Communization: The senile decay of anarchy (or re-inventing anarchy) – fragment of the unpublished pamphlet “FAI Reloaded” by the Conspiracy of Cells of Fire.
i) Frozen Marxism
Today’s era smells like engine oil, cheap labor sweat and naphthalene of the morality of voluntary obedience… We do not want to be defined by the culture of techno-industrial fascism, the white uniforms of scientists, the neckties of technocrats, the eager silences of ordinary people, the stupid smiles of consumers… We do not match with the aesthetics of the glass world of flat television screens, the digital imitation of the life of social media, the display windows of lifestyle, the lens of security cameras. We do not fit in the society of captivity, the police checks of our identification papers, the supervision of security guards, the laws of the judges, the locked doors of prisons. We do not settle for the average normality dictated by morality, we don’t amuse our boredom with psychotropic drugs, we aren’t covered by the coldness of empty relations, we don’t read… Marx.
Today we live to the rhythm of a generalized crisis. Our daily life is throttled from the tyranny of numbers. Our life resembles an accounting book, whose calculations always find it deficient and indebted. They overwhelm us with financial terms and definitions, one half of which are unknown and the other half of no interest to us. The wandering charlatans of all ideologies, roam from one financial conference to the other and bombard us with ramblings and often incomprehensible interviews-speeches, each of them presenting his own social antidote to the economic crisis. On the shelves of the ideological supermarket every faithful consumer will find the antidote that suits him, in all shades. There are “revolutionary” antidotes, even “anarchist” ones. In Greece, the neo-communists, ex-anarchists, mix in the cauldron of ideologies anarchist labels, with plenty of frozen Marxism, anti-imperialism and a pinch of disguised national liberation. The new tension of “serious” anarchy dresses itself in a formal way and launches the trend of anti-capitalist struggle on a red background. The rhetoric of the neo-communists – “anarchists” talks about everything. In an effort to build a social marketing of propaganda for the masses, it promotes generalizations sanctifying the “oppressed people” and “workers” who, obviously, for them are “not accountable” for their responsibilities and silences, uses covertly socially palatable national references, such as “the Greek people”, “our country” and promises “social salvation” with the coming of post-revolutionary society, preaching in the assemblies of the need for centralized-structures… It seems that some neo-communists already rehearse their future offices. Perhaps, this what they train themselves for now, selling hegemony, experience coming from age and the wisdom of a leader within the anarchist milieu.
There, then, where some see an opportunity, because of the economic crisis, we see a trap. A trap of sinking in the swamp of confusion, of fantasies about the social “good” deriving from Marxist analysis, of certainties about revolutionary subjects, of economism.
First of all, the global crisis we are experiencing today is not just a crisis of numbers, financial figures and mathematics, but part of the overall crisis of values and conscience in the world of authority. It is the cannibalistic crisis of western lifestyle which after it grew big consuming blood and oil from the “underdeveloped”, it now feeds from the flesh. Today, the “developed world” not only lives in the grip of economic tyranny, but also in the desert of spiritual and emotional bankruptcy.
Unlike the Marxists and their “anarchist” great-grandchildren, who want to interpret life with the rationality of mathematics, we seek our liberation inside the blasts of a permanent existential revolt of relations, situations, values, morals, and everyday life.
Even the economy, which is the center of the tedious analysis of the communists, for us it is not a series of ordered numbers leading to the equation of the class struggle. Instead, the economy is, first and foremost, a hierarchical social relationship that speaks the language of money. Money is a symbol of accumulated power. It is a property title that owns objects, land, time, admiration, relationships, people. The anarchist challenge, then, cannot be trapped in the demand for “better wages”, “lower taxes”, “economic equality”… One cannot destroy the morality of property by making it equal and uniform to all.
The experiment of communist totalitarian regimes spawned monsters, dictatorships of the proletariat and obedient subjects. One cannot exorcise ugliness with a new ugliness, simply by changing the name to something more “social” and imagining that through the “anti-imperialist struggle”, the country won’t become a “modern colony “.
