to engage in this moment. We are stumbling imperfectly towards the unknown—and there are as many answers as there are individuals, projects, and contexts. But the crux of it is this: don’t sleep on it. We can’t sit this one out just because we are hours away from the closest uprising. We recognize that there is no “Black consensus,” but we identify Black radicals with whom we share affinity—historically, currently, and locally—and we follow their leads. We need to find our points of connection, grab hold, and dig in. The door will only open if everyone keeps pushing together.</p>\n\n<p><strong>We offer support &amp; solidarity in our local communities.</strong> “Community” is a series of concentric and overlapping circles of connection and affinity. We freely and generously give care and solidarity to our chosen and biological families, roommates and landmates, friends, co-organizers, and neighbors. We give our time and labor to help other projects start, sustain, and improve. We focus on Black and POC needs within our communities. We listen to the voices of Black comrades and support Black-led organizing.</p>\n\n<p><strong>We agitate at home.</strong> What is appropriate here? What is possible? We are wary of directly importing big-city tactics into small towns. We think strategically and engage in acts of wild and imaginative creation, bridge building, guerrilla art, sabotage, organizing, fundraising, intelligence gathering, and mutual aid. We talk to our white and non-Black communities about what is going on, especially those who might feel differently about the events. We listen to what people are saying and ask questions. We show up at local demonstrations enthusiastically because we know that holding cardboard signs on the corner is an important step for this town.</p>\n\n<p><strong>We offer up our rural spaces for respite and recuperation</strong> for those who need a break from stressful or traumatizing environments. We are clear about what we can and cannot offer (meals, beds, use of common spaces, running water) as well as other considerations—is the house or land project made up of all white residents? Is the local town safe for people of color to travel through? What about those who are visibly queer or trans or otherwise marginalized?</p>\n\n<p><strong>We identify our local enemies.</strong> A lot of white supremacists live out here in the boonies. We locate them and learn about their networks and capabilities. We use this information tactically to counter their efforts. We are careful to safeguard our identities and anonymize our efforts because a well-armed enemy is not something to fuck around with, especially when everyone in town knows your face and where you live.</p>\n\n<p><strong>We arm ourselves and train each other.</strong> The racist right is heavily armed. We buy guns and learn how to shoot. We start gun clubs to share and build our capabilities.</p>\n\n<p><strong>We give money as we are able.</strong> We donate to bail funds, supply runs for protests, Black-led organizing and to Black individuals. We give as generously as we are able, especially if we benefit from white privilege or class privilege, if we are still getting a paycheck or are pulling in extra on COVID unemployment.</p>\n\n<p><strong>We provide tech support.</strong> We may live under a proverbial rock, but some of us have internet and phone lines. We help with graphics and web design. We listen to the police scanner and send updates to comrades on the ground. Location matters less than it ever has.</p>\n\n<p><strong>We identify resources and supply lines and distribute excess.</strong> What resources can we share? How can these be directed locally and to cities in revolt? Are there extra shares of a CSA that can be distributed free to BIPOC families? Can an herbalist make medicinal care packages to send to the front lines? Rural stores may have things in stock that are sold out in cities. They are also less likely to keep spray paint and bolt cutters locked up—and they may be less suspicious of individuals buying extra black clothing, umbrellas, and other materials that could arouse suspicion in a city.</p>\n\n<p><strong>We go into the cities when we can.</strong> It’s a long drive, but we try to get there. We go to march and make noise. We hand out masks, stand between police and the most vulnerable, run as street medics, and yes, even smash windows. We follow the lead of the crowd, stay aware of our surroundings, and watch carefully who is calling for escalation and deescalation alike. We show up for the struggle in this way because we know the state only pays attention to a threat—and hundreds or thousands of people in the streets cannot be ignored for long.</p>\n\n<p>We seek to contribute in all of these ways and countless others—because we know that an imaginative, militant, and accountable struggle for Black liberation must be central to the struggle for the world we aim to build together. Small towns and rural backwaters must rise up alongside the metropolis and our rural communities must connect with each another to share support, resources, ideas, and skills. The rural front will not directly reflect the same movements, horrors, and transformations as the city. We have our own set of circumstances, strategies, demons, and possibilities. We must engage our diverse skills and strengths and find ways to mobilize them. We must work diligently with intention and care. We know that the path is long and that we will learn and make mistakes along the way. We know the possibilities are ultimately only limited by our capabilities and willingness to act.</p>\n\n<p><strong>Black liberation is human liberation. Let’s roll, fuckers.</strong></p>\n\n<hr />\n\n<p><a href=\"https://www.flickr.com/photos/84346589@N00/8552681155/\">Header image is from Flickr</a> by a user named <em>@drburtoni</em>, accessed 2020-06-20. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. Cropped by CrimethInc.</p>\n\n"
    },
    {
      "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2020/01/07/crimethinccom-now-fully-functional-in-portuguese-including-books-zines-posters-and-articles",
      "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2020/01/07/crimethinccom-now-fully-functional-in-portuguese-including-books-zines-posters-and-articles",
      "title": "CrimethInc.com Now Fully Functional in Portuguese : Including Books, Zines, Posters, and Articles",
      "summary": "We are thrilled to announce the Brazilian Portuguese version of our site—along with a list of all our books, zines, posters, & articles in Portuguese.",
      "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/01/07/header.jpg",
      "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/01/07/header.jpg",
      "date_published": "2020-01-07T20:56:14Z",
      "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:41Z",
      "tags": [
        "Brazil",
        "Portuguese",
        "Brasil"
      ],
      "content_html": "<p>After a tremendous amount of work, we are finally able to announce the Brazilian Portuguese version of this site, <a href=\"https://pt.crimethinc.com/\">pt.crimethinc.com</a>. In addition, we have uploaded a large number of books, zines, posters, and articles  in Portuguese. From now on, you can access a full list of our articles in Portuguese at <a href=\"https://crimethinc.com/languages/portugu%C3%AAs-brasileiro\">crimethinc.com/languages/português-brasileiro</a>. Below, you can find a full list of all our books (all freely available in PDF), zines, and posters in Portuguese, as well.</p>\n\n<p>This is part of our ongoing effort to fully internationalize our efforts, making them equally inclusive across all national borders and boundaries of language.</p>\n\n<p>We first made contact with Brazilian anarchists in the 1990s; our material has appeared in Portuguese going back as far as early issues of our paper, <a href=\"https://crimethinc.com/journals/harbinger\">Harbinger</a>, which appeared under the name <em>Arauto.</em> Since the <a href=\"https://pt.crimethinc.com/2013/07/27/the-june-2013-uprisings-in-brazil-part-1\">June 2013</a> uprisings we have published articles from comrades, directly from within the mobilizations. In addition, comrades in Brazil and Portugal have translated a vast amount of CrimethInc. material from English and other languages into Portuguese. All this material can now be gathered here in a unified platform.</p>\n\n<p>We hope to continue our efforts to build tools and networks for communication and solidarity across the decades to come. We aim to establish strategic dialogue between anarchists and anti-authoritarian rebels active on all seven continents. Not just to translate analysis from one language or region for others, but also supporting voices of resistance wherever people are fighting against the oppression of capitalism, patriarchy, racism, and the state.</p>\n\n<p>If you would like to help with translations to or from Portuguese and other languages, or if know of any material already translated and not yet on this site, please contact us by email: <a href=\"mailto:false.flag@riseup.net\">false.flag@riseup.net</a>.</p>\n\n<p>Thanks—and see you on the streets!</p>\n\n<p><em>Below, you can click the image to download the pdf.</em></p>\n\n<h1 id=\"livros\"><a href=\"#livros\"></a>Livros</h1>\n\n<figure class=\"portrait\">\n<a href=\"https://crimethinc.com/books/da-democracia-a-liberdade\"> <img src=\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/books/da-democracia-a-liberdade/da-democracia-a-liberdade_front.jpg\" /> </a>   <figcaption>\n    <p>Da Democracia à Liberdade: A Diferença entre Governo e Autodeterminação – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.</p>\n  </figcaption>\n</figure>\n\n<p>Para comprar cópias impressas de Da Democracia à Liberdade <a href=\"http://nogods-nomasters.com/nogodsnomasters/produto/da-democracia-a-liberdade-crimethinc/\">clique aqui</a>.</p>\n\n<figure class=\"portrait\">\n<a href=\"https://crimethinc.com/books/trabalho-edicao-resumida-de-emergencia\"> <img src=\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/books/trabalho-edicao-resumida-de-emergencia/trabalho-edicao-resumida-de-emergencia_front.jpg\" /> </a>   <figcaption>\n    <p>Trabalho: capitalismo . economia . resistência – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.</p>\n  </figcaption>\n</figure>\n\n<figure class=\"portrait\">\n<a href=\"https://crimethinc.com/books/espere-resistencia\"> <img src=\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/books/espere-resistencia/espere-resistencia_front.jpg\" /> </a>   <figcaption>\n    <p>Espere Resistência: um guia de campo – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.</p>\n  </figcaption>\n</figure>\n\n<figure class=\"portrait\">\n<a href=\"https://crimethinc.com/books/receitas-para-o-desastre\"> <img src=\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/books/receitas-para-o-desastre/receitas-para-o-desastre_front.jpg\" /> </a>   <figcaption>\n    <p>Receitas para o Desastre: um livro de receitas anarquista – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.</p>\n  </figcaption>\n</figure>\n\n<figure class=\"portrait\">\n<a href=\"https://crimethinc.com/books/dias-de-guerra-noites-de-amor\"> <img src=\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/books/dias-de-guerra-noites-de-amor/dias-de-guerra-noites-de-amor_front.jpg\" /> </a>   <figcaption>\n    <p>Dias de Guerra Noites de Amor: Crimideia para iniciantes – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.</p>\n  </figcaption>\n</figure>\n\n<h1 id=\"zines\"><a href=\"#zines\"></a>Zines</h1>\n\n<figure class=\"portrait\">\n<a href=\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/tce/images/Para-Mudar-Tudo.pdf\"> <img src=\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/01/07/2.jpg\" /> </a>   <figcaption>\n    <p>Para Mudar Tudo – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.</p>\n  </figcaption>\n</figure>\n\n<figure class=\"portrait\">\n<a href=\"https://pt.crimethinc.com/zines/voto-vs-acaodireta\"> <img src=\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/voto-vs-acaodireta/voto-vs-acaodireta_front.jpg\" /> </a>   <figcaption>\n    <p>Voto vs. Ação Direta – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.</p>\n  </figcaption>\n</figure>\n\n<figure class=\"portrait\">\n<a href=\"https://pt.crimethinc.com/zines/voce-esta-sob-vigilancia\"> <img src=\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/voce-esta-sob-vigilancia/voce-esta-sob-vigilancia_front.jpg\" /> </a>   <figcaption>\n    <p>Você Está Sob Vigilância – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.</p>\n  </figcaption>\n</figure>\n\n<figure class=\"portrait\">\n<a href=\"https://pt.crimethinc.com/zines/a-internet-como-uma-nova-cerca\"> <img src=\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/a-internet-como-uma-nova-cerca/a-internet-como-uma-nova-cerca_front.jpg\" /> </a>   <figcaption>\n    <p>A Internet Como uma Nova Cerca – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.</p>\n  </figcaption>\n</figure>\n\n<figure class=\"portrait\">\n<a href=\"https://pt.crimethinc.com/zines/7-mitos-sobre-a-policia\"> <img src=\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/7-mitos-sobre-a-policia/7-mitos-sobre-a-policia_front.jpg\" /> </a>   <figcaption>\n    <p>7 Mitos Sobre a Polícia – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.</p>\n  </figcaption>\n</figure>\n\n<figure class=\"portrait\">\n<a href=\"https://pt.crimethinc.com/zines/anarquia-e-alcool\"> <img src=\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/anarquia-e-alcool/anarquia-e-alcool_front.jpg\" /> </a>   <figcaption>\n    <p>Anarquia e Álcool – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.</p>\n  </figcaption>\n</figure>\n\n<figure class=\"portrait\">\n<a href=\"https://pt.crimethinc.com/zines/receitas-para-o-desastre-vol-01-black-blocs-bloqueios-bombas-de-fumaca\"> <img src=\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/receitas-para-o-desastre-vol-01-black-blocs-bloqueios-bombas-de-fumaca/receitas-para-o-desastre-vol-01-black-blocs-bloqueios-bombas-de-fumaca_front.jpg\" /> </a>   <figcaption>\n    <p>Receitas para o Desastre Vol. 01 Black blocs, bloqueios &amp; bombas de fumaça – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.</p>\n  </figcaption>\n</figure>\n\n<figure class=\"portrait\">\n<a href=\"https://pt.crimethinc.com/zines/receitas-para-o-desastre-vol-02-coletivos-coalizoes-cultura-de-seguranca\"> <img src=\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/receitas-para-o-desastre-vol-02-coletivos-coalizoes-cultura-de-seguranca/receitas-para-o-desastre-vol-02-coletivos-coalizoes-cultura-de-seguranca_front.jpg\" /> </a>   <figcaption>\n    <p>Receitas para o Desastre Vol. 02 Coletivos, coalizões &amp; cultura de segurança – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.</p>\n  </figcaption>\n</figure>\n\n<figure class=\"portrait\">\n<a href=\"https://pt.crimethinc.com/zines/receitas-para-o-desastre-vol-03-saude-comportamento-violencia-domestica\"> <img src=\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/receitas-para-o-desastre-vol-03-saude-comportamento-violencia-domestica/receitas-para-o-desastre-vol-03-saude-comportamento-violencia-domestica_front.jpg\" /> </a>   <figcaption>\n    <p>Receitas para o Desastre Vol. 03 Saúde, comportamento &amp; violência doméstica – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.</p>\n  </figcaption>\n</figure>\n\n<figure class=\"portrait\">\n<a href=\"https://pt.crimethinc.com/zines/receitas-para-o-desastre-vol-04-sabotagem-infiltracao-evasao\"> <img src=\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/receitas-para-o-desastre-vol-04-sabotagem-infiltracao-evasao/receitas-para-o-desastre-vol-04-sabotagem-infiltracao-evasao_front.jpg\" /> </a>   <figcaption>\n    <p>Receitas para o Desastre Vol. 04 Sabotagem, infiltração &amp; evasão – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.</p>\n  </figcaption>\n</figure>\n\n<figure class=\"portrait\">\n<a href=\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/receitas-para-o-desastre-vol-05-grafite-estencil-serigrafia-adesivos-lambes/receitas-para-o-desastre-vol-05-grafite-estencil-serigrafia-adesivos-lambes_front.jpg\"> <img src=\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/receitas-para-o-desastre-vol-05-grafite-estencil-serigrafia-adesivos-lambes/receitas-para-o-desastre-vol-05-grafite-estencil-serigrafia-adesivos-lambes_front.jpg\" /> </a>   <figcaption>\n    <p>Receitas para o Desastre Vol. 05 Grafite, estêncil, serigrafia, adesivos &amp; lambes – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.</p>\n  </figcaption>\n</figure>\n\n<figure class=\"portrait\">\n<a href=\"https://pt.crimethinc.com/zines/receitas-para-o-desastre-vol-06-manifestacoes-bicicletadas-festas-festivais\"> <img src=\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/receitas-para-o-desastre-vol-06-manifestacoes-bicicletadas-festas-festivais/receitas-para-o-desastre-vol-06-manifestacoes-bicicletadas-festas-festivais_front.jpg\" /> </a>   <figcaption>\n    <p>Receitas para o Desastre Vol. 06 (Portugues Brasileiro) Manifestações, bicicletadas, festas &amp; festivais – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.</p>\n  </figcaption>\n</figure>\n\n<figure class=\"portrait\">\n<a href=\"https://pt.crimethinc.com/zines/receitas-para-o-desastre-vol-07-desemprego-okupas-caronas-lixeiras\"> <img src=\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/receitas-para-o-desastre-vol-07-desemprego-okupas-caronas-lixeiras/receitas-para-o-desastre-vol-07-desemprego-okupas-caronas-lixeiras_front.jpg\" /> </a>   <figcaption>\n    <p>Receitas para o Desastre Vol. 07 Desemprego, okupas, caronas &amp; lixeiras – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.</p>\n  </figcaption>\n</figure>\n\n<figure class=\"portrait\">\n<a href=\"https://crimethinc.com/zines/receitas-para-o-desastre-vol-08-solidariedade-apoio-juridico-minando-a-opressao\"> <img src=\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/receitas-para-o-desastre-vol-08-solidariedade-apoio-juridico-minando-a-opressao/receitas-para-o-desastre-vol-08-solidariedade-apoio-juridico-minando-a-opressao_front.jpg\" /> </a>   <figcaption>\n    <p>Receitas para o Desastre Vol. 08: Solidariedade, apoio jurídico &amp; minando a opressão</p>\n  </figcaption>\n</figure>\n\n<figure class=\"portrait\">\n<a href=\"https://crimethinc.com/zines/receitas-para-o-desastre-vol-09-feiticos-performances-musica-reservatorios-de-ideias\"> <img src=\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/receitas-para-o-desastre-vol-09-feiticos-performances-musica-reservatorios-de-ideias/receitas-para-o-desastre-vol-09-feiticos-performances-musica-reservatorios-de-ideias_front.jpg\" /> </a>   <figcaption>\n    <p>Receitas para o Desastre Vol. 09: Feitiços, performances, música &amp; reservatórios de ideias</p>\n  </figcaption>\n</figure>\n\n<figure class=\"portrait\">\n<a href=\"https://crimethinc.com/zines/receitas-para-o-desastre-vol-10-midia-propaganda-formas-de-chamar-a-atencao\"> <img src=\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/receitas-para-o-desastre-vol-10-midia-propaganda-formas-de-chamar-a-atencao/receitas-para-o-desastre-vol-10-midia-propaganda-formas-de-chamar-a-atencao_front.jpg\" /> </a>   <figcaption>\n    <p>Receitas para o Desastre Vol. 10: Mídia, propaganda &amp; formas de chamar a atenção</p>\n  </figcaption>\n</figure>\n\n<h1 id=\"posters\"><a href=\"#posters\"></a>Posters</h1>\n\n<figure class=\"portrait\">\n<a href=\"https://crimethinc.com/posters/a-policia\"> <img src=\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/posters/a-policia/a-policia_front_color.jpg\" /> </a>   <figcaption>\n    <p>A Polícia – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.