Lions Led by Jackals – Stalinism in the International Brigades
Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, January 2016, no ISBN]
This 40-page A4 pamphlet published by the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty traces the history of the International Brigades by way of sifting through the trove of documents from the Communist International’s archives of the International Brigades, which have recently been made available online. These offer interesting insights into the structure of the Brigades as well as the histories and motivations of those who joined them.
The International Brigades (IB) were troops set up by the Communist International who fought in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) on the side of the Republican forces against the fascist military coup led by General Franco and supported by Italy and Germany. The primary motivation of many members was to “fight fascism”, which showed a high level of individual and collective courage. Many certainly thought that they were, while fighting against fascism, also fighting for communism. They were about to be disappointed. As Street writes, “The goal of the Popular Front [Republican] government, which included representatives of the Spanish Communist Party, was not working-class revolution, but defense of bourgeois power and property relations” […] “Confronted with the greatest working-class insurrection in Europe since the October Revolution, Stalinism sought to demobilise and confine that insurrection to the limits of a “bourgeois-democratic revolution’”. The International Brigades were disbanded by the Republican government in 1938.
Incontro con Christoph Fringeli della redazione di DATACIDE, rivista che esplora le implicazioni sociali del souno del dancefloor e il binomio noise & politics. L’incontro sarà moderato da Riccardo Balli. A seguire dalle ore 21 ad appena un numero civico di distanza presso Stomp Bologna SOUND APERITIF con dj Lynx + C.F. (Praxis Records) datacide-magazine.com
praxis-records.net Rivista seminale in lingua inglese che sin dagli annI ’90 in formato fanzine e sotto il nome ALIEN UNDERGROUND monitora le implicazioni sociali del suono mutante del dancefloor. Il termine noise usato nell’accezione del magazine individua specificatamente la cassa di risonanza che si crea tra il continuum di sonorità elettroniche orientate al ballo & la politica intesa in senso allargato come scienza che regola ogni forma di interazione sociale. Ma perchè erigire la musica dance a campo di osservazione favorita dell’antropologia del contemporaneo? Venitelo a scoprire di persona giovedì prima al Libreria modo infoshop e poi al bar Stomp Bologna .
Music by Lynx, Psychic Defence, Christoph Fringeli
Riccardo Balli, however obscure and enigmatic he might appear in his writing and featured on his picture discs, has shown that he can be highly lucid and brilliantly persuasive in expounding his ideas when he is provoked to defend himself by attacks, such as the one Toby Reynolds, the literary critic of Datacide, launched against him on Reddit in the summer of 2018.
In reviewing ‘Frankenstein, Or The 8-Bit Prometheus’, Reynolds warned his readers of the danger that Balli might become the messiah of the enemies of realism. “Here at last was a self-proclaimed advocate of anti-writing: explicitly anti-realist and by implication anti-reality as well. Here was a writer ready to declare that words were meaningless and that all communication between human beings was impossible. Reynolds conceded that Balli presented a valid personal vision, but “the peril arises when it is held up for general emulation as the gateway to writing or music of the future, that bleak new world from which the humanist heresies of faith in logic and belief in man will forever be banished.’ Balli was moving away from realism, with “characters and events [that] have traceable roots in life” – from the writing of Paul Virilio, Stewart Home, Bill Drummond, Mark Manning, Lester Bangs, Brecht and Sartre.1
Reynolds’ attack opened one of the most interesting discussions on this subject ever conducted in public. Balli replied that he certainly did not see himself as a messiah,
Så
länge som det funnits en tanke på universell befrielse genom
kommunistisk revolution, har detta projekt rymt en spänning mellan
två tillvägagångssätt – två motsatta positioner, bland
människor som, ytligt betraktat, strävar efter samma slutmål.
Å
ena sidan finner vi ett synsätt som kan sammanfattas med dessa ord:
Endast revolutionen kommer att öppna för ett verkligt lustfyllt
liv, och för att nå dit måste vi agera som asketiska kadrer.
Den
motsatta sidan menar: Bara genom att utveckla våra lust och följa
våra begär kommer revolutionen att öppna sig som en möjlighet.
Om
vi blickar tillbaka på det gångna seklets två stora faser av
revolutionära kamper (den första kring 1917–23, den andra kring
1967–77, med geografiska variationer), så finner vi genast att det
för många revolutionärer varit grundläggande och självklart att
hedonism och revolution måste gå hand i hand.
Frågan
är nära kopplad till synen på arbete. “Frihetens rike börjar
i själva verket först där det arbete som är bestämt av nödtvång
och yttre ändamålsenlighet upphör”, skriver Marx i det tredje
bandet av Kapitalet.
Han lämnar inga tvivel om att frihetens rike alltid måste bygga på
nödvändighetens rike, men heller inte om att människans mål måste
vara att uppnå största möjliga frihet. Och detta måste inbegripa
lönearbetets avskaffande.
Book review: No borders, no fatherland! France – What’s New for the Left?
(Ni patrie ni frontières, Paris 2017, 454p., no ISBN)
I first came across the journal Ni patrie ni frontières (subtitled: Ni États, ni Eglises – Ni “races”, ni ethnies – Traductions et débats) around 2003/2004 when they published a collection of texts in English by the Dutch group De Fabel van de illegaal, titled Nationalism, Anti-Semitism and the Anti-globalisation Movement (1998-2003). At a time when things were going seriously wrong in the radical Left and especially the wider “anti-globalisation” movement, the brochure was a welcome signal that there were critical voices that were sensitive to the growing overlap of far right and far left anti-imperialist positions, often manifesting themselves as “anti-Zionist”.
I started picking up copies of Ni patrie ni frontières whenever I could find them. The French journal was started in 2002 by Yves Coleman and a fair number of issues appeared in quick succession. Initially published in the form of photocopied and staple-bound A4 editions, they switched to printed softcovers in 2007 with issue 21/22.
The journal presents a wide range of historical texts and contemporary analysis of the pressing questions of the “revolutionary” Left, with views from a spectrum of radical writers and groups ranging from Left Communism to anarchism and Third Camp Trotskyism. Among the writers are Loren Goldner (Insurgent Notes), and the groups the Alliance for Worker’s Liberty, (the German) Wildcat publication, Temps critiques, Movement Communiste, the Worker-Communist Parties of Iran and Iraq, as well as anarchist and left communist classics.
