When I die
let the black rag fly
raven falling
from the sky.
Let the black flag lie
on bones and skin
that long last night
as I enter in.
For out of black
soul’s night have stirred
dawn’s cold gleam,
morning’s singing bird.
Let black day die,
let black flag fall,
let raven call,
let new day dawn
of black reborn. ( George Woodcock, The Black Flag )
”All this democracy disgusts me. It wishes to be scratched where vermin causes itching, but it does not at all wish to be combed or deloused. What I would not give to sail into this mob with my clenched fists!” ( Pierre Joseph Proudhon ) Proudhon’s hatred of democracy overflowed all decent bounds , and he descended to a degree of disgusting vilification recorded only by the fascists. To Proudhon,of ”property is theft” notoriety, democracy was the most unstable of governments, continually oscillating between the absurd and the impossible.
Dostoevsky. The Possessed. ''The leading roles in The Possessed, by the way, were played by Christopher Lloyd (a distinguished leading man before his Taxi days), Meryl Streep (still a student, and playing a beautiful aristocrat), Jerome Dempsey, Norma Brustein, the aforementioned Alvin Epstein, and the Polish film actress Elzbieta Czyzewska, who gave an especially remarkable performance.''
The road to Dante’s inferno has often been paved with the best of intentions. That politically, for the anarchist, a apocalypse must happen to clear the path for redemption; a messianic vision that held the faithful since its inception. As the debris is cleaned up after the G20 Summit in Toronto last week, the message was reinforced that anarchism as a political movement leaves, few indifferent. It is a movement that is rarely short on ideas, but almost always out of stock of coherence, and contradiction is always on sale. Somehow the individual pieces are less than the sum of the parts; a magnified lucidity in language equalled only by an imposing obscurity of thought; and sometimes so much thought it becomes a labyrinth to which escape and perspective is a challenge. It is a revolutionary fervor laced with sinister overtones that both puzzle and exasperate. However, as an aesthetic, a tangible figment of poetic imagination, anarchism is in a league of their own, to which few can aspire to leave the rhetorical sandbox and join them.
''I think Naomi Klein, although not an anarchist, is the poster child for this tendency. I've got a review copy of her book, and was enormously impressed by her historical account of the CIA's involvement in Chile and the Southern Cone and her well-documented account of how neoliberalism was implemented in the region. But it's marred by her lack of conceptual clarity, generally taking the neoliberal use of the term "free market" at face value. She doesn't seem to understand what a conceptual victory she's handing them at the outset; it's about like accepting, at face value, Stalin's claim to speak for the workers' movement.''
“We don’t just crawl up from the sewers from protests,” says Chris Bowen, part of the anarchist hip-hop duo Test Their Logik and one of the movement’s most visible proponents of property damage. “We are not violent people. I’m filled with love – love for this planet, not for pacifism and the status quo.”…“When buildings are destroyed and no one is hurt – who cares?” said Mr. Bowen during a protest earlier this week. “It’s a broken window, not a life. The violence comes from the companies that are targeted. They are wrecking the environment; they are wrecking lives.”
Delacroix. tasso in the Hospital. Dostoevsky, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man ''I am a ridiculous person. Now they call me a madman. That would be a promotion if it were not that I remain as ridiculous in their eyes as before. But now I do not resent it, they are all dear to me now, even when they laugh at me - and, indeed, it is just then that they are particularly dear to me. I could join in their laughter—not exactly at myself, but through affection for them, if I did not feel so sad as I look at them. Sad because they do not know the truth and I do know it. Oh, how hard it is to be the only one who knows the truth! But they won't understand that. No, they won't understand it.''man : ''
Mikhail Bakunin, son of a Russian nobleman, and pupil of Proudhon, was another dissenter from the dissenters of his day and ours, who shared, like Proudhon, a virulent invective in scattershot fashion among political persuasions of all stripes who did not happen to agree and vow to swallow the poison pill with him. Similar to Proudhon, Bakunin was profoundly convinced that he, and he alone, of the many revolutionists of his day, was the complete and legitimate expression of the revolutionary movement in Europe. No accomodation. No compromise. And take no prisoners. The aesthetic was that of the dark, black comedy if not for its unsettling complementarity with totalitarian movements.
Bakunin himself had a childlike love of mystification and a large capacity for political fantasy. He would hint at the existence of a vast international revolutionary underground movements, of which he was the head, and which in fact existed almost entirely in his imagination. He would send letters in code, enclosing the code in the same envelope. Herzen, who was occasionally his reluctant accomplice, compared his delight in plotting to the innocent furtive excitement of preparing a Christmas tree. Yet like many others he could not help being captivated by Bakunin’s personal recklessness and idealism , his childlike enthusiasm and boundless demonic energy.
Wanted, a leader! - The labor-agitation orchestra on the go-as-you-please plan Subjects: Labor leaders Powderly, Terence Vincent, 1849-1924 George, Henry, 1839-1897 American Federation of Labor Political cartoons -- United States Source: Puck
”His activity, his laziness, his appetite, like his gigantic stature and the everlasting sweat he was in, everything, in fact, was on a superhuman scale, as he was himself; and he was himself a giant with his leonine head and tousled mane”.
Bakunin, though personally a kind and gentle man, exulted in the thought of a clean sweep of the debris of a restrictive and inegalitarian civilization, declaring: ”The passion for destruction is also a creative passion.” In 1869, he bacame associated with one of the most sinister in the whole murky, blood streaked history of clandestine Russian politics. Half delinquent, half fanatic, Sergei Nechaev arrived in Switzerland announcing that he had escaped from prison in Russia, though there was no evidence of this.