</p>\n  </figcaption>\n</figure>\n\n<figure class=\"portrait\">\n<a href=\"https://crimethinc.com/posters/vamos-mostar-quem-manda-ninguem\"> <img src=\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/posters/vamos-mostar-quem-manda-ninguem/vamos-mostar-quem-manda-ninguem_front_black_and_white.jpg\" /> </a>   <figcaption>\n    <p>Vamos Mostar Quem Manda: Ninguém – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.</p>\n  </figcaption>\n</figure>\n\n<figure class=\"portrait\">\n<a href=\"https://crimethinc.com/posters/democracia-e-burocracia\"> <img src=\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/posters/democracia-e-burocracia/democracia-e-burocracia_front_color.jpg\" /> </a>   <figcaption>\n    <p>Democracia é Burocracia – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.</p>\n  </figcaption>\n</figure>\n\n<figure class=\"portrait\">\n<a href=\"https://crimethinc.com/posters/democracia-e-fronteira\"> <img src=\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/posters/democracia-e-fronteira/democracia-e-fronteira_front_color.jpg\" /> </a>   <figcaption>\n    <p>Democracia é Fronteira – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.</p>\n  </figcaption>\n</figure>\n\n<figure class=\"portrait\">\n<a href=\"https://crimethinc.com/posters/democracia-e-guerra\"> <img src=\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/posters/democracia-e-guerra/democracia-e-guerra_front_color.jpg\" /> </a>   <figcaption>\n    <p>Democracia é Guerra – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.</p>\n  </figcaption>\n</figure>\n\n<figure class=\"portrait\">\n<a href=\"https://crimethinc.com/posters/democracia-e-policia\"> <img src=\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/posters/democracia-e-policia/democracia-e-policia_front_color.jpg\" /> </a>   <figcaption>\n    <p>Democracia é Polícia – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.</p>\n  </figcaption>\n</figure>\n\n<figure class=\"portrait\">\n<a href=\"https://crimethinc.com/posters/democracia-e-prisao\"> <img src=\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/posters/democracia-e-prisao/democracia-e-prisao_front_color.jpg\" /> </a>   <figcaption>\n    <p>Democracia é Prisão – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.</p>\n  </figcaption>\n</figure>\n\n<figure class=\"portrait\">\n<a href=\"https://crimethinc.com/posters/democracia-e-vigilancia\"> <img src=\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/posters/democracia-e-vigilancia/democracia-e-vigilancia_front_color.jpg\" /> </a>   <figcaption>\n    <p>Democracia é Vigilância – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.</p>\n  </figcaption>\n</figure>\n\n<h1 id=\"textos\"><a href=\"#textos\"></a>Textos</h1>\n\n<ul>\n  <li>\n    <p><a href=\"https://crimethinc.com/2019/11/19/sexta-feira-29-de-novembro-ninguem-paga-chamado-internacional-para-uma-greve-contra-o-aumento-do-custo-de-vida\">Sexta-feira, 29 de novembro: Ninguém paga</a>! Chamado Internacional para uma Greve Contra o Aumento do Custo de Vida</p>\n  </li>\n  <li>\n    <p><a href=\"https://crimethinc.com/2019/10/19/o-cessar-fogo-e-uma-fraude-mortal-mensagem-de-um-camarada-em-rojava\">O “Cessar Fogo” é uma Fraude Mortal</a>—Mensagem de um camarada em Rojava</p>\n  </li>\n  <li>\n    <p><a href=\"https://crimethinc.com/2019/10/12/a-relevancia-da-invasao-turca-abordando-as-duras-questoes-sobre-imperialismo-e-solidariedade\">A relevância da invasão turca</a>—Abordando as duras questões sobre imperialismo e solidariedade</p>\n  </li>\n  <li>\n    <p><a href=\"https://crimethinc.com/2019/10/09/chamado-para-a-acao-solidariedade-a-rojava-contra-a-invasao-turca-uma-apelo-urgente-de-organizacoes-internacionais\">Chamado para a ação: Solidariedade a Rojava – contra a invasão turca</a>! Uma Apelo Urgente de Organizações Internacionais</p>\n  </li>\n  <li>\n    <p><a href=\"https://crimethinc.com/2019/10/07/nacionalistas-e-jihadistas-unidos-e-contra-eles-apenas-resistencia-autonoma\">Nacionalistas e Jihadistas Unidos</a>—E Contra Eles, apenas Resistência Autônoma</p>\n  </li>\n  <li>\n    <p><a href=\"https://crimethinc.com/2019/09/24/o-que-queima-a-amazonia-um-apelo-de-anarquistas-do-brasil\">O que queima a Amazônia</a>—Um apelo de anarquistas do Brasil</p>\n  </li>\n  <li>\n    <p><a href=\"https://crimethinc.com/2019/08/29/a-nova-guerra-contra-imigrantes-e-anarquistas-na-grecia-uma-entrevista-com-anarquista-em-exarchia\">A nova guerra contra imigrantes e anarquistas na Grécia</a>—Uma entrevista com anarquista em Exarchia</p>\n  </li>\n  <li>\n    <p><a href=\"https://crimethinc.com/2019/08/05/relato-de-viagem-turne-brasileira-lancando-da-democracia-a-liberdade-incluindo-um-panorama-de-movimentos-e-lutas-anarquistas-pelo-brasil-1\">Relato de Viagem: Turnê Brasileira lançando Da Democracia à Liberdade</a>—Incluindo um panorama de movimentos e lutas anarquistas pelo Brasil</p>\n  </li>\n  <li>\n    <p><a href=\"https://crimethinc.com/2019/03/15/policia-um-estudo-etnografico-foto-ensaio-sobre-a-obediencia-armada\">Polícia: Um Estudo Etnográfico</a>—Foto-Ensaio Sobre a Obediência Armada</p>\n  </li>\n  <li>\n    <p><a href=\"https://crimethinc.com/2018/12/28/a-ameaca-a-rojava-anarquista-na-siria-fala-sobre-o-real-significado-da-retirada-das-tropas-estadunidenses-da-siria-por-donald-trump\">A ameaça a Rojava</a>—Anarquista na Síria fala sobre o real significado da retirada das tropas estadunidenses da Síria por Donald Trump.</p>\n  </li>\n  <li>\n    <p><a href=\"https://crimethinc.com/2018/12/27/todas-contra-bolsonaro-todas-contra-bolsonaro-e-a-nova-direita\">Todas Contra Bolsonaro</a>! Todas contra Bolsonaro e a nova direita!</p>\n  </li>\n</ul>\n\n<hr />\n\n<figure class=\"\">\n<img src=\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/01/07/1.jpg\" />   <figcaption>\n    <p>Para Mudar Tudo, Comece de Algum Lugar!</p>\n  </figcaption>\n</figure>\n\n"
    },
    {
      "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2017/11/02/other-rojavas-echoes-of-the-free-commune-of-barbacha-an-autonomous-uprising-in-north-africa-2012-2014",
      "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2017/11/02/other-rojavas-echoes-of-the-free-commune-of-barbacha-an-autonomous-uprising-in-north-africa-2012-2014",
      "title": "Other Rojavas: Echoes of the Free Commune of Barbacha : Chronicling an Autonomous Uprising in North Africa",
      "summary": "In Kabylia, an ethnic minority oppressed by racism and state oppression has initiated a series of revolts comparable to what the Kurds have accomplished in Rojava and the Zapatistas in Chiapas.",
      "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/11/02/header.jpg",
      "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/11/02/header.jpg",
      "date_published": "2017-11-02T17:51:00Z",
      "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:35Z",
      "tags": [
        "Kabylia",
        "Barbacha",
        "Amazigh",
        "Tamazight"
      ],
      "content_html": "<p>The autonomous region of Rojava has gained international visibility as a beacon of struggle against the Islamic State and other forms of autocratic power, an experiment in which <a href=\"https://crimethinc.com/2017/04/18/the-struggle-is-not-for-martyrdom-but-for-life\">many anarchists are currently participating</a>. Yet Rojava is not the only region in which a struggle for self-determination has expanded to open a path towards total liberation. In north Africa, in the region of Kabylia, an ethnic minority oppressed by racism and state oppression has initiated in a series of revolts comparable to what the Kurds have accomplished in Rojava and the Zapatistas in Chiapas. Throughout decades of struggle, they have established zones of autonomy and built bridges to others in revolt, in hopes of bringing about “a genuine emancipatory social revolution.” Read on to learn about this underreported struggle.</p>\n\n<figure class=\"\">\n<img src=\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/11/02/5.jpg\" />   <figcaption>\n    <p><a href=\"https://eburnienews.net/tizi-ouzou-la-capitale-de-la-kabylie-martyrisee-bafouee-a-feu-et-a-sang-mais-debout/\">Demonstration in Kabylia, April 20, 2014, commemorating the Amazigh Springs of 1980 and 2001</a>.</p>\n  </figcaption>\n</figure>\n\n<h1 id=\"translators-introduction\"><a href=\"#translators-introduction\"></a>Translators’ Introduction</h1>\n\n<p><em>By Michael Desnivic and Habiba Dhirem-Kasper.</em></p>\n\n<p>This translation has allowed us to share a recent resistance movement that, until now, was completely unknown to English-speaking countries and still largely unknown outside of Algeria. The author, a French writer, filmmaker and documentarian, Matouf Tarlacrea, was very happy to see its release into English. In 2014, he traveled to a commune called Barbacha in northern Algeria with some friends for two days and collected personal stories and documents to present “Échos de la Commune libre de Barbacha” as both an article and short documentary video. Matouf’s specialty is primarily in resistance movements around the world. His grandparents are from northern Algeria and he currently lives in Toulouse, France and is active in supporting CREA (<em>Campagne de Réquisition, d’Entraide et d’Autogestion</em> or Requisition Campaign for Mutual Aid and Self-Management), a squatted communal building inhabited by people of various ethnic and cultural backgrounds united under one common banner: <strong>the total and complete rejection of all authority.</strong></p>\n\n<p>Kabylia or Kabylie is a region in northern Algeria just east of the country’s capital city Algiers, inhabited primarily by the indigenous Kabyle people. Outside of Belgium and France, Berbers and Kabyles are fairly unknown to Westerners: Algeria and all of North Africa are imagined to be exclusively populated by Arabs. The Kabyle people are an ethnic division of the Berbers, among many other Berber ethnic groups. Most Kabyles and other Berber ethnic groups currently speak Arabic, Algeria’s official language, as well as regional Berber dialects; French, introduced via colonialism, is also common, especially in business and education.</p>\n\n<p>Who are the Berbers? They are the original inhabitants of North Africa (Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia) and parts of West Africa (Burkina Faso, Mali, Mauritania, Niger). But they did not <em>call themselves</em> Berbers: like the names of most indigenous peoples (e.g. “Indians”), this name was given to them by invaders. It comes from the Greek word <em>barbarous</em> and the Latin cognate <em>barbarus;</em> root of “barbarian,” originally denoting a person with a primitive civilization. The original inhabitants of this region called themselves <em>Imazighen,</em> which roughly translates to “free people,” known individually as <em>Amazigh</em> (masculine) and as <em>Tamazight</em> (feminine), who speak the <em>Tamazight</em> language. Their land was known as <em>Tamazgha,</em> renamed the “Maghreb” by the Arabs. In Antiquity, the people of this land had close relations with Ancient Greeks and Romans.</p>\n\n<p>As with many ancient people, contact with outside cultures alternated between friendship and hostility, with the Berbers playing the roles of both conquerors and conquered. Their contribution to the developing cultures of Antiquity and the Middle Ages has left a mark on African and even European culture (for example, historians suspect St. Augustine may have been an ethnic Berber). More recently, Situationist International cofounder Guy Debord noted in his 1955 article “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography” that the term “psychogeography” was coined by “an illiterate Kabyle” he and his friends had known.</p>\n\n<p>Algeria has a rich history of revolt against the various forms of oppression and tyranny that have menaced it, including French colonialism and theocratic autocracy. Algerian-born Albert Camus noted the immense racism the Kabyles experienced through socioeconomic exclusion, extreme poverty and famines instigated by the French settler-colonialists in his essay “Misère de la Kabylie.” In <em>We Are Imazighen,</em> Fazia Ailel states, “Berbers were denounced as a creation of France” as a means to intensify discrimination from the dominant Arab ethnic group. Generation after generation has resisted this racism. The struggles against discrimination and colonialism led to struggles against other forms of oppression as well. As is to be expected, throughout history, revolutionary attempts in Algeria to overthrow dictatorial systems of colonization and, later, state bureaucracy have consistently been co-opted by various “liberators” attempting to secure power for themselves via political, economic, military, or religious leadership roles. This is as true on the African continent as it has been in Europe and Asia.</p>\n\n<p>Kabyles in particular have a long, vast history in avoiding authority and hierarchy, rejecting French colonialism and bureaucracy, by implementing local village assemblies; government in itself has mostly been alien to them. In his 1902 book <em>Mutual Aid,</em> Peter Kropotkin noted the rejection of authority that seemed to be imbedded in Kabyle culture.</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n  <p>“The Kabyles know no authority whatever besides that of the <em>djemmâa,</em> or folkmote of the village community. All men of age take part in it, in the open air, or in a special building provided with stone seats. and the decisions of the <em>djemmâa</em> are evidently taken at unanimity: that is, the discussions continue until all present agree to accept, or to submit to, some decision. There being no authority in a village community to impose a decision, this system has been practiced by mankind wherever there have been village communities, and it is practiced still wherever they continue to exist, i.e., by several hundred million men (sic) all over the world.”</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>He adds:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n  <p>“Mutual support permeates the life of the Kabyles, and if one of them, during a journey abroad, meets with another Kabyle in need, he is bound to come to his aid, even at the risk of his own fortune and life; if this has not been done, the <em>djemmâa</em> of the man who has suffered from such neglect may lodge a complaint, and the <em>djemmâa</em> of the selfish man will at once make good the loss. We thus come across a custom which is familiar to the students of the mediaeval merchant guilds. Every stranger who enters a Kabyle village has right to housing in the winter, and his horses can always graze on the communal lands for twenty-four hours. But in case of need he can reckon upon an almost unlimited support. Thus, during the famine of 1867-68, the Kabyles received and fed every one who sought refuge in their villages, without distinction of origin. In the district of Dellys, no less than 12,000 people who came from all parts of Algeria, and even from Morocco, were fed in this way. While people died from starvation all over Algeria, there was not one single case of death due to this cause on Kabylian soil. The <em>djemmâas,</em> depriving themselves of necessaries, organized relief, without ever asking any aid from the Government, or uttering the slightest complaint; they considered it as a natural duty. And while among the European settlers all kind of police measures were taken to prevent thefts and disorder resulting from such an influx of strangers, nothing of the kind was required on the Kabyles’ territory: the <em>djemmâas</em> needed neither aid nor protection from without.”</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<hr />\n\n<figure class=\"\">\n<img src=\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/11/02/9.jpg\" />   <figcaption>\n    <p>Barbacha’s residents march against repression, Béjaïa, April 9, 2013. The banner reads “Down with repression.”</p>\n  </figcaption>\n</figure>\n\n<p>On July 5, 1962, Algeria was granted independence after nearly 8 years of war and 132 years (exactly to the day) of colonization. The brutal war, depending on the sources, left around 400,000 to 1.5 million dead. Confusion, fear, disillusionment and atrocity seem to be inevitable byproducts of war, and the end of the occupation (as with the end of so many) led to the rise of despotic leadership.</p>\n\n<p>But after the colonial forces left, something unusual happened. Coming to power at the end of the War, the workers and peasants of the country decided to implement <em>autogestion</em> or self-management. Quickly, the working class took over much of the industry and the peasants much of the countryside. Thus the Algerian War of Independence suddenly became the Algerian Revolution.</p>\n\n<p>Algeria’s self-management revolution (1962-65) united the entire working class, Berber and Arab, as well as even ethnic French <em>pieds-noirs</em><sup id=\"fnref:1\"><a href=\"#fn:1\" class=\"footnote\" rel=\"footnote\" role=\"doc-noteref\">1</a></sup> to build a socialist (some might even say “libertarian socialist”) revolution that shook off the dead weight of political parties, including the Leninism and Stalinism that numerous bureaucrats were struggling to implement in Algeria and throughout most of the freshly decolonized countries. The struggle of the Algerian workers, peasants, and students was consistently hammered and wedged between various ideologies: religious conservatism, Leninism (or “vanguardism”), capitalism, nationalism, ethnic identity. Unsatisfied by each of these, an Algerian proletariat—people who had not read Marx and Engels, brought a communist party to power, or possessed any interest in centralizing power and the means of production in the hands of the State—had successfully done what socialists in the Cold War era were bent on preventing working people from doing: taking power <em>for themselves.</em></p>\n\n<p>“After independence, the Algerians turned to socialism, which to them meant self-management.” (Autogestion ouvrière et pouvoir politique en Algérie (1962-1965), Monique Laks, 1970.) Revolutionaries in Algeria were quickly superseding Marxism and its apologists. Ukraine, Germany, Russia, France, and especially Spain are historically seen as the bastions of anarchist and libertarian socialist insurrection by means of self-management, especially in the form of workers’ councils. The revolutionary reorganization of society got underway in Algeria along similar lines, with far less influence from Western thinkers, pushing itself to challenge both state control and private ownership of capital.