Even if one removes money, authority will find new beads and mirrors to swap for the obedience of the natives. Besides, authority is older than capitalism and money. So we laugh, but also get bored from the analysis and the texts of the anarcho-marxist theoretical moles. They write and rewrite super-analysis, but their figures don’t add up, as they cannot understand that life does not fit in the labels they stick to it … “proletariat,” “class struggle,” “anti-imperialist struggle”… First of all, anti-imperialist struggle does not require an overall anti-state perception of the anarchist struggle. Anti-imperialist struggle is also being conducted by the bureaucratic fossil of KKE (Greek Communist Party). At the same time, reading behind the lines both in the texts of the ex-anarchist now communists, we see a deliberate crypto-patriotism. National references (our country, the Greek people, etc.), focusing on the “foreign capital” (as if capital has a nationality), combined with the complete absence of anti-state edges is at least suspicious. The neo-communists – ex-anarchists do not speak for a moment about the destruction of the state. Instead, they speak in a denunciatory, political way aiming for its wide consumption and present themselves as the far left of the left government, which they denounce, but without openly declaring war against it. The extra-parliamentary opposition to the leftist government of SY.RI.Z.A. has nothing to do with anarchy and freedom. We do not seek neither a reform of the system, nor its leftist grooming; all we want is its total destruction. However, we live in strange days and we have to rearm even the most fundamental parts of anarchy…
Authority, then, is not just ugly, sullen faces attached to miserable bodies decorated with suits and ties, in the same way anarchy is not “honest worker’s sweat” and “The reading of the complete works of Marx and Bakunin“… Surely the first ones must become ideal shooting targets for Kalashnikov bursts, but this is not enough…
Authority is a social relationship.
Authority is born even in our friendships, in our meetings, in our love, in our daily lives.
Again, we have to cast it out of our relations. Of course, this is done only through a belligerent/armed confrontation with the existent, as our searches are not a hippie inner meditation but practical wishes best expressed when our fingers fill magazines with bullets and our hands arm our weapons to “talk”…
ii) Overcoming revolutionary myths
The class of the poor, the oppressed, the “ones at the bottom”, the workers, is a faded label, which for us does not represent anything in itself . They are words that are lost in the void and their echo is immersed in a past that has been overcome. The working class is a massive forced social identity, which crushes the uniqueness and particularity of the individual, of every different man under its weight. The people is the fairytale that connects a variety of persons with completely different perceptions, habits, anxieties, thoughts, personalities, characteristics most of them regressing into confusion, homogenized in the mouths of politics experts with the name “the people”. The people, the society is the realm of contradictions. It is the common place of origin, and we who deny the ethics and values of society also come from it, but it leads to different options of destinations. Within the society reside slaves who want to look like their bosses, subjects who worship order, conservatives who defend normality, the petty bourgeois who worship property, the fascists who fear everything different, the good citizens who fall in love with the privacy of their home and the cleanliness of their furniture, the underclass that envy the ensconced, the ensconced who are indifferent, the poor who grumble but are afraid to act, immigrants, delinquents who admire the privileged… At the same time, within the same society, there are progressives, sensitive philanthropists, leftists, pacifists, communists, libertarians, anarchists, revolutionaries even the nihilists-negators of society.
What is called “the people”, “society” is all the above mosaic of relations between a fog of persons, some of them connected with an affinity of perceptions and experiences, others at a fierce war with each other.
The people is always seen in a positive way. The people are claimed by all, from the fascists and conservatives to leftists and anarchists. The people are “poor”, “honest”, “depressed”, “wronged” and of course “wise” when voting… The people and the working class, according to political experts, is eternally deluded, thus always in need of guidance. Marxists and their anarchist great-grandchildren are always willing to guide (in the name of “the people” of course) and offer the promised land, the post-revolutionary society. In their texts, posters and events, they always speak in plural, using the collective “we” of the people, the workers, the proletariat, considering that, presenting themselves as part of the proletariat, they will become more likeable and the take the people on their side. The funny thing is that, usually, the political representatives of the proletariat have no connection with it, as, to put it in a “class” way, they come from petty bourgeois or middle-class layers (eternal students, regulars and owners of coffeehouses, economically dependent from their parents etc. .).
