Subversive bookfair in Brussels

I’ve been thinking for quite some time now, to write about certain topics, and after reading some texts, it seems to me that the issue I want to write about is a sentiment shared by other companions.

I would like to speak about a need that I have always felt, a need that not only has never been soothed, but on the contrary has been occupying more and more space in my reflections during the last times: I’m talking about Utopia. This idea haunts me with a new and strong persistence, which might be because its quest has slowly but inexorably become less obsessive in the hearts of what we can generically define as the anarchist movement. At least this is my impression.

Maybe disillusioned from the years which are now perceived as an accumulation of failures, or maybe fatigued by the repeated blows (more in a moral than in a physical sense) which remain constant possibility when you are in struggle, all of this to then be told that anyways we will never realize our wildest dreams; it seems to me there is a certain tendency to settle for less: better to win a small struggle to boost your morale than to put up with another failure while aiming at the ultimate victory. Better to solace a part of this miserable existence rather than to risk never improving anything during our attempt to permanently overturn it. The constant push to improve our adaptation to the situations we are confronted with, is superseding the tension which would not allow us to ever adapt; the frenzy and anxiety to do something, be active and feel alive, is risking to become a substitute for the analysis and critique necessary to develop our own projectuality. We then end up doing like the others and talking like the others, because we think that the use of another language would make us incomprehensible, risking remaining isolated. We all participate in the same struggles and we also do the things in the exact same way, using the same means which on the long run are sterilizing and immobilizing us, to then discover that we are all too often just chasing what the anarchist movement used to be; we have aborted our creative capacities, we have choked the imagination necessary to pursue the straggles we had embarked on…

What about those struggles then? As means to reach something wider and bigger these struggles risk to become an end at itself, and this is the road on which we loose sight of Utopia. The occasions on which I talk with comrades about bigger dreams become more and more rare. I am not referring to those daydreams that we put aside once we’re done fantasizing, but about a sublime aspiration to shoot for, something to strive towards to try to realize. To me, Utopia is not an island in never never land, but something which pushes the blood towards the heart and brain, an idea which never allows truce; it is the tension which pushes me to act and at the same time the consciousness which enables me to overcome fear. The Utopia is one of the reasons for which I am anarchist, because it is the only thing which offers me the possibility to struggle, not only for a new world, but for something that has never been realized before. This is my Utopia: the attempt to realize something that has never been achieved before, the strife towards a world that is not this one, but neither the one of some thousand years ago. Something we can only try through an insurrectionary rupture, a moment which is nothing more than the opening of a possibility, which lets me look into a deep abyss and feel vertigo, leaving open the possibility that in its depths could be something completely fascinating as something absolutely terrible. In short, a leap into the unknown without knowing beforehand what the society I desire has to look like, but starting from what I don’t desire.

Thinking the unthinkable, as the preliminary condition to attempt the impossible.

“He who starts thinking about the end when he’s just at the beginning, he who needs the feeling of security to reach the end even before starting, he will never reach it.”

A. Libertad