</p>\n\n<p>With an uncertain socio-economic future in post-independence, the new rulers of Algeria appeared inept. After the war, the General Union of Algerian Workers (<em>Union Générale des Travailleurs Algériens</em> or UGTA) issued the following appeal: “…our battle is soon going to take a new form… The resumption of economic activity will allow the workers to take the initiative to be present everywhere, to participate, to direct and control the economy of our country.” The UGTA continued an appeal to the newly-formed government and the French former owners of the farms and factories to reopen them. The UGTA stated that if there is “a negative answer, the government must organize a system of management by the workers.” The request fell on deaf ears at first, but workers’ self-management continued to come into discussion and was granted official status by Ahmed Ben Bella, the first President of Algeria, in September 28, 1962 in his inaugural speech (plausibly, however, to outstrip his bourgeois competitors with his bureaucracy). After Ben Bella was overthrown by Boumédienne in a <em>coup d’état,</em> self-management and the workers’ movement were targeted by the new regime that blended Islamic fundamentalism and technocratic state-planning, destroying self-management in a few years’ time.</p>\n\n<hr />\n\n<figure class=\"\">\n<img src=\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/11/02/6.jpg\" />   <figcaption>\n    <p>Barbacha, February 2014.</p>\n  </figcaption>\n</figure>\n\n<p>The movements of the “Arab Spring” were particularly intense in Algeria; but they were preceded by several Berber Springs. In 1980, a lecture on Kabyle poetry by Moulod Mammeri was banned at the University of Tizi-Ouzo. This sparked the first spontaneous Berber Spring, a series of riots and strikes aimed at demanding status for Tamazight as a national or official language, and culminating in other attempts to change Algerian society. Another Berber Spring broke out in 1988. A civil war erupted in 1991 and lasted until 2002.</p>\n\n<p>On April 18, 2001, an event occurred that again put Algeria and the Kaybles in the international spotlight. Guermah Massinissa, an eighteen-year-old high school student arrested in Tizi-Ouzou, a city in Kabylia, was shot by police while in custody under very mysterious circumstances. Rioting broke out almost immediately, causing what was dubbed the “Black Spring.” As often occurs in uprisings against State-sponsored murder, the entirety of the society and everything it produced was called into question. A movement emerged for an autonomous Kabylia.</p>\n\n<p>This revolt elucidated what the insurrectionaries were ultimately attempting to do and what they wanted to communicate to Algeria and the rest of the world: they refused to be led or dominated by anyone, French, Arab, <em>or</em> Kabyle.</p>\n\n<p>Men, women, and children all over Kabylia participated in this third Berber Spring. The common slogan chanted was “You can’t kill us, we are already dead!” (Somewhat more intimidating than “We are the 99 percent.”) Kabyle women were particularly active in the revolt, voicing their disgust against the possible State-sponsored murder of their brothers, husbands, boyfriends, fathers, and sons.</p>\n\n<p>Government offices, courts, police stations—all repressive infrastructures of the State—were put to the torch. Showing a thoroughgoing critique of all the different things that restricted their liberation, the rioters went after the buildings of political parties and Islamic fundamentalists. The Islamists, whose ideological terror paralleled the State’s autocracy culminating in the deaths of countless Algerians, saw their meeting places turned to ash. By the end of the month, the entire region of Kabylia was in total revolt. Every attempt at negotiation with the Algerian government was rejected by the communities of resistance. Police and Islamic fundamentalists were consistently driven out of villages and cities. Labor unions and left-wing parties were shunned as all attempts to take authority were considered traitorous, including voting in the elections.</p>\n\n<p>The people of the region recreated the <em>aarch</em> (similar to Kropotkin’s aforementioned system of the <em>djemmâa</em>), a method of coordinating the needs of the community with revocable delegates from the village assemblies (see Wolfi Landstreicher’s <em>Autonomous Self-Organization and Anarchist Intervention</em>). Via <em>aarchs,</em> the community runs decisions by consensus and assembly. By rejecting hierarchy, it purges the old Algeria—and the old world itself—that asserted its assault on freedom through the police state and Islamic fundamentalism.</p>\n\n<hr />\n\n<figure class=\"\">\n<img src=\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/11/02/1.jpg\" />\n</figure>\n\n<p>Habiba’s father, an ethnic Kabyle, was married with two daughters during the Algerian War of Independence. He was a <em>harki,</em> something he did not like to talk about. It was a poignant subject in their household. Why would anyone choose to fight against his country and people? Wearing these two badges of shame, a <em>harki</em> and a Kabyle, was not easy.</p>\n\n<p>The word <em>harki</em> has generally come to mean “traitor”: in the Algerian context it refers to an Algerian soldier who fought on the French side of the war—sometimes not by choice. Habiba’s father was told his family would be killed if he did not help the armed forces of France keep Algeria as their colony. In return for fighting at their side against the anti-colonial forces, he was promised asylum in France. He found a new life in France, where Habiba was born. Obviously, the transition wasn’t easy for the family. They would have preferred that their country regain its independence from France, and it did, but they never were able to savor the victory. As a child, Habiba visited Algeria with her mother, but things were not the same as her mother had left it. As for Habiba, the experience was very disappointing. She had hoped for acceptance but instead encountered disdain from children in the village her mother grew up in. Being called a dirty Arab back in France was normal, almost expected, but to be called a dirty French in the land of her ancestors left her disheartened and confused.</p>\n\n<p>It was a few years before she understood what it all meant. She was the daughter of a traitorous <em>harki,</em> a man who had betrayed his country and fled with hundreds of thousands of others. Or at least that was what those kids were told she was.</p>\n\n<p>After that trip she had a better understanding of where she came from and she was never the same again. Everything she thought she was came crumbling down. It was only after decades that she discovered her true background: her parents had been Arabized; they were Kabyles assimilated into the Arabic culture and language, and all her life she was made to believe she was part of a culture that deep down she knew she was never part of. Today she is proud to say that she is part of the Kabyle people, some of the most resilient and courageous people in North Africa. Today she hopes that the people of Kabylie will keep fighting for their rights, for their language and to regain their independence.</p>\n\n<p>In translating this piece and presenting the existence of the movement in Barbacha to the English-speaking public, we strongly felt their struggle needed to be known to a wider audience. We did so not just simply to offer a mere news piece to enlighten the Anglosphere on the <em>zeitgeist</em> in northern Algeria, but to inspire others, to move people out of pessimism and fatalism, to show them resistance and change are not impossible. Furthermore, we do so for the people of Barbacha’s request for support and solidarity outside of Algeria, as they have stated plainly that they wish to unite with everyone across the world who yearn for freedom from oppression. We present this project to serve as outreach in order that their struggle might connect with other struggles against authoritarianism, hierarchy, capitalism, and racism.</p>\n\n<figure class=\"\">\n<img src=\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/11/02/7.jpg\" />   <figcaption>\n    <p>Barbacha City Hall, blocked by the residents to prevent the installation of the “shameful alliance,” 2013.</p>\n  </figcaption>\n</figure>\n\n<h1 id=\"echoes-of-the-free-commune-of-barbacha\"><a href=\"#echoes-of-the-free-commune-of-barbacha\"></a>Echoes of the Free Commune of Barbacha</h1>\n\n<p>“Échos de la commune libre de Barbacha,” by Matouf Tarlacrea (with the gracious help of Amazigh, Morgane, Da Taïeb, Mabrouk, and Da Elhamid) in <em>Article 11,</em> 2014. Translated from the French by Michael Desnivic and Habiba Dhirem-Kasper.</p>\n\n<p><em>Barbacha is a small region in Kabylia, made up of 34 villages with 27,000 inhabitants. Since 2012, the people there decided to forego holding the reins of municipal authority to instead develop diverse forms of self-management, notably via their Open General Assembly (OGA). Matouf Tarlacrea was there a few months ago accompanied by friends. He brings with him this collective story.</em></p>\n\n<figure class=\"video-container \">\n  <iframe credentialless=\"\" allowfullscreen=\"\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer-when-downgrade\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts allow-same-origin\" allow=\"accelerometer 'none'; ambient-light-sensor 'none'; autoplay 'none'; battery 'none'; bluetooth 'none'; browsing-topics 'none'; camera 'none'; ch-ua 'none'; display-capture 'none'; domain-agent 'none'; document-domain 'none'; encrypted-media 'none'; execution-while-not-rendered 'none'; execution-while-out-of-viewport 'none'; gamepad 'none'; geolocation 'none'; gyroscope 'none'; hid 'none'; identity-credentials-get 'none'; idle-detection 'none'; keyboard-map 'none'; local-fonts 'none'; magnetometer 'none'; microphone 'none'; midi 'none'; navigation-override 'none'; otp-credentials 'none'; payment 'none'; picture-in-picture 'none'; publickey-credentials-create 'none'; publickey-credentials-get 'none'; screen-wake-lock 'none'; serial 'none'; speaker-selection 'none'; sync-xhr 'none'; usb 'none'; web-share 'none'; window-management 'none'; xr-spatial-tracking 'none'\" csp=\"sandbox allow-scripts allow-same-origin;\" src=\"https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/LIbKL3pQYcI\" frameborder=\"0\" loading=\"lazy\"></iframe>\n  <figcaption class=\"caption video-caption video-caption-youtube\">\n    <p>Echos de la Commune libre de Barbacha.</p>\n  </figcaption>\n</figure>\n\n<p>Barbacha—<em>Iberbacen</em> in Tamazight, the Berber language—is a region in Little Kabylia, Algeria, self-managed by its inhabitants since the end of 2012. “Barbacha is just a small hamlet left aside from all the treasures of Algeria,” says Da Taïeb, an elder of the Commune. “It’s a poor region located in a mountainous area. We have no trails or roads.”</p>\n\n<p>As in other regions, the peasants and workers of Barbacha fight day by day to live a dignified life confronted with all the forms of exploitation and oppression imposed by the State and capitalism. But in Barbacha, something else has also created itself. The 27,000 residents of these 34 villages comprising the population of Iberbacen, effectively self-organized through the Open General Assembly (OGA), established a collectively-occupied building. “In Barbacha, we have created this house to protest against the system that crushes us endlessly. The system that governs us right now is rotten,” says Da Taïeb. He and a few others welcomed us in February 2014 with their story and showed us their archives.</p>\n\n<p>Here are a few sketches of these roads drawn by the people of Barbacha—paths for all those who are fighting for emancipation all over the world.</p>\n\n<h2 id=\"a-tradition-of-insubordination-and-autonomy\"><a href=\"#a-tradition-of-insubordination-and-autonomy\"></a>A Tradition of Insubordination and Autonomy</h2>\n\n<p>The region of Barbacha has been a site of Berber resistance against all colonization as well as a place of continuous battles for Tamazight culture and language. This has been imbedded in the long history of the struggles of the Kabyle people for autonomy and independence. The region cultivates this with the methods of practicing mutual aid and solidarity, insubordination and insurrection that are passed down from generation to generation. “It’s a movement that was born in 1979. And this fight for culture, for language, for everything, continues. Because we are not [yet] independent!” says Da Elhamid, a welder in central Barbacha.</p>\n\n<p>Like most parts of Kabylia, the region revolted in 2001. Among what was obtained were cultural rights, and those revolts allowed the inhabitants to eliminate numerous police stations and <em>gendarmeries</em><sup id=\"fnref:2\"><a href=\"#fn:2\" class=\"footnote\" rel=\"footnote\" role=\"doc-noteref\">2</a></sup> which were opposed to all forms of struggle and any autonomous social life.</p>\n\n<p>On top of the harassment, the racketeering and the systematic brutalities, the Algerian State for a long time applied a strategy of tension based on murder and civilian abductions as a form of permanent counter-insurrection. Faced with an exceptional regime, the people did not give in. In 2001, they expelled the police and military forces in the Barbacha region and burned down their buildings. Mabrouk, an English teacher in the commune, explained that the population was doing without security services for thirteen years: no gendarmerie, no police. During those thirteen years, no crimes or infractions were committed.</p>\n\n<figure class=\"\">\n<img src=\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/11/02/2.jpg\" />   <figcaption>\n    <p>Mabrouk, an English teacher.</p>\n  </figcaption>\n</figure>\n\n<p>Amazigh, a youth from the region, has determined that the gendarmerie “is of no use. On the contrary, it oppresses. It’s not there for our security. For twelve years, we organized ourselves in village committees. Each village assures its security by its own residents.” It is in this collective self-defense experiment that new forms of communal self-organization have been created. Mabrouk further explains, “We organized ourselves. Each village has someone responsible. And the people of these villages organize together. If there is an enemy that wishes to enter, we create a security post at night and we organize with everyone to help in teams.” He goes on to explain that after four years, people got in the habit of living without these security teams. “But as soon as there’s a problem, everyone will come together and organize and fight.” In Barbacha, there are not even State-run courts: justice is rendered on the traditional model of the <em>aarchs,</em> the councils of the wise.</p>\n\n<h2 id=\"the-shutdown-of-the-daira3-and-its-replacement-by-the-open-general-assembly\"><a href=\"#the-shutdown-of-the-daira3-and-its-replacement-by-the-open-general-assembly\"></a>The Shutdown of the <em>Daïra</em><sup id=\"fnref:3\"><a href=\"#fn:3\" class=\"footnote\" rel=\"footnote\" role=\"doc-noteref\">3</a></sup> and Its Replacement by the Open General Assembly</h2>\n\n<p>The direct conflict with the Algerian State and its structures grew even more divisive during the preparation of the municipal elections of November 2012. During this time, the <em>Wali</em> (governor) Hemmou Hmed Et-Touhami actually refused to register the PST,<sup id=\"fnref:4\"><a href=\"#fn:4\" class=\"footnote\" rel=\"footnote\" role=\"doc-noteref\">4</a></sup> largely supported by the residents of Barbacha. They decided to fight so that the PST could be registered. And they won this cause. In the elections of November 29, the PST finally got 39% of the vote, with six out of fifteen elected. Clearly their list is the majority.</p>\n\n<p>Except that the four other parties on the list formed an alliance to impose another mayor, Benmeddour Mahmoud, of the RCD. And this occurred despite the existence of a law declaring that a list that has obtained 35% of the vote can nominate the new mayor. The election was held even without the PST member list present, who had not even been notified of this. This <em>“shameful alliance,”</em> as Barbacha’s residents called it, united the RCD,<sup id=\"fnref:5\"><a href=\"#fn:5\" class=\"footnote\" rel=\"footnote\" role=\"doc-noteref\">5</a></sup> the FLN,<sup id=\"fnref:6\"><a href=\"#fn:6\" class=\"footnote\" rel=\"footnote\" role=\"doc-noteref\">6</a></sup> and the FFS,<sup id=\"fnref:7\"><a href=\"#fn:7\" class=\"footnote\" rel=\"footnote\" role=\"doc-noteref\">7</a></sup> parties initially opposed to one another, in their struggle for state power.</p>\n\n<p>The population of Barbacha rose up against this manipulation. They closed the <em>Daïra,</em> then city hall, and collectively requisitioned the local village hall in order to create the <em>Axxam n Caâb</em><sup id=\"fnref:8\"><a href=\"#fn:8\" class=\"footnote\" rel=\"footnote\" role=\"doc-noteref\">8</a></sup>—the House of the People—where, since then, the Open General Assembly (OGA) of Barbacha’s villages meet. A banner hangs there: <em>“Long live the struggle, for only struggle pays off.”</em></p>\n\n<p>Within this assembly, only alcohol, drugs, and “lack of respect” are prohibited by collective decision. Da Taïeb explains how it operates: “As soon as there is a problem, we meet, we make decisions; our words matter. This is our strength, the law of the people. […] This house, we acquired it with our collective power. No one can shut it down, and here we speak of whatever we wish to speak of, we say whatever we want. Letting anyone step on our toes is out of the question.” The welder Da Elhamid adds, “Everyone has the right to speak. And the people there are there as volunteers. That is democracy, true democracy, because it comes from the people. […] We organize ourselves for marches, for contributions, for everything, everything, everything. We must always fight.”</p>\n\n<figure class=\"\">\n<img src=\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/11/02/3.jpg\" />   <figcaption>\n    <p>Da Taïeb.</p>\n  </figcaption>\n</figure>\n\n<p>Mabrouk, the English teacher in his thirties, specifies that, “We fight against corruption, for the dignity of the people.” Faced with the “power of the State” which describes them as “a mafia of young people who spend their nights in a house,” Mabrouk states that the people that come to the <em>Axxam n Caâb</em> are “the peasants, the intellectuals, the artists.” “It is a place of one hundred percent freedom: there are no currents, neither religious nor political, inside this house; there are no ideas of the PST or any alliances with the FFS, only the ideas of the peasants and the inhabitants.”</p>\n\n<p>After each assembly, someone is in charge of writing a communiqué that is dispatched to prisons, to citizens, and posted on all the walls of the commune. It is even sent to the security services, “Because we don’t do this behind closed doors!” says Mabrouk.