As new messiahs–liberators , they address the motley mass of the working class, considering it as the ultimate revolutionary subject. But from within the working class comes the indifference of many, the misery of the petty bourgeoisie, the patriotic cannibalism, the 500,000 voters of the fascist Golden Dawn, law-abiding citizens, informants, the conservatives, the pious of the churches, the faithful TV-viewers, the zombies of the digital world and social media, the happy consumers…
What connects us as anarchists with all these people?… From the absolute nothing, until irreconcilable hostility. Anarchy and the labor movement followed two parallel lines and it is geometrically proven that parallel lines do not intersect. Why, then, should we acknowledge the oppressed in a general and vague way as “brothers” and talk about class war, along people with whom we do not have anything in common? Better to put forward the overall anarchist attack that eliminates all these illusions of the common front of the oppressed. Because right now, all that connects us with the oppressed is the economic condition we are required to live in. But the common coercive economic condition we experience as marginalized, along with the poor, the unemployed, workers, migrants is a forced condition and not a conscious choice. Except from all of us who consciously chose the social margin and refused material privileges, what most oppressed people desire is not to destroy the world of exploitation, but to move to their bosses’ mansions, wear their clothes, imitate their manners and, in turn, oppress all those under their authority. The slave who seeks rights without having a liberating conscience will soon seek to wear his master’s suit. One only needs to notice the accumulated micro-authority that oppressed ones bear inside them when they express it against all those they believe to be “weaker” than them; the native against the immigrant, the immigrant against his family, the “most experienced” workers against their new colleagues… This is the class of modern proletarians. A mix of mercenaries of misery and cannibalism, ready to offer their services to the highest bidder. Oppressed people with oppressed complexes, wanting to be like their bosses.
We don’t want, therefore, to seek comrades and allies inside coercive common conditions we did not choose, but through common choices.
We are neither tricked nor pleased by ephemeral alliances with those who fight for a better salary or rights and reforms of the existent’s misery. We may find ourselves next to them behind barricades or in conflicts with the cops, but we’ll never meet with them substantially unless they demolish their internal moral identity of the worker, the student, the unemployed, the demonstrator and unless they refuse the world of order and laws all together.
We don’t care about those who, having nothing to lose, go out in the streets, but about those willing to lose everything to regain their lives from the beginning…
Besides, among the first ones, you’ll find the biggest traitors, who, in the first hitch or in front of the lure of an economical promise, will desert you, squeal you or even turn against you…
In contrast, in the latter case, you’ll find some of your closest and most authentic comrades and accomplices… How many times have we not found ourselves in the middle of a stormy sea of confusion and contradictions? The same people with whom we were side by side, throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails at the cops and sharing times and moments behind flaming barricades, in the context of a corporatist claim of a “wild strike” for better salaries, returned fast to their daily routine and shielded themselves again with the uniform of the lawful citizen, voter, family man, TV-viewer right after their claim was either satisfied or rejected. From the “wild strike” of Chalybourgia, we ended up with the mobilization’s total control by the union adjacent to the Communist Party and the warm welcome of Golden Dawn’s MPs, who rushed to show their solidarity to the “Greek worker’s” struggle. From the barricades and the flaming nights in Keratea and the sabotage of the landfill facility installation in the area, we ended up with high election rates for the Golden Dawn in the same area.
But even the “wild youth” reciprocates in its contradictions. From student squats and attacks against cops it jumps without a second thought to pogroms against immigrants and panegyric fiestas of national pride (“athletic” successes of the national football team).
It is not enough, therefore, only to occasionally overcome the law by throwing a rock or a Molotov cocktail. This is surely a necessary step. However, along with the bank or the police vehicle which we’ll torch, we ought to torch all the authoritarian residues inside us, the moral preconceptions and the conservative stereotypes we inherited from this world.
Of course, as we hate criticism for the sake of criticism and the degradation of digital pseudo-nihilist dirge, that criticizes everything except from the deformed “super-ego”, our position is clear. As much as we want to want to crush the petty politics of the newly minted anarcho-marxists, we evenly want to demolish the ivory tower of the “ideologists’” theory of pure anarchy.
We analyze and decode the complex of society’s explosive contradictions, not to remain spectators and admire our “authority”, but to organize strategically our anarchist attack. There are the so-called intermediate social struggles, some of which (i.e. students’ squats) are interesting due to their composition and their diversion, which may trigger chaotic situations that are the ideal field of expression of our hatred for the system. Obviously, we’ll not be absent from these struggles, without forgetting, of course, that the “ideal” is blotted by reality and what’s left from the rose is the thorn.
However, as we don’t cage ourselves into demands and reformist notions, we maintain our characteristics and don’t lose ourselves in petty political discounts to become socially “liked”. Therefore, we invade as anarchists and don’t hide behind other social masks (unemployed, worker, demonstrator); in contrast, we wear the hood and attack, without fearing the pit of contradictions of the intermediate struggles.