Ecstatically, Bakunin wrote of him: ”They are magnificent, these young fanatics, believers without Gods, heroes without rhetoric”. He immediately made Nechaev a member of ”the Russian Section of the World Revolutionary Alliance, No 2771.” Like No. 2771’s prison escape, the existence of the other two thousand seven hundred and seventy has to be taken on trust.
Toronto G8/G20 Frank Gunn photo. Canadian Press
On the Tronto G20 Summit: ”One of those alleged organizers, Alex Hundert, arrested on charges of conspiracy to commit mischief during an early-morning police raid Saturday, recently wrote a treatise at rabble.ca defending destructive Black Bloc tactics used during the 2010 Winter Olympics. He claimed that Black Bloc acts as “a wrecking ball” that clears the way for other protest groups to state their various cases. Smashing windows at Hudson’s Bay Co., for instance, “actually opened up space for Canadians to stop and think about the colonial history of HBC,” Mr. Hundert wrote.”
History Repeats Itself - The Robber Barons of the Middle Ages, and the Robber Barons of Today Subjects: Political cartoons -- United States Laborers -- United States
Fantasy met fantasy, but in Nechaev it was mixed with the cold-blooded calculation of the con man. After milking Bakunin of a considerable sum of money, he returned to Russia and founded a small revolutionary group. From then onward the story has the atmosphere of a Dostoevsky novel. Indeed, Dostoevsky took it as the basis for the greatest of all fictional studies of the terrorist mentality, his novel ”The Possessed”. One of the members of the group, a young man named Ivan Ivanov, opposed Nechaev. Nechaev called a meeting of the others, declaring that ”the Central Committee”, a purely imaginary body, had evidence that Ivanov was a spy. They lured the unfortunate young man to a lonely garden at night and murdered him. The body was discovered, and Nechaev’s group was revealed. He himself fled but was eventually hunted down. Sentenced to life imprisonment, he died ten years later in the Peter-and-Paul fortress, the grim prison on the banks of the river Neva where Bakunin had lain in chains twenty years before.
''It hadn’t even been eight weeks since Czolgosz met McKinley gladhanding a receiving line at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, and fatally (though it took the victim a week to succumb) shot the second-term Republican president.''
Nechaev remains an obscure, enigmatic and haunting figure. That he was a swindler, it is clear. But the fact of falling in love with their own fanasies, willingness to go to prison, love of power, and sheer lust for destruction was merely a generalized identity within the self-dramatization of anarchist nihilism that seemed to be a common thread. The contradictions between the revolutionist and the mainstream revolutionary thought of their day was even more puzzling, more strange in light of an often non-disguised glorification of war for its own sake. In the view of Proudhon, was was inherent in the very nature of man and was itself the prime source of human progress.
”Hail to war! It is only through war that man was able to rise from the lowest depths to his present dignity and worth. Over the body of the fallen foe he had the first vision of glory and immortality….Death is the crowning of life, and how can an intelligent free minded creature like man end his life more nobly than on the battlefield. War, in its very nature was divine, being the revelation of religion, of justice, and of the ideal in human relations. Man was above all else a warrior animal…It is through war that his sublime nature becomes manifest. It is war alone that makes heroes and demigods. ( Proudhon )
''The flood of immigrants into the United States in the late 1800s and labor wars that racked the nation for decades mobilized a national movement to restrict immigration. In this 1891 political cartoon, a judge scolds Uncle Sam that "If Immigration was properly Restricted you would no longer be troubled with Anarchy, Socialism, the Mafia and such kindred evils!" After he resigned from the Supreme Court in 1880, Justice William Strong became president of the National Association to Secure the Religious Amendment of the Constitution, which sought to restrict the influx of Catholic and Jewish immigrants and to declare the United States a “Christian nation.”
This obsession, absorption and passion with a single thought- the revolution, was marked by a rupture with almost every tie with the civil order, the educated world, and all laws , conventions and generally accepted conditions, with existence in it, seen as strictly utilitarian: to destroy the world more effectively. But to proclaim such an aim was one thing, to realize it another. The cult of anarcist violence manifested itself in late nineteenth century Europe in two forms: in peasant insurrections and urban terrorism.
“Himself a Jew, Marx has around him, in London and France, but especially in Germany, a multitude of more or less clever, intriguing, mobile, speculating Jews, such as Jews are every where: commercial or banking agents, writers, politicians, correspondents for newspapers of all shades, with one foot in the bank, the other in the socialist movement, and with their behinds sitting on the German daily press — they have taken possession of all the newspapers — and you can imagine what kind of sickening literature they produce. Now, this entire Jewish world, which forms a single profiteering sect, a people of blooksuckers, a single gluttonnous parasite, closely and intimately united not only across national borders but across all differences of political opinion — this Jewish world today stands for the most part at the disposal of Marx and at the same time at the disposal of Rothschild. I am certain that Rothschild for his part greatly values the merits of Marx, and that Marx for his part feels instinctive attraction and great respect for Rothschild.
Harper's Weekly cartoon by Thomas Nast ridicules the allegedly false bravado of anarchist Johann Most, who trumpets his call for class warfare (top) when he is not personally in danger, but cravenly hides under his bed (bottom) when the police arrive to arrest him.
This may seem strange. What can there be in common between Communism and the large banks? Oh! The Communism of Marx seeks enormous centralization in the state, and where such exists, there must inevitably be a central state bank, and where such a bank exists, the parasitic Jewish nation, which. speculates on the work of the people, will always find a way to prevail ….” ( Bakunin )
”Klein explains how neoliberalism represents the counter-revolution of capital and thrives on disasters, wars, and crises to spread throughout the world.
‘we are told about how free markets and free people go hand in hand, and that these are the same and an inseparable project. Now I’m not arguing that neoliberals are the first people, the first ideologues to use shock to advance an unpopular economic project’ ”
COMMENTS