</p>\n\n<p>An excerpt of the very first bulletin of the OGA, broadcasted and posted in the villages of the commune states:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n  <p><em>“We citizens, the men and women of the Commune of Barbacha, organized as an Open General Assembly, strongly reaffirm our rejection of Daho Ould Kablia’s<sup id=\"fnref:9\"><a href=\"#fn:9\" class=\"footnote\" rel=\"footnote\" role=\"doc-noteref\">9</a></sup> instruction which opens the path to clientelism, and we consider the installation of the pseudo-mayor by decree of the Wali of Bgayet (Prefect of Béjaïa) dated December 17, 2012, to be annulled and invalidated. […] Furthermore, we hold the public powers and those elected in the so-called coalition responsible for the decay of this situation (blockading the Daïra and city hall, the treatment of communal workers, etc.). We reserve the right to create large-scale actions. […] LONG LIVE THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE! STAY IN SOLIDARITY! LONG LIVE THE STRUGGLE!”</em></p>\n\n  <p>-Communiqué No. 1 of the Open General Assembly of the Residents of Iberbacen, December 26, 2012.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>Little by little, the Open General Assembly of the residents of Barbacha has replaced the centralized and authoritarian management of city hall. At first limiting itself to the struggle against the State, it extends itself, little by little, to different domains of collective life. A path to the basics has anchored in a unique history.</p>\n\n<h2 id=\"the-autonomy-of-struggle-and-the-struggle-for-autonomy\"><a href=\"#the-autonomy-of-struggle-and-the-struggle-for-autonomy\"></a>The Autonomy of Struggle and the Struggle for Autonomy</h2>\n\n<p>It’s in this battle against the installation of a fraudulent mayor by the State and the big political parties that the Commune of Barbacha creates self-organization. While the swindler mayor tries to settle in the PCA (the People’s Communal Assembly, <em>Assemblée populaire communale,</em> or “city hall”), accompanied by an attorney general, a crowd assembles a first time to prevent access. Resolutely determined to solve the problem, the residents decide to block all access to city hall. Hundreds of them, including activists from the FFS and the RCD, in disagreement with the elected parties, mobilize day and night, occupying and blocking all municipal services (the registry office, etc.) and prohibit the slightest meeting of these elected puppets.</p>\n\n<p>“The interests of the Commune, which is in a state of stagnation, come before all other interests, and our interest today is to place Barbacha back on track; this can only happen by the resignation of all elected officials,” announces the second Communiqué of the OGA (December 30, 2012). Communiqué No. 3 points out the strategies of rottenness exercised by the State against the population to create divisions among those mobilized against them. This text calls for the dissolution of the PCA, the nomination of a temporary leader of the <em>Daïra</em> to manage administrative affairs, and a rally for January 5 at the headquarters of the <em>Wilayah</em> of Béjaïa. The assembly signed off, “To the peoples and populations of the world fighting for real sovereignty: may the year 2013 be a good and happy one of solidarity struggles and all that can be gained from them!”</p>\n\n<p>To get to Béjaïa from Barbacha, it’s about 40 kilometers (25 miles). Not exactly next door. The demonstration of January 5, 2013 nevertheless unites over a thousand people. The protestors block the main road leading to Béjaïa to demand the organization of new elections. This demonstration marks the effective involvement of the residents of other communes in other <em>Wilayahs.</em> A solidarity even more valuable emerges knowing that legal proceedings would be charged against militants accused of blocking city hall.</p>\n\n<p>Communiqué No. 4 shows that in the space of autonomous struggles, there emerge new forms of collective organization:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n  <p>“In detailing its durations of battles, the General Assembly (GA) made the following propositions:</p>\n\n  <ul>\n    <li>\n      <p>The reinforcement of its self-organization by the integration of more delegates and volunteers of all villages by their distribution into commissions according to the tasks it has accomplished and the demands to stop and take charge;<sup id=\"fnref:10\"><a href=\"#fn:10\" class=\"footnote\" rel=\"footnote\" role=\"doc-noteref\">10</a></sup></p>\n    </li>\n    <li>\n      <p>An improved organization of volunteer actions concerning vigilance and security as well as trash collection, particularly around Suq n Tlata;</p>\n    </li>\n    <li>\n      <p>Taking charge of repairs in different sectors: the supply of drinking water, sanitation, public lighting, etc.;</p>\n    </li>\n    <li>\n      <p>Scientific and cultural activity in organizing nightly festivities after the GA’s tasks are completed;</p>\n    </li>\n    <li>\n      <p>Quarantining those elected by the shameful alliance, requiring that they resign within 24 hours, the denunciation of their sponsors and support as well as all participants in the various attempts at manipulation in the instrumentalization and intimidation of high school (and other) students and communal workers;</p>\n    </li>\n    <li>\n      <p>The construction of a general strike and other large-scale actions.”</p>\n    </li>\n  </ul>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>Therefore, the General Assembly is not just an organization for struggle and resistance. It has become an everyday meeting place and takes charge of various aspects in the maintenance of the commune: trash collection, the distribution of fuel for schools, cleaning, etc. Mabrouk spoke also about how the employees of the People’s Communal Assembly (PCA) hadn’t been paid in four months: “These are people who have four, five, or six children. In order to take care of them these past four months, we organized together to find money and food, to respond to their needs… In addition, we help the sick who may be in need of passports to travel to France or Belgium for healthcare, and we take care of that for them. We also do the same for the maintenance of schools, supplying them with fuel and supplying their cafeterias.” Some business owners and residents even contributed to finance certain projects. Mabrouk recounts: “This is how we’ve worked from then until today. We have assemblies all the time, we work in solidarity. We want a PCA of the people, not a PCA of power.”</p>\n\n<p>This collective handling of the organization of the commune leads to a form of revolutionary radicalism. In its “Open Letter to Everyone” dated January 22, 2013, the OGA announces:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n  <p>“We will spare no effort to build any bridges necessary to expand our movement to all the Algerian people for a genuine emancipatory social revolution to federate our multiple discontents, oh so legitimate, and all of our actions. In Sidi Buzid, it was a suicide. In Barbacha, it was a ray of hope that shined through.”</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>January 26, 2013: the six legitimately elected members of the PST and the NRD (<em>Rassemblement national démocratique</em><sup id=\"fnref:11\"><a href=\"#fn:11\" class=\"footnote\" rel=\"footnote\" role=\"doc-noteref\">11</a></sup>) resigned and gave their power of attorney to the Assembly to move toward the dissolution of the PCA and to provoke new elections. The Assembly also decided to demand the resignation of the entire prefecture. In its Communiqué No. 6 of January 29, 2013, it calls on the entire population of Barbacha and “every person convinced of the justness of our battle, wherever they may be” to stage a general strike on commune territory on January 31, with “the shutdown of all access from midnight to 4 pm.” The communiqué ends, <em>“Long live the people, organized and conscious. Long live the people’s solidarity. We are moving forward.”</em></p>\n\n<p>But on January 30, the FLN building is burned down. Claiming their strategy to be “peaceful,” the OGA condemns this action which it sees as provocation from the State to justify its repression. Communiqué No. 7 of January 30, 2013 proclaims:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n  <p>“We are telling all Hamhamists,<sup id=\"fnref:12\"><a href=\"#fn:12\" class=\"footnote\" rel=\"footnote\" role=\"doc-noteref\">12</a></sup> enemies of the people at the bottom of society, that these kinds of acts will only reinforce our determination to fight you, you and your sponsors, until victory. Our battle is neither tribal nor individualistic. It is a real class struggle that started in Barbacha. It is the will of the people against the will of bourgeois and mafia power that, instead of serving the people at the bottom of society, offer themselves as servants to global and imperialist capitalism.”</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>The exceptional regime applied for so long in Kabylia and the regimes of repressive terror deployed during the Berber Springs and the 1990’s both left permanent scars on the relationships in Algerians’ movements regarding the use of violence. In Barbacha, the majority of the population—which participated in the burning down of a police station thirteen years earlier [in 2001]—seems to prefer occupations and blockades of buildings, roads, or towns as well as mass marches and general strikes. But in the debate between the residents (which we attended), the partisans of armed insurrection, although in a minority, are not stigmatized or cast aside; they are respected in their perspectives and are integrated into the struggle. It seems there is a predominant will to minimize employing acts of violence the more co-opted they can be by power and the more useful they could be to justify the remilitarization of the territory, while completely undertaking all forms of offensive direct action when the situation necessitates it. For example, a young anarchist in Barbacha who is very involved in the Assembly prefers what he calls “nonviolence,” and says, “even in my interventions within the movement, I defend the idea of sometimes utilizing violence, such as, for example, burning the ballots next April 17 [the date of the presidential elections]. I see all the psychological scars of past movements, like the events of 2001. Just seeing a gendarme makes us want to burn everything down.” In Barbacha, these debates seem to uplift the movement rather than dividing it.</p>\n\n<p>The general strike of January 31, 2013 is a success. During the popular meeting at the end of the day, much of the population decides to organize a march and then a sit-in in front of the <em>Wilayah</em> of Béjaïa on February 3. The OGA adds “a more radical action, namely the blocking of street traffic access to both entrances of Béjaïa.” Both of these actions are massively implemented, but they don’t suffice for the Prefecture to give in. In Communiqué No. 9 of February 4, 2013, the Assembly speaks of the risk of a “fratricidal bloodbath among Barbacha residents” if the demands of the population are not met. Faced with the “masquerades” of a power that’s attempting to criminalize them, they become from then on an organ of people’s self-management.</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n  <p>“Our movement is jealous of its own independence. It is above all parties and all partisan logic. We pronounce our decisions in total democracy (direct, we should say) in an Open General Assembly that we have adopted as a popular commitment to our conscious organization. […] We forbid you to judge our method of struggle. We have already declared that we have passed the stage of rioting. Our movement is highly peaceful and of an exemplary maturity.”</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>On February 11, the minority opponents of the OGA try again to enter the PCA to reinstall the “Mafioso” mayor, but they are stopped by the local population blocking access to city hall. In response, the Assembly calls for a new gathering in front of the <em>Wilayah</em> on February 17. The <em>Wilayah</em>’s administrator agrees to meet with the representatives of the OGA and the PST. During this meeting, the decision is made to reopen the <em>Daïra,</em> but without its official leader, and confer limited administrative powers to the General Secretary of the <em>Daïra,</em> Toufik Adnane. He is in charge of the Assembly’s management of the “current affairs of the commune,” meaning mainly administrative records, the payment of municipal employees as well as the deliverance of birth and death certificates (which the population needs to proclaim its rights). In consequence, the representatives of the OGA decide to cancel the rally scheduled for February 17. But they plan a new “peaceful” march and encampment in front of the <em>Wilayah</em>’s headquarters on March 24.</p>\n\n<p>That Sunday, March 24, marks a turning point. Faced with 2000 demonstrators blocking the headquarters of the <em>Wilayah</em> of Béjaïa, the <em>Wali</em> calls on riot police who intervene with extreme brutality, injuring many people—one young demonstrator even has both legs broken.</p>\n\n<p>Twenty-four people are arrested, including Sadeq Akrour, the PST mayor, who is released—with bandages around his head from the beatings—after 24 hours from the pressure and acclamations of hundreds of people that came to wait for his release. On March 25, the OGA announces a new general strike in Barbacha to pick up the comrades that were arrested the day before in Béjaïa.</p>\n\n<p>Emotions run high in Kabylia as they do in the entire country. Especially since during this time news has spread of the government’s use of police force against the demonstrations of unemployed workers in the south. “This is how, while struggling for the unconditional liberation of our six comrades under judicial control, it is now more urgent than ever to find new methods of struggle in order to prevail with the success of the so-called principal demands,” states Communiqué No. 20 of March 26.</p>\n\n<p>The mobilization does not weaken. On Sunday, March 31, hundreds of Barbacha’s residents demonstrate again in front of the court of Béjaïa where six of their own are scheduled to appear for a hearing. They demand all legal proceedings be suspended. They also announce national actions for upcoming days to impose the dissolution of the municipal council and to demand new elections. The OGA calls for a general strike in Barbacha and a gathering in front of Béjaïa’s courthouse on April 9, the trial date of the 24 arrested. More than a thousand demonstrators rally in front of the court to protest and the general strike is massively undertaken.</p>\n\n<figure class=\"\">\n<img src=\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/11/02/8.jpg\" />   <figcaption>\n    <p>Axxam n Caâb, House of the People, Barbacha, February 2014. The banner reads, “Long live the struggle for only struggle pays off.”</p>\n  </figcaption>\n</figure>\n\n<p>All this pushes the population to further develop methods of self-organization. Communiqué No. 23 of April 11, 2013 states:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n  <p>“The path is still long and difficult. Therefore, the reinforcement of the self-organization of the population must be our permanent task: it is necessary to strengthen the current village committees and create new ones in villages and neighborhoods not yet organized. Because the relative return of the maintenance of the Daïra and City Hall constitutes an important step in our fight, the real development of our Commune must be our strategic objective. […] These are our true battles: the Buâmran mine, the mini-dams, town fuel resources, the high school, the CEM of Tibkirt, RN 75, <sup id=\"fnref:13\"><a href=\"#fn:13\" class=\"footnote\" rel=\"footnote\" role=\"doc-noteref\">13</a></sup> the Commune’s and Wilayah’s roads, telephone and internet services, machines, agriculture and forestry, youth and leisure, etc. A true synergy of the people at the bottom of society is more than indispensable to move forward and succeed with this project.”</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>April 19 and 20, 2013, the Assembly is in charge of organizing the festivities commemorating the Berber Springs of 1981 and 2001. It is in this context that the idea emerges and gains momentum that a people’s assembly is the best and most legitimate means to solve the problems of the inhabitants and collectively improve their lives. In their Communiqué No. 26 of May 2013, the OGA states that it’s convinced that the nomination of the General Secretary to manage the <em>Daïra</em> does not bring desired solutions for the population. The Assembly also denounces “all tentative desire to rehabilitate the mayor of the alliance and his team in order to put them in command of our glorious commune.” Rightfully, on May 22, Mohamed Benmeddour, his team, and the members of the “alliance” tried once again to enter city hall. But they were again pushed out by the crowd. However, the Assembly decided in favor of a concession: the reopening of city hall. This is as much about managing “current affairs” as much as it is of “the critics.”</p>\n\n<p>During the summer, the <em>Wilayah</em> blocks all power of signature from the General Secretary—the only finances it leaves at his disposable are for “a closure,” destined to protect the <em>Daïra</em> as well as the means to reinstall the gendarmerie. The General Assembly challenges the unwillingness of the <em>Wilayah,</em> stressing the fact that the population has accepted making concessions (notably, the reopening of city hall). In the “Appeal of September 21,” the OGA thus denounces: the reduction of communal services to a strict minimum; the fact that communal workers were receiving their payments bit by bit, and, if they’re lucky enough to receive them, months late; the refusal of the <em>Wilayah</em> to approve the budget of 2013 (which stifles the communal treasury); the shutdown of all construction sites, especially of the local high school; the end of the school bus service (the bus drivers have not been paid and neither have any of the suppliers for the school’s cafeteria) and the “squatting of the local commune by the gendarmerie.”</p>\n\n<p>Finally, after a long wait, on October 1, the General Secretary is authorized by the Minister of Interior to divide the budget and pay the commune’s employees. But during the entire fall of 2013, the “shameful alliance” tries many times to get back into city hall. Each time, the people of Barbacha, united and determined, prevent them. To present their discontent about the installation of the mayor, a large popular meeting is organized on November 29, 2013. A thousand residents participated, voting by a show of hands against the shameful alliance. “Of the more than one thousand people responding to our call, only three hands were raised (one ironically) in approval of the installation of the infamous mayor of the RCD-FLN-FFS shameful alliance, Mohammed ‘Mahmoud’ Benmeddour, whom we had generously invited to speak. It was an authentic referendum worthy of a real people’s direct democracy, unknown anywhere else,” stated Communiqué No. 32 of December 6, 2013.