So, if we want to destroy this world of organized exploitation and boredom, we must talk about the overcoming of classes and not wiggle the shroud of “class struggle” as a flag. Red anarchists that talk about class struggle have a corpse in their mouths which has begun to rot. In continuous anarchist insurrection, all classes are abolished. The individual, discovering in a liberating manner its conscious self, is in total rupture with the class of which it comes from, whether this is the proletarian one or the petty bourgeois. We refuse every class because it’s a result of fissions triggered by the system. Every class bears inside it the characteristics and ethics of the existent. The beloved child of red “anarchists”, the proletariat, carries inside it the ethics of labor, the pseudo-pride of patriotism, the worship of petty ownership, the remains of religious conservatism… This is the sad representation of the confusion which triumphs inside the intermediate reformist labor struggles that never overcome their myopic self to acquire an overall liberating perspective.
iii) About Black Anarchy
We renounce, therefore, any notion of “class struggle” which, in its most radical form, the Marxist variation, aims to the conquest of power through the dictatorship of the proletariat. We spit on the “experts” of revolution, the communist leadership, the veterans and the “anarchist” personas of public relations that compete with each other for the position of the greatest helmsman of revolution.
Besides, liberation will come when we smash the heads of our self-appointed “liberators”.
We refuse to wait for the objective conditions of mass uprising. The preparation of big masses as a precondition for the “revolution” against authority only triggers postponement.
We know we live in times of “crisis”. Some ex-anarchists chose to follow the Marxist rhetoric of pragmatism, economism, thinking that they speak the language of political realism. They could not stand as anarchists; they’ll prove to be incompetent as Marxists…
Their arguments already transform and lead to obsolete alliances with individuals and political milieus that define themselves in terms of political opposition. Anarchy no longer has anything to do with them…
We insist on anarchy’s blackness.
In chaos, disorder, living dangerously, nihilism of action, in the armed confrontation with the existent, in the fire of the continuous anarchist insurrection.
We reject all the idealized principles that revolutionary theories talking about the future liberation and social harmony promise. Life offers no guarantees. The time is now and the place is here…
Let’s be honest; we don’t know how a liberated tomorrow will be “functional”. That’s exactly why it’s liberated.
Because it’ll be full of possibilities, questions and doubts. Whoever seeks for certain answers and Marxist certainties will soon seek the guarantee of authority and priesthoods of red power.
We maintain our questions and black flag…
This is black anarchy.
Anarchy, however, demands the organization of the new anarchist urban guerrilla, if we don’t want it to degenerate into a meaningless poetic chatter, doomed to be followed by the alternative integration in the system. Concepts that are not armed, like anarchist individualism, nihilism end up being harmless words in the mouths of even more harmless individuals who confuse anarcho-nihilism with the subculture of “antisocial lifestyle”.
Anarcho-nihilism combines the propaganda of words with the propaganda of shootings, fire, dynamite. Its dynamics is forged on the anvil of actions where consciousness and experience meet in a never ending dance and not in the keyboards of the digital world of noting.
Therefore, the anarchist urban guerrilla has the possibility to carry anarchy from abstract theory to practice where our desires are armed and trigger our own reality.
The Conspiracy of Cells of Fire and FAI are the reflection of our desires. We promote the creation of an informal network of cells and groups of anarchist affinity with the aim to diffuse the practical theory and attacks. We weave our own spider web… We organize our attacks against the outposts of the world of organized exploitation and boredom. We hit the banks, the police stations, the courthouses, the prisons, the ministries, the party offices, the corporate empires and whatever guards and reproduces the values of this world. Of course, we don’t forget that new anarchist urban guerrilla’s target is not just the blowing up of things and execution of authority’s officers, but, simultaneously, the destruction of social relations that bear inside them the poison of power. Therefore, in parallel with the organization and diffusion of FAI and CCF via bullets and bombs, we desire to smash with our texts all these daily social conventions and slap the mentality of willing obedience that are half of the authority’s power…
We hate the hand that holds the whip as much as we hate the back of those who uncomplainingly accept its hits…
Don’t follow me… I’m not leading you…
Don’t walk ahead of me… I’ll not follow you…
Carve your own path… Become yourself…
WE ORGANIZE 10, 100, 1000 cells of Informal Anarchist Federation and Conspiracy of Cells of Fire
ATTACK FIRST AND ALWAYS FOR ANARCHY
Conspiracy of Cells of Fire – FAI/IRF
Imprisoned Members Cell