Subversive bookfair in Brussels

The most powerful weapon that all anti-authoritarian persons share and that we have to take to heart, are our ideas. Those that can cement and provoke profound changes in the world we live in. Everywhere around us uprisings and insurrections follow that seem to indicate that we live in a moment favourable for freedom, a historical moment that allowed people to leave their usual mental isolation and to raise the head to be illuminated by the small sparkle of new ideas.

In a context like this, it is normal that we all ask ourselves what to do and how to have an influence on the reality that surrounds us. It seems that there are as much answers as individuals or groups. Nevertheless, much to my regret, I see that postures prevail and, according to me, these can only lead us towards a total failure.

A big part of what is called the anarchist world displays an almost prophetic attitude towards the population, which will be hardly greeted with sympathy. If, to our fellow creatures, we can only present ideas mummified, fossilized or anchored in reflections from the past century – trying to preach the “anarchist” doctrine in the desert of alienation – we will meet, in the best case, only indifference or, in the worst case, a visceral rejection.

Thus, how I see it, the strategy of the moment has to adept to the reality and we have to use our ideas in an intelligent way. Long years of processes of decredibilitation have made the word anarchist a taboo and has made it a concept to distrust. It’s for that reason that we come up against reactions of rejection towards our publications and our propaganda. Yet, have we tried to talk about solidarity, direct action, mutual aid or freedom without shutting ourselves away behind any label? In my experience, I can say that there are much more people than we can imagine who share the ideal of emancipation, although they refuse the label behind which a lot of us place ourselves and that we use to define ourselves.

My own reflection leads me to the conclusion that we have to know to live following the times that we correspond with and have to be capable to overcome the anachronisms and the self-referential dynamics. That will allow ourselves to share our ideas and our values with the rest of the world; as well in the streets as in assemblies. If we come down from our pedestal and we humbly spread our ideas without locking them up in any ideological chapel, then we will probably come to ideas that gather and unify people, and oppose them to a common enemy: the State and the Capital.

After all we all have enough of this precarious work that exploits us and alienates us; that steals our right to live. We all have it difficult with the fact that the comfort of our sofa bathes in the innocent blood of our brothers from other places. It is true that a significant part of the population prefers to close their eyes and let pay their silence in exchange for commodities offered by the society of well-being; however these times are bygone. We see how, all over Europe, the economical affluence drops ceaselessly and how the Welfare state rapidly disappears. When the television, tourism and the industry of the spectacle can no longer hide a decomposing world, when the workers see that they are no longer profitable for the system and that their periods of inactivity follow one after the other, … Thus a large part of the population will be obliged to choose between authoritarianism and freedom.

If during the years before the inflexion point, we don’t show ourselves capable of humbly sharing with the rest of the world our vision and our ideas how to construct the only world in which we can really be free (that means being alive), we will see, faster than we can imagine, parliamentarian neo-dictatorships more adapted than ever before, that at the same time tear away our emancipatory horizon. It is even more a fruitful moment because the political capitalist class lives trough a moment of almost complete delegitimation, that makes it more weak than ever.

If we fail, we will carry the responsibility. That will reflect our incapacity to be really capable of putting everything into play, to cut ourselves loose from all the old antique and void forms and to take the bet of the true revolution. If we triumph, the gratification will justify every previous sacrifice.

Cronos