</p>\n\n<p>The struggle doesn’t budge. However, the demands directed to the State and public powers for the shutting down of judiciary pursuits, the dissolution of the PCA, and the funds destined to develop the commune are all unsuccessful. More radical perspectives emerge among the population.</p>\n\n<figure class=\"\">\n<img src=\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/11/02/4.jpg\" />   <figcaption>\n    <p>Da Elhamid.</p>\n  </figcaption>\n</figure>\n\n<h2 id=\"and-what-if-the-peoples-assembly-completely-replaced-city-hall\"><a href=\"#and-what-if-the-peoples-assembly-completely-replaced-city-hall\"></a>And What if the People’s Assembly Completely Replaced City Hall?</h2>\n\n<p>The battle for new elections and to establish a “legitimate” city hall comes with numerous concessions. It begins with the return of the gendarmerie, although it would be kept out of the commune and will avoid all conflict. Mabrouk says that the State justifies the reinstallation of the gendarmerie as a measure to protect the population against “terrorism.” Additionally, Da Elhamid tells us that not very long ago, the gendarmes would have arrested us for having our discussion. “Nothing has changed, it’s still the same system. Because even the gendarmes [might as well be] colonial gendarmes,” he says.</p>\n\n<p>The reinstallation of the gendarmerie is not the only concession. The residents that are in favor of having new elections plan also to give the House of the People back to the PCA as a measure of goodwill. This is summarized in Communiqué No. 30:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n  <p>“If the logic of appeasement and advancement moves toward the final unblocking of this conflict, and the return of the meeting place (the Axxam n Caâb) to the Commune (nobody questions its character as a communal good) can help reinforce this dynamic, we are ready for this. However, the public powers must know that it’s because of this meeting place that the movement has remained peaceful and refined in wise judgment. In any case, the General Secretary was allowed to use it whenever the necessity arose. By default, each one of us will assume responsibilities. […] We are neither terrorists nor are we cowards. We are the planners of adventures and are consciously organized with the single goal of allowing our commune to have its part in development and that our proud people have the means to assume their full duty to contribute to the veritable liberation of our dear country, Algeria, and so that it can contribute to the construction of a universal project that can liberate all of humanity.”</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>A city hall, even if it’s far-left and sincerely engaged with its residents, cannot do anything that can radically change the lives of people. It would remain a manager, a hierarchy, a link in the network of the powers of the state and capital. It may represent the people, but it is not the people. Mayor Saddek Akrour summarized the role attributed by the state to the PST while in office during the preceding mandate: “We suddenly found ourselves in a feedback loop of public finances between oil profits and private enterprises.”<sup id=\"fnref:14\"><a href=\"#fn:14\" class=\"footnote\" rel=\"footnote\" role=\"doc-noteref\">14</a></sup> In this context, and since the basic demands for the economic development of the commune were not carried out, a growing number of the residents are conscious of the fact that the Assembly should not just be reduced to a tool only for struggle, but that it could become a structure of political, economic, and permanent social self-organization.</p>\n\n<p>By the end of the month of December 2013, the state still had not satisfied the demands that the OGA had presented in exchange for the return of the leader of the <em>Daïra.</em> Those in the camp that think that the People’s Assembly should completely replace all forms of State power are again reassured. Da Taïeb, whom we meet in February 2014, sums up his strategy. “We have to completely destroy the Algerian system. It’s not just about Bouteflika,<sup id=\"fnref:15\"><a href=\"#fn:15\" class=\"footnote\" rel=\"footnote\" role=\"doc-noteref\">15</a></sup> his ministers or his <em>walis</em>: the state must be completely destroyed. Only generals live well in Algeria, the people have nothing. Rich state, poor people! This is why the people revolt. To take back our rights. Because there is a way! This is <em>hoggra.</em><sup id=\"fnref:16\"><a href=\"#fn:16\" class=\"footnote\" rel=\"footnote\" role=\"doc-noteref\">16</a></sup> Look! A Member of Parliament gets 35 million dinars per month or more, plus an international passport, while any other employee in the commune makes only 15,000 dinars! […] We are protestors and we wish for other marginalized people like us come to our aid, that we all unite, that we help one another.”</p>\n\n<p>He is interrupted by a friend, “What interests us is not the elections, but in assembling together […] to struggle against this system.”</p>\n\n<p>The reflection on the elections and the political parties has effectively evolved amongst the residents of Barbacha who have invented a way to manage themselves and their own lives. The position of the welder we met is clear: “The political parties, I don’t like them. Because with parties, you raise a person up, and once they’re at the top, ‘the king is dead, long live the king’—it’s always been like that. Because I have spent a long time in political parties, they don’t interest me anymore. Because as soon as someone is at the top as a Member of Parliament or a mayor, once he goes up, that’s it, you never hear from him again, and then the day he needs the people, he comes back, he whines. ‘We’re going to do this, we’re going to do that…’ and at the end there’s nothing. These people are only interested in power and money.”</p>\n\n<p>Confronting the state and capitalism that are ravaging its territory and very existence, the people of Barbacha lead a continuous struggle for a dignified life. Through the practices of mutual aid and collective resistance, they invent an emancipated society on an everyday basis. Like others before them, notably in Chiapas, they do not attempt to take state power but to dissolve it, along with capitalism, via federated self-organization in communes. Like the Zapatistas, they know that solidarity is a weapon when coordinated struggles come together.</p>\n\n<p>This is the welder’s conclusion: “We have to fight where we are. If everybody fights together, in France, in Morocco, here… we can improve things.” And as the elderly Da Taïeb tells us, “Alone, the residents of Barbacha won’t be able to throw this out. So we are trying to create a great movement, a bulldozer, to destroy it.”</p>\n\n<h1 id=\"further-reading\"><a href=\"#further-reading\"></a>Further Reading</h1>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.eco-action.org/dod/no10/kabylia.htm\">“Carry on Kabylia!”</a>—An article about the 2001 uprising from the eco-defense journal <a href=\"http://www.eco-action.org/dod/index.html\"><em>Do or Die</em></a></p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.azinelibrary.org/zines/You-Cannot-Kill-Us-We-Are-Already-Dead\">“You Can’t Kill Us—We Are Already Dead”</a>—A zine about the 2001 uprising</p>\n\n<div class=\"footnotes\" role=\"doc-endnotes\">\n  <ol>\n    <li id=\"fn:1\">\n      <p>European supporters of and participants in the Algerian Revolution were referred to later as <em>pieds-rouges.</em> <a href=\"#fnref:1\" class=\"reversefootnote\" role=\"doc-backlink\">&#8617;</a></p>\n    </li>\n    <li id=\"fn:2\">\n      <p>Generally unknown in English-speaking countries, a “gendarmerie” is a French word (and French invention) for a military police force involved in the law enforcement of rural regions. In Algeria, they are substantially militarized and brutal, thus particularly despised. <em>—Trans.</em> <a href=\"#fnref:2\" class=\"reversefootnote\" role=\"doc-backlink\">&#8617;</a></p>\n    </li>\n    <li id=\"fn:3\">\n      <p>Subdivision of a Wilayah (prefecture), that is to say, a sub-prefecture. [A Wilayah (an Arabic word) might be better understood in English as “region,” “province,” “county,” etc. A Daïra, unique to Algeria and the Western Sahara, can be best translated as “district.” —Trans.] <a href=\"#fnref:3\" class=\"reversefootnote\" role=\"doc-backlink\">&#8617;</a></p>\n    </li>\n    <li id=\"fn:4\">\n      <p>PST: <em>Parti Socialiste des Travailleurs</em> (Socialist Workers Party), an anticapitalist and internationalist party founded in 1989, a member of the Fourth International. <a href=\"#fnref:4\" class=\"reversefootnote\" role=\"doc-backlink\">&#8617;</a></p>\n    </li>\n    <li id=\"fn:5\">\n      <p>RCD: <em>Rassemblement pour la Culture et la Démocratie</em> (Rally for Culture and Democracy), social democratic party created in 1989 founded after the formation of the <em>Mouvement culturel berbère.</em> <a href=\"#fnref:5\" class=\"reversefootnote\" role=\"doc-backlink\">&#8617;</a></p>\n    </li>\n    <li id=\"fn:6\">\n      <p>FLN: <em>Front de Libération Nationale</em> (National Liberation Front), current party of the State under the ruling military junta. <a href=\"#fnref:6\" class=\"reversefootnote\" role=\"doc-backlink\">&#8617;</a></p>\n    </li>\n    <li id=\"fn:7\">\n      <p>FFS: <em>Front des Forces Socialistes</em> (Socialist Forces Front), social democratic party founded in 1963. <a href=\"#fnref:7\" class=\"reversefootnote\" role=\"doc-backlink\">&#8617;</a></p>\n    </li>\n    <li id=\"fn:8\">\n      <p><em>Axxam n Caâb:</em> this is Tamazight, not Arabic. <em>—Trans.</em> <a href=\"#fnref:8\" class=\"reversefootnote\" role=\"doc-backlink\">&#8617;</a></p>\n    </li>\n    <li id=\"fn:9\">\n      <p>Daho Ould Kablia (born 1933), former Interior Minister of Algeria in charge of Algeria’s gendarmerie, among other bureaucratic affairs. <em>—Trans.</em> <a href=\"#fnref:9\" class=\"reversefootnote\" role=\"doc-backlink\">&#8617;</a></p>\n    </li>\n    <li id=\"fn:10\">\n      <p>This peculiar phrasing at the end of the sentence is in the original French. <em>—Trans.</em> <a href=\"#fnref:10\" class=\"reversefootnote\" role=\"doc-backlink\">&#8617;</a></p>\n    </li>\n    <li id=\"fn:11\">\n      <p>National Rally for Democracy, liberal party founded in 1997. <em>—Trans.</em> <a href=\"#fnref:11\" class=\"reversefootnote\" role=\"doc-backlink\">&#8617;</a></p>\n    </li>\n    <li id=\"fn:12\">\n      <p>Opportunists that only act to fill their bellies. <a href=\"#fnref:12\" class=\"reversefootnote\" role=\"doc-backlink\">&#8617;</a></p>\n    </li>\n    <li id=\"fn:13\">\n      <p>RN: <em>Route National.</em> A highway. <em>—Trans.</em> <a href=\"#fnref:13\" class=\"reversefootnote\" role=\"doc-backlink\">&#8617;</a></p>\n    </li>\n    <li id=\"fn:14\">\n      <p>Interview in Paris, 2008. <a href=\"#fnref:14\" class=\"reversefootnote\" role=\"doc-backlink\">&#8617;</a></p>\n    </li>\n    <li id=\"fn:15\">\n      <p>Abdelaziz Bouteflika, current President of Algeria, in power since 1999. <em>—Trans.</em> <a href=\"#fnref:15\" class=\"reversefootnote\" role=\"doc-backlink\">&#8617;</a></p>\n    </li>\n    <li id=\"fn:16\">\n      <p>In the Algerian Arabic dialect, the word <em>hoggra</em> (also spelled <em>hogra</em>), often translated as “oppression,” means having one’s rights denied to them, being cheated, exploited, humiliated, or scammed by a ruler, authority figure, or government. The term was used frequently during the Arab Spring in Algeria. One conducting <em>hoggra</em> is known as a <em>haggar.</em> <em>—Trans.</em> <a href=\"#fnref:16\" class=\"reversefootnote\" role=\"doc-backlink\">&#8617;</a></p>\n    </li>\n  </ol>\n</div>\n"
    },
    {
      "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2017/08/10/anarchistgeography",
      "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2017/08/10/anarchistgeography",
      "title": "“We Are the Inferno” : A Conversation on the Anarchist Roots of Geography",
      "summary": "Alexander Reid Ross interviews Simon Springer, author of The Anarchist Roots of Geography: Toward Spatial Emancipation, who argues that a true radical geography must oppose the state.",
      "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/08/10/header.jpg",
      "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/08/10/header.jpg",
      "date_published": "2017-08-10T12:30:00Z",
      "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:34Z",
      "tags": [],
      "content_html": "<p>In the 1970s, radical geographers expanded the discipline to study the interplay between spaces and social relations, focusing on the spatial dimensions of inequality and oppression. Since then, the radical geography has come to encompass a wide range of tools—yet Marxism remains the most common framework. In this conversation between scholars in the field, Alexander Reid Ross interviews Simon Springer, author of <a href=\"https://muse.jhu.edu/book/46544\"><em>The Anarchist Roots of Geography: Toward Spatial Emancipation,</em></a> who argues that a truly radical geography must oppose the state and all notions of command and control.</p>\n\n<figure class=\"portrait\">\n<img src=\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/08/10/5.jpg\" />\n</figure>\n\n<p><strong>Alexander Reid Ross:</strong> Your book, <em>The Anarchist Roots of Geography: Toward Spatial Emancipation,</em> transgresses traditional concepts of geographic space and time by introducing the effects of communications technology, as well as grassroots networks based on issues rather than location. However, you do not go so far as to rule out place-specific identity as hegemonic and formidable in one way or another. In this precarious balance (or rather struggle) between relational geography in time and place, can you elaborate on the dynamics of rural and urban today? What would you envision for the future?</p>\n\n<p><strong>Simon Springer:</strong> There is no real separation between urban and rural. To put it bluntly, this is a false dichotomy that is read onto the world rather than being a reflection of anything intrinsic to the organization of human beings on the planet. We are told we are living in the age of urbanism, and this is true to an extent. More and more people are living in cities. But to suggest that this means that there is some sort of firm division of the so-called urban from the so-called rural is problematic because the wealth and so-called prosperity of urban locales is almost entirely reliant upon the rural frame. While we are witnessing more intense forms of financialization and knowledge-based economies, the accumulation of capital still primarily functions as a form of <a href=\"http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/What-Will-It-Take-to-Go-Beyond-Extractivism-20141029-0049.html\">extractivism</a>. The hardware that enables the circuits of financial capital to flow is still very much material and there seems to be an insatiable appetite for more gadgets to keep this network buzzing in cities, which represent the heart of this system. What this means is that the control and plundering of resources matters very significantly to the viability of the urban sphere. In terms of relations of solidarity, there is much to be said here, too. Urban peoples can’t afford to ignore the kinds of violence that are being meted out against rural peoples, primarily in the form of forced eviction and land grabbing, because this malevolence always comes home to roost. In Cambodia, where I have done most of my empirical work, this “payback” is often in the form of migration to the city. People rendered landless through the onslaught of capitalism’s soldiers of fortune have nowhere else to go, so they flee, making their way to cities in an attempt to find employment. Owing to a variety of bureaucratic roadblocks that prevent them from working in the formal sector, most often people end up begging on the streets. Fearmongering and the criminalization of homeless people perpetuates this cycle of violence, where for nearly a decade now Cambodia has been arbitrarily detaining street-engaged peoples in what municipal authorities euphemistically refer to as “re-education” or “opportunity” centers. The rhetoric doesn’t match the reality, and having seen firsthand the conditions that people are exposed to, what we are really dealing with are contemporary concentration camps. So the preferred solution for dispossession is effectively <a href=\"https://www.researchgate.net/publication/270764113_Homelessness_in_Cambodia_the_terror_of_gentrification\">internment</a>.</p>\n\n<figure class=\"\">\n<img src=\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/08/10/6.jpg\" />   <figcaption>\n    <p>Cambodian villagers involved in a land dispute, held in a detention center in Phnom Penh.</p>\n  </figcaption>\n</figure>\n\n<p>If the level of violence at a structural level wasn’t already enough to make your head spin, at the level of the body the cruelty is that much more acute. People are regularly beaten by guards, fed starvation diets, kept under lock and key in small rooms for twenty-three hours a day, forced to labor, made to sleep and live in their own excrement, and women are not only raped, but gang-raped by their captors. The impact on urban people, besides needing to expand their circle of empathy to care for the rural people caught up in this <a href=\"https://www.policyforum.net/apocalypse-apocalypse-now/\">apocalyptic nightmare</a>, is that it has resulted in a much stricter authoritarian order in the city, where people problematically come to accept heightened levels of surveillance and policing. In such a context, it is hard to imagine how solidarities can be built, as the situation provides significant barriers to greater community engagement. This scenario is not unique to Cambodia, of course, as the surveillance state has crept into the lives of people all around the world. What I would envision for the future is an end to this dynamic of separation and a more holistic integration of people within the biophysical landscapes of the places that they live their lives. In this respect, we have a great deal to learn from the indigenous peoples of the world. Sadly, rather than learning alongside these groups, the history of capitalism is characterized by their <a href=\"http://rabble.ca/news/2013/11/our-nations-to-live-capitalism-must-die\">genocidal extermination</a>.