WHY DEMOCRACY

   It can be argued that democracy is the very heart of capitalism. Capitalism views people as equivalent in terms of the work they do - it reduces people to simple labor power. Democracy views people as equivalent in terms of voting, in terms of having an equal say in some machinery controlling you.

   Here too, Justice and morality are equivalent parts of this machinery.

   So why do so many anarchists embrace democracy?

   -- Because being against "authority" seems to many of them to be simply being in favor of Justice, perhaps?

   -- Because they haven't rejected exchange and the way that exchange can work to make people equivalent to each other.

   Perhaps it is similar to what Nietzsche called the final cruelty of Christians, the need to kill God to keep the logic of religion. Many anarchists feel the need to kill the top, the boss, of a bureaucracy in order to keep the bureaucracy itself alive.

—ASAN

 

 

CLASHES AT THE EU SUMMIT

 

   For several days in mid-December, leaders of the nations that make up the European Union held a summit meeting in Brussels. It was met with protests. On December 12, a group of predominantly Dutch and Flemish protesters occupied the office of CEFIC, a lobby for European chemical companies. This occupation was evicted after four hours.

    On the 13^th, a large demonstration took place. Being sponsored by the trade unions, it is no surprise that this march was peaceful.

   On the 14^th and 15^th, a much smaller demonstration took a different turn as demonstrators armed with molotov cocktails, cobblestone and metal staves battled cops and damaged the windows of banks and businesses and threw a metal barrier through the window of a police station.

   It is clear now that the rulers of this world can never expect to meet in peace. There are those who have their demands to make, and there are those with no demands who simply want to make it clear to the rulers that they have implacable enemies who will not give them peace. These latter need to carefully examine the place of these demonstrations in their lives, determining if and how they fit into a life lived against this order. There is no simple answer, nor one that applies to every one, but the real struggle is, in fact in the context of our daily lives, and we need to be careful not to be blinded by the flash of the spectacular and of the heroics of street conflicts. Street demonstrations are simply one (to my mind, fairly minor) tactic in our struggle, not the struggle itself.

 

 

LIVE FREE OR DIE

 

   Our dream is to live free, destroying every form of established power and every hierarchy since these are the negation of this dream.

   For us freedom cannot be separated from pleasure. Therefore, we are willing to make titanic efforts in order to realize freedom and pleasure, aware that freedom does not exist in sacrifice and immolation.

   In this sense, the most complete experience that we now take the extravagance of living is that of self-organization which makes space for direct action, understood as open, collective, expansive experience that doesn’t give a damn for the fences set up by the state between legality and illegality.

   The occupation of abandoned spaces brings these prerogatives together and opens the way, in the most precise manner, for self-organization. The development of the self-organization of our lives is not possible without subverting the existent.

From “Against the Legalization of Occupied Spaces” by El Paso Occupato

and Barocchio Occupato

 

 

KILLING GOD

 

  When we accept the dangerous cohabitation with god, when we allow a phantom to pollute our lives, everything comes to be tainted by death. God is death because it is a phantom that makes itself more concrete as the dangers and uncertainties from which a person suffers increase.

   When life becomes full, when joy and beauty overflow and effectively oppose pain and fear (which still exist in the world and against which we have nothing except the ridiculous means that presumptuous science puts at our disposal), then the phantom of god vanishes.

   Each one of us must decide what to make of her life, and in order to do so we must kill god, first of all in our own hearts, then in the earthly manifestations that claim to give body to this phantom: above all, the church.

—Canenero