</p>\n\n<p><strong>ARR:</strong> What fascinates me here is the parallax nature of <a href=\"https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2015/10/12/american-racists-work-spread-%E2%80%98identitarian%E2%80%99-ideology\">identitarianism</a> and indigeneity in this case. The UN classifies indigenous peoples as maintaining a continuity between today and the time before the current prevailing societies gained power in their territories. However, such a definition is twisted, by European ultranationalists for instance, to produce a kind of post-modern identity returning to pre-Roman times as a <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palingenetic_ultranationalism\">palingenetic</a> rebirth of internal consciousness of land and territory. This movement attempts to gain a kind of credibility that would be useful in a struggle against liberal multiculturalism, as well as NATO and the EU, because for ultranationalists, those structures remain embedded in the historical consequence of the defeat of fascism in 1945. The demand remains paradoxical, as the movement against a multicultural empire simply turns toward a kind of global apartheid (“France for the French, Algeria for the Algerians!”) that even some leftists have embraced in their desperation. Yet, in terms of genuine indigenous struggles that do not insist upon a kind of “spiritual empire” of Europe alongside ultranationalist regimes elsewhere in the world catalogued according to dominant ethnicity, a deeper affinity exists with the left and particularly anarchism. You catalogue anarchist theorists who have drawn on indigenous ideas while presenting a kind of parallel solidarity, rather than an attempt to integrate indigeneity and anarchism. It would appear that this is a deft attempt to keep a broadly-speaking European political tradition at something of a distance from global movements that would speak autonomously in their own name, while avoiding the retrenchment of anarchism as specifically embedded in European interests. How are the efforts of, for instance, the <a href=\"http://apihtawikosisan.com/2013/10/resources-on-elsipogtog/\">Elsipogtog</a> and <a href=\"https://www.standingrock.org\">Standing Rock Sioux</a> significant in geographical terms? How do you see anarchism in relation to their efforts, and what are the theoretical insights and lessons you might take away from their resistance?</p>\n\n<figure class=\"\">\n<img src=\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/08/10/1.jpg\" />   <figcaption>\n    <p>Water protectors on the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in 2016.</p>\n  </figcaption>\n</figure>\n\n<p><strong>SS:</strong> I don’t want to position anarchism as a colonizer of any particular groups or their ideas. Anarchism is a lens that makes sense to me, but I don’t assume the arrogance of suggesting that it works for everyone. I can see the expression of what I would call “anarchism” in the patterns of association and mutual aid among many groups, whether indigenous or otherwise. Yet for me to impose this particular viewpoint onto ways of knowing and being in the world that have vastly different historical trajectories than my own understandings of the world would be really problematic.</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n  <p>In the spirit of anarchism, I think it is important for any group of people to define their own politics, and not simply be told what it is by an outside agent. While I may see expressions of anarchism in what many indigenous peoples do, or even in the actions of the Cambodian people I do research with, there may also be significant breaks with anarchist modes and it isn’t really my place to tell anyone what is anarchist or isn’t.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>It would be a contradiction where I would be replicating a certain form of authority and encouraging a hierarchy of knowledge. I get my fair share of hate mail. I suppose it comes with the territory of exposing my ideas to the world, but in some of this correspondence I’ve had people tell me I’m wrong about anarchism, and then proceed to tell me what “real” anarchism is all about. To me this mode of argumentation doesn’t sit well with how I understand anarchism. We have enough policing in our world already that we don’t need to be policing each other about the ostensible “correct” and “true” form of anarchism. To me the ethos of anarchism should be one of experimentation and affinity, and that’s precisely what indigenous groups are actively engaging, and have been for centuries. But they are doing so on their own terms, using their own language to define it, which is the crucial piece. So my view on this seemingly congruent movement is that there are important synergies between anarchists and indigenous activists, but they can’t be assumed or imposed. Any sense of alliance has to develop out of mutual respect and understanding, and often the best position for an anarchist is to simply be an ally and listen carefully. The theoretical lessons to be learned from indigenous peoples are very practical. In North America there has been <a href=\"http://www.dickshovel.com/500.html\">500 years of oppression</a>, met with 500 years of solidarity and resistance to settler colonialism. Indigenous peoples have not given up, and they refuse to bend and bow to the impositions of the modern state. The threats that they are presented with are manifold. Capitalism has in the past and continues into the present to actively <a href=\"http://www.idlenomore.ca/\">steal their land</a>, <a href=\"http://wherearethechildren.ca/en/\">abuse the young</a>, and <a href=\"http://www.highwayoftears.ca/in-memory/overview\">rape and murder the women</a>. This is not hyperbole, but a tangible reality of the lived experiences of indigenous peoples in the province I call home. Mainstream society responds with ambivalence because the racism runs so deep in Canadian society, and yet indigenous peoples persevere in spite of the indifference and scorn they are presented with. I come at this from the perspective of having grown up in British Columbia, where white people look at racism as something that only happens south of the border. Meanwhile there are deeply rooted prejudices that show no sign of letting up right here at home. So something seemingly as simple as pushing for an indigenous hire in my department at the University of Victoria is met with suspicion, doubt, and even contempt. Those of us working on the principle of wanting to redress the historical marginalization of indigenous voices on campus and within our curriculum have been accused of being racist for even proposing such an idea. There is no understanding that what is actually racist is the suggestion that working towards corrective equity is racist. It is an inverted argument that is intensively afraid of diversity, and expresses that anxiety through a kneejerk reaction that fails to understand that racism is much more than simple categorization. It is a form of systemic violence that is cultivated through the maintenance of privilege and disadvantage. There is no willingness to admit that the playing field is not and has never been even, and that there are significant societal barriers that indigenous people have to contend with that white people never have to consider. At base, it represents the classic scenario of blaming someone for their own poverty, while ignoring the fact that you’ve fixed the game to ensure their impoverishment.</p>\n\n<p><strong>ARR:</strong> On a global scale, European ultranationalism often pretends to identify with the struggles of decolonization and national liberation, insisting on the liberation of Europe from the structures of capital, and its replacement with a national variety of socialism that clearly excludes outliers based on ethnicity or “culture.” It is here that we find <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Dugin\">Alexander Dugin’s</a> greatest inclinations toward “geopolitics,” which he gleaned from such National Bolsheviks as Jean-François Thiriart and Nouvelle Droit ideologues like Robert Steuckers. Dugin views geopolitics in terms of broad metaregions like Eurasia, producing a spiritual empire from Lisbon to the Pacific, and from the Arctic to the Indian Ocean, in which regional sovereignty is actuated by national communities defined by cultural traditions, even while being linked in a greater chain of what he views as a kind of new Internationale. Unfortunately, even if often unknowingly, much of the largely-Marxist left wing of the broad-based anti-imperialist movement posits a kind of Duginist position wherein Russia becomes, if not an ally, then a kind of lesser evil or useful “enemy of an enemy” in the struggle against multiculturalism and liberal capitalism. A lot of these politics are reflected in notions that Bashar Al-Assad is holding down some semblance of stability in the midst of encroaching chaos, so his regime ought to find support among leftists who loathe Washington’s interventions in Iraq. They also tend to identify North Korea as a similar ally in anti-imperialist struggle, due to the DPRK’s skillful propaganda machine’s ability to deploy left-wing critiques of capital and US imperialism while downplaying its own nationalist self-image as the “cleanest race.” In geographic terms, how do you see this geopolitical positioning of allies and enemies? An unsophisticated game of Risk? A kind of armchair geopolitics? A threat to the left or to the right?</p>\n\n<p><strong>SS:</strong> The geopolitical map of allies and enemies is one of futility and hubris. It doesn’t surprise me that many Marxists would paint the world with such monochromatic strokes. There is so much about Marxist politics that rubs me the wrong way, and some of this comes out in my book.</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n  <p>The bottom line is that we are talking about states and sovereign control. On the basis of this alone there is nothing worthwhile to support from an anarchist perspective.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>The discourse of “lesser enemy” is a ruse, and we should be suspicious of this black and white rendering of the world. It plays itself out in electoral politics, where hawks like Hillary Clinton are supported in a facile attempt to stave off other monsters like Donald Trump. It represents an apathetic acceptance of false choice, and so we shouldn’t be surprised to see its manifestation in other arenas like geopolitics. Is this a threat to the Left? Yes, without question! I think Marxists in general are a threat to the Left, because they are so self-assured in having the right answers about the world. This might get me in trouble, but I’m far past the point of caring about assuaging the egos of Marxists. For anarchists I think there is a much more humble and unassuming understanding of what anarchism can offer. This is not to say anarchists are naïve or incapable of solutions, but rather that we are much more willing to see things work themselves out in the process of unfolding through our collective efforts, subject to ongoing revision and revitalization, rather than following a set course towards some imagined end goal. David Harvey has lamented that I am somehow trampling on the possibility of Left unity, asking me to listen to his plea, but what he is really mourning is that the Marxist position has been toppled on the streets and its citadel in the academy is now actively being stormed.</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n  <p>The rise of anarchism in academia in recent years is merely a reflection of the politics of the world, a world that is in desperate need of new ideas beyond the narrow possibilities of the state.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>This is after all an institution that repeatedly proves itself to operate not out of concern for the collective of humanity, but in the interests of an elite. Marxists continue to beguile themselves with the idea that one set of elites (i.e., their vanguards) will do better than the current set of elites, and then after their astute wisdom leads us to the so-called Promised Land in the aftermath of revolution, they will suddenly give up the reigns and full communism will blossom. We’ve heard this story before, and we’ve put it into practice. It is a cypher for our disempowerment, and a dangerous crutch that continues to shackle the Left to statist politics, a politics with no hope of ever being emancipatory because its very premise is hierarchy and control.</p>\n\n<p><strong>ARR:</strong> To clarify my own politics in light of this larger discussion between you and Harvey, I can find sympathy for both positions. I am greatly indebted to Marxist mentors in the past, such as Vijay Prashad and Kazembe Balagun. I am also drawn, as an anarchist, to the autonomist analysis of both social movements and capital, hinging on Rosa Luxemburg’s text, <em>Accumulation of Capital.</em> However, I want to push back against the position, advanced by people I deeply admire like Andrew Cornell, that anarchism lacks the tools to attain its desires. I see anarchism as a strong but humble practice, rather than a kind of pure analysis in the sense that scientific socialism and other milieu are presented. Unfortunately, I have found Marxist-anarchist syntheses to be painfully lacking and often self-destructive in their aporia—in particular, a general belligerence and reductive self-criticism that produces winners and losers on the Left. The winner is the last man standing through the hail of accusations and reflexive insults, while the loser is the one who bows out and accepts a kind of quiet normalcy in defiance of collective methods of punishment and discipline. Nobody is happy at the end, but the party has not been built and the newspapers aren’t selling—which I suppose is a good thing in the end. You seem to adopt an antiauthoritarian analysis that is inclusive and community-oriented; something I would perhaps identify as a bit of an oxymoron: a populist-insurrectionism. Would you say that this is accurate?</p>\n\n<p><strong>SS:</strong> I guess. If that label works for you, then I’m fine with it. As I said before with respect to indigenous peoples, I’m not too hung up on what you actually call things. I prefer the word “anarchism” because I think it encapsulates the kind of politics I want to advocate for, namely mutual aid, self-management, voluntary association, horizontality, direct aid, cooperation, and decentralization. That is, I want a politics for us, by us. I use the term “democracy” only in its radical, direct, or etymological sense of <em>demos</em> and <em>kratia,</em> or people power, not in the misappropriated and diluted version that really should be called “electoralism” instead. With respect to insurrection, I like this term because I think it speaks to a continuity of resistance, where unlike revolution, the temporal frame is one of perpetuity.</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n  <p>Life is struggle. We know this from an early age. What we come to learn as we get older is that the moment we give up that struggle is the precise moment we die under the heel of our oppressor. This is why Marxism is fundamentally a necropolitics, because it assumes an end state, a utopia in the aftermath of revolution instead of recognizing that politics continue unabated.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>And so people died under Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot en masse because they were rendered vulnerable by the Marxist fallacy that promised the delivery of a better life instead of recognizing that our only possibility of changing the world is to continue to actively engage with it. Transformation requires an eternal vigilance and is possible only insofar as we are willing to do the hard work ourselves instead of entrusting the responsibility for our lives to others. So I suppose this is where the populist part that you mention would come into play. The point is that for me the term “anarchism” is just a placeholder for a set of ideas that are subject to experimentation and interpretation based on how different groups are willing to employ them. We need language to communicate ideas, but it also constrains our political imaginations in particular and problematic ways. Elsewhere I have been asked if those who label their thought “feminist intersectional analysis” should be made to call it “anarchism” because of the synergies I envision. My answer was absolutely not, even if there is something intrinsically anarchistic about what they do. You can call this “anarchism,” “critical anti-hegemonic iconoclasm,” “paradigm destabilizing recalcitrant analysis,” “nonconformist insurgent praxis,” “don’t tell me what to do theory,” or, as you’ve suggested, “populist democratic insurrectionism.” It doesn’t really matter to me, as the overarching point is that we are talking about a mindset of breaking archetypes, tearing up blueprints, and scribbling over leitmotifs. I like to simplify this and just call it “anarchism,” while recognizing an inevitable mutability to the idea.</p>\n\n<p><strong>ARR:</strong> Considering anarchism, I think you are setting up a geographic position that enables strategic discussions to take place outside of “geopolitics” (i.e., rather than plotting which nation-states are best pitted against one another for the final outcome, whatever it may be, you are presenting a kind of political geography of radical movements). At the same time, I think you make it clear that there is not much that distinguishes your political thought from the groundwork created by, for instance, Emma Goldman. It is quite clear, from that, how your differences with David Harvey emerge. In <em>The Anarchist Roots of Geography,</em> Harvey is the scholar you critique perhaps the most, next to Marx. In particular, you struggle against his assertion of hierarchy and his belief in a revolution of tomorrow instead of an insurrection of today. How does this critique inflect your ideas of “flat ontology,” horizontalism, and mutual aid over space and time, especially in relation to rural/urban dynamics?</p>\n\n<p><strong>SS:</strong> Harvey is so close to the letter and spirit of Marx, where other Marxist geographers have recognized his project as simply the continuation of the past into the present. As a geographer myself, Harvey represents somewhat of an easy target. Not because his ideas are worthless, but simply because he is the most famous living geographer. I’m happy to acknowledge that he’s done a great deal of good for our discipline. When for example I see geographers uncritically flirting with military funding I have to think that it is because they have stayed the course of the quantitative revolution in geography, and never heeded the warnings that Harvey drew our collective attention towards four decades ago. Harvey opened geography up to new possibilities, possibilities that were hinted at in other ways by earlier anarchist geographers like <a href=\"http://theanarchistlibrary.org/search?query=&amp;title=&amp;author=kropotkin&amp;year=&amp;topic=&amp;source=&amp;notes=&amp;complex_query=1\">Peter Kropotkin</a> and <a href=\"http://theanarchistlibrary.org/category/author/elisee-reclus\">Élisée Reclus,</a> but had long since been forgotten. So there is no doubt that Harvey is worthy of our collective thanks. Without his work it is highly likely that I would not be a geographer. The only reason I am an academic geographer today is because I recognized the possibilities for critique within the discipline, and the attention that feminist geographers in particular paid to social justice was something that captured my imagination and made me want to engage.</p>\n\n<figure class=\"\">\n<img src=\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/08/10/header.jpg\" />   <figcaption>\n    <p>Map of Eastern Siberia, drawn by Peter Kropotkin.</p>\n  </figcaption>\n</figure>\n\n<p>All this being said, I don’t think we should lionize Harvey. As an anarchist I don’t think anyone should be put up on a pedestal and then be sheltered from critique. I once had a reviewer tell me that they felt like I “would be better off with a picket sign standing out front of CUNY yelling at David Harvey.  What I mean by this is there is an 800-pound straw person as effigy that is depicted as David Harvey, when in fact many Marxist geographers find intellectual/theoretical value in some of the concepts that are lambasted.”</p>\n\n<p>Aside from being a comical defence of Harvey, we can unpack this a bit. Why would I want to yell at Harvey or present him with a picket sign? As an anarchist I’m committed to direct action, not to <a href=\"https://crimethinc.com/2015/05/05/feature-why-we-dont-make-demands\">appeals to authority figures</a>. I don’t want to yell at Harvey, but I would like the opportunity to debate with him. Despite several opportunities and invitations being sent for that very purpose, so far Harvey has refused to participate. I actually went to New York in February 2016 at the invitation of the <a href=\"http://marxedproject.org/\">Marxist Education Project</a>, who wanted to host a dialogue between Harvey and myself. He declined, but I participated anyway and had a great conversation with Michael Lardner and some of the other Marxists who gathered about <a href=\"https://livestream.com/thecommons/events/4738005/videos/111861392\">forced evictions in Cambodia</a>. I thought I might be entering the lion’s den, but I was pleasantly surprised by the hospitality I was shown and the conviviality that ensued. Two nights later I gave a talk at CUNY, hoping again that Harvey might show up. He did, but unfortunately he didn’t have time for me afterwards. I had hoped to shake his hand, but the only words we exchanged were the question he asked about my talk and the response I gave. He seemed unimpressed, which is fine, I didn’t expect him to be. My colleague later invited him here to Victoria as part of our community colloquium “The City Talks,” where we ran a speaker series on the theme of <a href=\"http://www.thecitytalks.ca/lectures_past.php#p2016-2017\">“Anarchism in the City”</a> in early 2017. The idea was to bring Harvey in to debate the merits and limits of anarchism and Marxism in the contemporary city. Unfortunately, he once again declined. He was then invited to participate in an author-meets-critic session for my book at the American Association of Geographer’s meeting in Boston in April 2017, and once again he turned down the invitation. But if not now, then when? This debate is, at least in my view, critically important.</p>\n\n<p>I’d be happy to share a meal with Harvey and make him feel welcome here in Victoria. To me that’s where unity matters. How we actually treat each other on an interpersonal basis. Regardless of what Harvey has to say about Left unity more generally, the fact that there are competing ideas on the Left is in my view indicative of a healthy politics. I fear the post-political moment where dissent is silenced and a universal consensus is evoked. It scares me that Marxists don’t understand this, but such is the problem with Marxism. So returning to the reviewer’s statement I had mentioned, what is particularly funny about this comment is that Harvey actually responded to me with a long lambasting of his own in an essay called <a href=\"http://davidharvey.org/2015/06/listen-anarchist-by-david-harvey/\">“Listen, anarchist!”</a> He did so despite the fact that I would hope many anarchist geographers find intellectual/theoretical value in the concepts I am using. The question then becomes, so what? It is perfectly acceptable for Harvey to critique me, and <a href=\"https://www.researchgate.net/publication/277332857_The_Limits_to_Marx_David_Harvey_and_the_Condition_of_Postfraternity\">vice versa</a>. I refuse to play the game of yielding to the elder statesmen.</p>\n\n<p>Aside from the apparent hierarchy, what you can sense in this reviewer’s comment is the appeal to paternalism and orthodoxy, which is what Harvey’s work has come to represent. It has taken on such an assured and assumed role in critical geographical scholarship that it is akin to mother’s milk. It is the <em>ex cathedra</em> word of our anointed leader. I don’t blame Harvey or accuse him of having cultivated this himself, as instead it is a case of the cult of personality that rests at the heart of Marxism. The name of the ideology should tell you as much, having been named for a single man rather than a group of ideas that were fleshed out by countless individuals. In any event, <a href=\"https://www.researchgate.net/publication/260082709_Why_A_Radical_Geography_Must_Be_Anarchist\">my critique of Harvey’s</a> explicit advocation of authority in <em>Rebel Cities</em> is seen as transgressive, which of course it should be. I am antithetical to the spirit of authority that haunts the Marxist project. The frightening question is why should Marxists find transgression to be such a dangerous idea? Why are they so self-assured that they consider their ideas as being beyond reproach? It is a curious conceit, given the fact that Marxism cannot withstand the anarchist critique. It would seem that this is why Harvey would rather speak of Left unity than actually sit down and debate me in person. He gets to carry forward with his distortions and subsume the anarchist position under the banner of an ostensibly unified Left that looks exactly how he wants it to look. It reveals an imperializing impulse to Marxism that is in fact nothing new.</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n  <p>The attempt to subsume anarchism into a Marxist trajectory is something that Marxists have been doing since the First International. So if anarchists are skeptical of calls for Left unity, there is good reason for it.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>Why do Marxists <em>prima facie</em> consider their concepts and theories as being more important than anarchist ones? Sadly, this is the geography we have inherited on the back of Harvey’s legacy, and its authoritarianism should be clear. For the discipline to flourish and continue to bloom, it needs to concern itself with <em>undisciplining.</em> There shouldn’t be fences and walls erected around what is considered possible in geography, what concerns are explored, and who is critiqued. With respect to flat ontology, my insistence is quite simply on horizontalism as a politics of possibility. When we start engaging in modes of being in the world beyond hierarchical organization, what might we accomplish? Harvey falls back on superficial examples like a nuclear power plant and flying an airplane with too many pilots in the cockpit, but he is purposefully conflating the authority of specialization with the authority of command and control. As Mikhail Bakunin argued, in the matter of boots, he refers to the authority of the bootmaker, but this is not a licensing or justification of the state as Harvey wants to argue. Consulting with or even deferring to specialization in certain instances is not the same thing as uncritically allowing an authority to impose itself upon you. It is a voluntary association, where we freely listen to them in respect of their knowledge, always reserving the right to reprimand and rebuke. Such authority is not infallible, and absolute faith in a single individual or institution represents both the end of autonomy and the death of politics. Even in the case of a <a href=\"https://libcom.org/library/i-wouldnt-want-my-anarchist-friends-be-charge-nuclear-power-station-david-harvey-anarchi\">nuclear reactor</a>, there is no reason to assume that a horizontally organized worker collective couldn’t acquire the skills required to operate such a facility. This seems far less frightening than allowing people like Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, or Kim Jong-un the inalienable right to have their finger on the trigger of global annihilation. The dynamics of such a flat ontology should be no different in the rural sphere than they are in the urban. Again, this is a false dichotomy, at least in part enabled by hierarchical thinking that privileges the experience of one group over the ways of being of another. The resistance to horizontalism is precisely why I think Marxism is such a stunted and in fact threatening political prospect. It suggests it will emancipate us, all while actively working to ensure that particular systems of oppression remain intact. To be blunt, Marxism is a charlatan politics selling snake oil.</p>\n\n<p><strong>ARR:</strong> Perhaps Harvey’s most famous term is the “spatio-temporal fix,” which I found useful to describe the switch from domestic real estate to foreign land grabs in 2008—a phenomenon that I also located within Marx’s notion of “primitive accumulation” drawing on Rosa Luxemburg’s concept of “the accumulation of capital” and Walter Rodney’s “underdevelopment” thesis. Personally, I see this network of Marxian critique “from below” as useful to encounter differing traditions of left-wing thought emerging from the Third World movement and the post-colonial Global South that emerged in times and places in which Marxism was viewed as the ideology of universal liberation. While I don’t share this ultimate concept of Marxism as the end-all, be-all of the universe, I do believe it becomes necessary to engage in the formative level of analysis that Marxism provides in order to alloy left-libertarian and anarchist ideas with those that have been fostered within the Global South for decades independently of the anarchist movement from 1938 to 1989, which in reality cannot be seen as particularly influential on a global level (with some major exceptions). The <a href=\"https://anarchiststudies.org/2016/02/10/field-notes-from-an-archipelago-a-review-of-grabbing-back-by-will-munger/\">“global land grab”</a> is the focus of some of your work regarding Cambodia, if I’m not mistaken. (From what I know, the term was coined by activists linked to <a href=\"https://viacampesina.org/en/\">La Via Campesina</a> taking place in the Global South as investors fled the US real estate market in 2008.) First, would you agree with this approach to Marxism in relation to modern paradigms of political geography, and second, has that paradigm reached a kind of a tipping point with the anti-imperialist support of regimes such as Assad’s Syria?</p>\n\n<p><strong>SS:</strong> Marx’s notion of primitive accumulation isn’t actually Marx’s. Again, in the identity politics of Marxism, a single individual is given undue credit for an idea that was being cultivated by a broad array of thinkers at the time. Yes, Marx wrote on this subject quite eloquently, but he was not alone. Marx was actually basing his ideas on Adam Smith’s notion of previous accumulation, and Pierre Joseph-Proudhon’s work on property was a huge inspiration on the young Karl Marx. Recognition for the processes of dispossession were evolving around the turn of the 20th century, where for example in <em>The Slavery of our Times,</em> Leo Tolstoy wrote “History shows that property in land did not arise from any wish to make the cultivator’s tenure more secure, but resulted from the seizure of communal lands by conquerors and its distribution to those who served the conqueror.” So no, I wouldn’t entirely agree with the summary you’ve provided because it risks assigning priority once again to Marx. Part of what I am trying to show in my own work is that socialist ideas were born first and foremost of the people, where their theorization was not the preserve of a single person, but reflective of an ongoing conversation among a community of scholars. Someone always puts a smart and concise label on describing particular processes, but that doesn’t mean the idea came to them like a bolt from the blue. Think today of all the attention around Rob Nixon’s idea of <a href=\"http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674072343\">“slow violence.”</a> Like “primitive accumulation,” this is a great label to describe a very complex phenomenon, but Nixon didn’t singularly come up with this idea of violence being diffused across time. A number of other scholars have been writing about the same sort of process for many years, both prior to and coinciding with Nixon’s analysis. Kudos to Nixon for putting such a great and readily digestible label on it, but we should acknowledge that his doing so was only made possible by the conversations that were evolving among a community of scholars working on violence. He offered an excellent synthesis, but I want to reject the “great man” theory in all its guises. It isn’t just Marx that is presented in this way, so I don’t want to be accused of unduly picking on him. The same cult of personality surrounds poststructuralist figures like Michel Foucault, when in reality there is of course a genealogy to his work as well, some of which actually seems to draw quite explicitly from anarchism, but without proper acknowledgement. This doesn’t mean that I don’t think the idea of primitive accumulation, or Harvey’s revamped “accumulation by dispossession” aren’t useful, but that we should be aware of the other intellectual trajectories that both continue to inform and even contradict this idea. Writing about the Latin American experience and the intellectual traditions that have evolved in this context, Eduardo Gudynas for example has called the “great man” thinking or what he terms <a href=\"https://entitleblog.org/2015/10/15/friendly-colonialism-and-the-harvey-fashion/\">“Harvey fashion”</a> into question, suggesting that it represents a form of intellectual colonialism. In that regard, Harvey is in good company, because this is precisely how I read the history of Marxism. Many of the ideas advanced by Marx are appropriations of Proudhon and other socialist thinkers of the time. Marx was a prolific and fantastic writer, but much like Foucault, he wasn’t very good at giving credit where credit was due. To call attention to the elephant in the room isn’t the construction of an “800-pound straw person,” it is simply to tell it like it is, something that evidently makes Marxists very uncomfortable because so much of their identity is wrapped up in the very idea of Marx. I presented my paper <a href=\"http://142.207.145.31/index.php/acme/article/view/1342/1172\">“Fuck Neoliberalism”</a> at the Association of American Geographers conference in San Francisco, where I sketch an anarchist politics of refusal, but never actually mention anarchism anywhere in the talk. You can find the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNMakfcZzAo\">video</a> online where you’ll see one audience member react very negatively at the end of the talk during the question period, suggesting that ideas like mutual aid and the free association of the commons all spring from Marx. He was incensed that I was turning my back on Marx, because in his view, this was the only inheritance that contemporary radical geography should concern itself with. Therein we see the orthodoxy, which I think is extremely dangerous. Etymologically, the notion of orthodoxy signifies the “right opinion” and consequently any given orthodoxy represents a truth claim that imposes itself on the world. What about all the pieces that don’t fit with a Marxist reading? Why are the spaces of experimentation with methodology, epistemology, and ontology being closed off? Harvey’s latest book is titled <em>The Ways of the World,</em> which I think is pretty apt in how assuming this succinct statement is. It seems transhistorical and omniscient to me, as though apparently he’s got it all figured out. The situation in Syria and particularly in Rojava is interesting insofar as I think it reveals the tensions between anarchism and Marxism. Harvey has said he wants to go to Rojava to see what’s going on, but at the same time he’s clearly already made up his mind. He views the PKK as the result of Marxist and Leninist thinking. But the situation isn’t that simple, as there is tension where some would prefer to take an anarchist path in spite of the push towards hierarchical organization. Couldn’t this alternative path be supported? For Marxists, they refuse to acknowledge that such a politics could emerge from places like Rojava. Zaher Baher has called this thinking <a href=\"https://www.reddit.com/r/Anarchism/duplicates/3f0xyo/why_are_anarchists_and_libertarians_divided_over/\">“borderline religious,”</a> stating that Marxists “believe that if anything is not written in the old books it will not happen,” and so the distortion of historical struggles to fit a Marxist narrative continues in Rojava.</p>\n\n<p><strong>ARR:</strong> So, it seems like you are saying that the paradigm of radical geography has not completely shifted with whatever left-wing support of Assad’s regime exists, but at the same time there is an ongoing struggle between anarchism and authoritarian Marxism (using the term “authoritarian” as a modifier, not as a necessary qualifier) over the conceptualization and actuation of political geography. With this struggle in mind, I want to return to a question of national liberation again, and the nostalgia for 1970s-type revolutionary groups, as well as major geographic transformations occurring over time. Like Sam Dolgoff and other anarchists, you target national liberation states as being reformations of capital and colonialism. Do you see them all as equally bad, some of them as better than others, or would you reduce the transformation to a reformation of the “world system” that remains fundamentally unchanged, despite improvements in infrastructure, quality of life, and human rights status in some countries in the South?</p>\n\n<p><strong>SS:</strong> I think the idea of improvements in infrastructure, quality of life, and human rights in the global south is highly contestable. This isn’t to say that there haven’t been changes that people have struggled to secure, but rather, I think we need to ask: who have such developments actually targeted and whose lives have been improved? I’m most familiar with the <a href=\"https://www.academia.edu/29838878/Interview_with_Simon_Springer_Author_of_Violent_Neoliberalism_Development_Discourse_and_Dispossession_in_Cambodia\">situation in Cambodia</a>, where infrastructure projects have deepened the penetration of capitalism into the country, human rights remain fragile in the face of an authoritarian regime that shows no signs of loosening its grip, and quality of life is utterly abominable for many and perhaps even most. Meanwhile, a very small group of elites lives in the lap of luxury. An urban middle class has emerged, but it isn’t a significant percentage of the population and we should ask if such stratification is a good thing for any given society. I think most anarchists would answer that question the same way: a resounding “no.” Have other countries done better? I suppose if you were to set up some sort of measure that could take the pulse of national opinion then you might come to that conclusion. But it really doesn’t matter in terms of the fundamental structure that is imposed. All states, including those who have freed themselves from the yoke of European colonialism, remain fundamentally colonial in their constitution. So in Cambodia, the capital city of Phnom Penh has merely replaced Paris as the occupying force. Identities are assimilated into a single vision of “Khmerness” that is produced, scripted, and oriented towards the will of the government in power. Today we are told that Cambodia is something like 90% ethnic Khmer, but what does that even mean? This is just a social construct that has, to at least some extent, been used to replace the earlier label of “race” by linking it to some idea of cultural content as well. But it doesn’t hold up to critical scrutiny. For example, my daughter was adopted from Cambodia, but she has spent most of her life in Canada, and before that New Zealand and Singapore. Is she ethnically “Khmer” or is she quite simply “human?” Going to the doctor’s office in New Zealand means you have to fill in a survey on ethnicity, and on one visit I entered in her details as “human.” This was unacceptable to the doctor because I was told that certain people are susceptible to different ailments. Suddenly this didn’t sound so much like a question of culture. What he was really asking was a question about her “race,” problematically rooted in a biological understanding. So nationalist narratives use ethnicity in such a way that is inherited from colonialism’s racialization of the world’s peoples, but then places culture alongside it. The nationalist narrative then reaches far into the depths of the past to accumulate its ostensible legitimacy, despite being a very recent phenomenon that, as Benedict Anderson argues in <em>Imagined Communities,</em> only arose in the aftermath of colonialism. In Cambodia, this historical reach means citing the Angkorian Empire as the locus of Khmer identity, but that imagined line that separates Cambodia from Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam is a reflection of the colonial encounter, not an Angkorian inheritance. National borders and nations themselves can accordingly be thought of as perpetuations of a colonial logic, as this was the origin of their birth. Imagine a village that sits right along the Cambodia-Thailand national boundary, and perhaps even two neighbors that become separated by this line. Despite the villagers on either side of this line having shared familial lineages for many generations, the now-separated neighbors are informed via nationalism that they are not the same ethnicity. Moreover, they are told that they are more distant from one another than they are from other people who live thousands of miles away from them but are said, by the state, to be their national brethren. It’s really quite an absurd proposition, but this is the way the institution of the state encourages us to think about the world. The state has appropriated local identities under a national banner, where the population is then compelled to think, act, and even speak in a national way. This is one of the primary functions of <a href=\"http://carolblack.org/schooling-the-world\">schooling</a>: To convince people that they are indeed part of a nation and to teach them to speak the same language, which becomes standardized through things as seemingly mundane as correct spelling. The state then is actually far more insidious than explicit forms of colonialism because it operates at the level of ideology, where people’s sense of themselves and their very subjectivity is transformed. This scenario is as true of Cambodia as it is of Canada, Colombia, Cameroon, and Cuba. The state is cut from the exact same cloth as colonialism, where the only real differences are the scale upon which they operate and the tactics that are employed to ensure the capitulation of those they oppress.</p>\n\n<p><strong>ARR:</strong> One of the troubling things about the post-colonial map (if we can use that term) is that it retains many of those colonially imposed borders. Perforce, we might see ISIS as a kind of reaction and challenge to the totality of such geopolitical relations, insofar as they declare a spiritually mandated zone already in existence in Southwest Asia, as defined by their traditional, imperial constructs rather than the modern nation-state. Of course, the opposite side of the same challenge to geopolitical totalization is the Zapatistas, which you discuss in <em>The Anarchist Roots of Geography.</em> In light of these maneuvers to overturn the map of nation-states, we are left with the 19th century model of revolution as contemporary but perhaps wanting. Marx famously believed that the most industrial state would lead the revolution, while Lenin importantly insisted that the “weakest link” would be the fastest to snap. In either situation, the Trotskyist notion takes hold that countries that have undergone a revolution ought then to spread the revolution elsewhere, since true communism will not exist anywhere until it exists internationally. Yet when we see the political geographies of conflicting territorialities amid global relations, the notion of revolutionary transformation in time and space regarding borders and the content of what is retained within those borders becomes quite transversal. Does your flat ontology include a broader political strategy in terms of advantage and opportunity with regards to the overcoming of capitalism, or is it too spontaneous for such predictions?</p>\n\n<p><strong>SS:</strong> I think you’ve now answered part of my critique of the Marxist reading of Rojava. There is a deep Eurocentrisim in Marxist thinking that goes largely unacknowledged. I don’t think Marxists have ever resolved this or confronted it in a sustained manner. It structures the world in a way not too dissimilar to colonialism, where there is a distinct “core” and “periphery,” and it assumes the same problematic position of a benevolent caretaker. The white man’s burden is threaded through Marxism, and capitalism for its part is strangely seen through a lens that is actually somewhat celebratory. Marx tempers this by saying it is a stage to pass through on the way to communism, but that character of espousing capitalism remains. Bill Warren picked up on this tenor of Marx’s work in his book <em>Imperialism: Pioneer of Capitalism,</em> arguing that “imperialism was the means through which the techniques, culture, and institutions that had evolved in Western Europe over several centuries—the culture of the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution—sowed their revolutionary seeds in the rest of the world.” Imperialism as an outgrowth of capitalism is construed as a “necessary evil” on the path towards some greater good. On this point some Marxists crucified Warren, but he was really just revisiting Marxism proper. Marx condemned the violence of primitive accumulation while also <a href=\"https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1853/06/25.htm\">retaining a view of such violent expropriation as important for the furthering of human possibilities</a>. It’s really quite appalling when you think about it. This politics of suffering is predicated on placing non-industrialized people on the altar, while their European “saviors” have meanwhile convinced themselves that they are saving the world by spreading their filth. Clearly to clean up a mess, first you have to make one. So, is there a global strategy to anarchism? Absolutely not. I don’t want to paint a picture of what a global revolution might look like because to do so would be to illustrate a plenary image that is little more than a reflection of my own positionality. I can’t speak for the masses in a way that Marx or Harvey assume they can. Point blank, there is no universal subject position of the worker. People want different things in different places and it is up for them to decide collectively in each location what it is they want and what it is they are willing to fight for. I see much potential in Proudhon and Kropotkin’s ideas of federalism as a means of linking autonomous communities together. Murray Bookchin of course elaborated this idea and Colin Ward articulated it very well when he spoke of the global postal service, oriented not around a hegemon or point of authority, but around voluntary networks of association. Why couldn’t our political associations function in the same way? In terms of overcoming capitalism in particular, I don’t want to pretend that I have the correct answer. I do however have complete faith in human possibility. We made capitalism, and so we can unmake it. What is required is the concerted and ongoing willingness to struggle among those who want to see themselves removed from under it, and a desire to offer our solidarity in whatever terms we are asked to contribute. This has to grow organically, and most importantly it has to be guided by the communities themselves, not the hubris of “great men” with “great ideas.”</p>\n\n<p><strong>ARR:</strong> Can these communities, themselves, really stand a chance against coordinated fascism, though? In geographic terms, returning to Duginism, we are confronted with a fascist movement far more integrated and extensive than we have seen since 1945. A spread of fascists and parafascists exists where the radical right has become particularly strong. For this reason, I do not draw absolute distinctions between the three, but see them rather as semi-permeable and interpenetrating. From the rise of Dugin in Moscow, there are the connections between <a href=\"https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2015/third-position-web\">third positionism</a> and the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_for_Germany\">AfD</a> in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern; there is the Front National’s historic support for Nazi skinheads in the past and current incorporation of fascists like Christian Bouchet; there is, of course, National Action and the Northern League in Italy, both of which integrate the Casa Pound fascist squatter network; let’s not forget the rise of UKIP and its tacit, though downplayed and often denied, connections with the English Defense League (and the latter’s similar denial of Nazi involvement). Similar, relationships exist from Poland to Ukraine, of course, where the EU-supported government that overthrew the Yanukovich regime has links to the Nazis of Azov, who have recently been accused of leading an ethnic pogrom. It appears that <a href=\"https://itsgoingdown.org/responding-fascist-creep-interview-alexander-reid-ross\">fascists today</a> once again serve as the useful idiots of authoritarian conservative regimes, which develop fascist trappings in order to maintain street-level credibility while also remaining equipped to handle everyday business dealings of the bourgeoisie. One can see similar relationships in Venezuela’s opposition, and in somewhat different contexts in Turkey and India, for instance. What has produced this troubling rise throughout the world, and how is it to be confronted on the geographic level?</p>\n\n<figure class=\"\">\n<img src=\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/08/10/3.jpg\" />   <figcaption>\n    <p>Right-wing Germans at a rally supporting Pegida (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West).</p>\n  </figcaption>\n</figure>\n\n<p><strong>SS:</strong> I think it is an outgrowth of <a href=\"https://www.researchgate.net/publication/266970282_The_violence_of_neoliberalism\">neoliberalism</a>. People are disconnected, bewildered, and isolated in the current moment of ever intensifying individualism. We’ve lost touch with our families, our communities, and the earth itself. And so there is a longing to belong to something. Amid all the feelings of hopelessness and desperation, people lash out. This shouldn’t be surprising to anyone. It’s easy to be consumed with fear and anger when your life is severed from meaningful interaction with others and a strong sense of inclusion has never been part of your lived experience. Younger people are that much more fragile because they don’t remember a time of freely exploring the outdoors, or wandering in their neighborhoods with friends without adult supervision. Everything is compartmentalized and planned in our contemporary lives. Kids don’t walk out the front door to play with whoever might happen to be around that afternoon, they have play dates set up for them, and so the chance to encounter alterity with childlike curiosity is severely limited. This has resulted in considerable societal anxiety. The fear of the “Other” is intensifying for this exact reason, but it’s also being cultivated through the discourses that are being circulated in society about migrants, indigenous peoples, Muslims, and so on. The bottom line is that the rise of extremist groups on the Right represents a reflection of this fear and an innate desire to belong to something. Fascist groups asserting themselves is obviously contextually specific and the level of susceptibility to this outgrowth of isolation and individualization is going to differ across space, but what’s frightening is that these expressions of hate are so common. They are the canary in the coalmine that something is seriously wrong with our current path and should tell us that we need to start considering ways to bring about greater inclusion and a stronger sense of community. We are of course competing with all sorts of gadgets and screens, where social media placates our feelings of being alone, but these are only ever poor substitutes for genuine togetherness and the touch and warmth of another human being. So in this age of the spectacular, where the mundane and the monumental are increasingly indecipherable, we need to encourage our children and ourselves to disconnect from the machine and <a href=\"https://www.academia.edu/15550214/Learning_through_the_soles_of_our_feet_unschooling_anarchism_and_the_geography_of_childhood\">reconnect with the planet</a> and each other. This may sound somewhat spiritual, but only because in a certain way it is meant to be. It is not religious, which enters new forms of hierarchy and anxieties about “Others,” but as an atheist, I take spirituality to mean a broad consideration of bonding without bondage. For me, spirituality is also a willingness to express humility for our place in the fabric of space and time. My view of anarchism is consequently integral, whereby I think everything is connected to everything else, not in a universalizing sense, but as a processual unfolding in the way that Doreen Massey encourages us to <a href=\"https://selforganizedseminar.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/massey-for_space.pdf\">think about space</a>. To eradicate fascism then, we need to simultaneously work towards ridding ourselves of all the other logics of domination that frame our lives. From sexism to homophobia, racism to misopedia, and carnism to the state, all of these ideas fragment our ability to connect with others and thereby undermine the potential of mutual aid, which is nothing more and nothing less than our collective birthright.</p>\n\n<p><strong>ARR:</strong> Okay, well I wish we had time to enter into more depth with regards to the strange varieties of fascism emerging as rebellions against the very authoritarian conservatism that has attempted to harness their energy and power. I’m thinking in particular of fascism associated with the alt-right, incorporating misogynistic and homophobic forms of queer culture, as well as vegetarianism and what I call “fascism of the boutiques.” It is here, amid the struggling lower-middle classes, that we find the problems of gentrification generating racial animus while feeding the structural realities of racial segregation and alienation. One sees these processes at play on a far more exaggerated level in the Bay Area, where hipsters ironically mock the cultures they displace while they produce an often openly misogynistic and racist “counterculture” against hegemonic interest in equality and freedom. That Silicon Valley millionaires are also buying up regional farms in the midst of drought, while some even support the “neo-reactionary” credo of the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment\">Dark Enlightenment</a> and its call for a mix of genetic engineering, eugenics, and the corporatization of the state, gives a hint of some of the emergent political positions we will be contending with over the next twenty years, and how this pertains to the coming spacio-temporal changes. We have also neglected the ranchers and Patriots, who perhaps we can discuss at a later date. Regardless, thank you very much for laying out the foundations of flat ontology, and the “anarchist roots of geography.” This work will stand as a pivot-point for theorizing strategy and tactics of the anarchist movement.</p>\n\n<p><strong>SS:</strong> You’re absolutely correct that the rise of fascism presents one of the most terrifying threats of the contemporary political moment. Trump’s rise to power in the US is certainly an indication of the horror that is to come, where misogynists, racists, and homophobes have become emboldened in a way that we’ve not seen in such an overt way in decades. Thinking even more widely, we also have to contend with the fascism of climate change, and the anthroparchy that underpins the intersection of capitalism and the state as the planet is choked into submission by these institutions. I have three children and I would by lying if I said I didn’t worry that they may not have the opportunity to live out their natural lives owing to some catastrophic planetary disaster. But perhaps because I am a parent, I simply refuse to allow nihilism to take hold of my political outlook. I have to cling to hope, as precarious and naïve as that may sound in a context where an impending darkness seems to be swallowing everything we’ve ever known. The fire has not yet been extinguished. For me, anarchism is the light of liberation, the ember of emancipation, and it continues to glow. I’m convinced that if we are willing to cultivate the cinders of compassion and care, they will eventually burst into a brilliant and beautiful flame that can’t be extinguished. In time, the conflagration of our passions, our desires, and our hopes for a better world will spread like wildfire, burning all existing hierarchies to the ground. We are the inferno, and the time has come for a politics of arson.</p>\n\n<figure class=\"\">\n<img src=\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/08/10/4.jpg\" />\n</figure>\n\n"
    }
  ]
}