Authoritarian Communism

Reality of proletarian struggle versus workerist myths

It was on June 17th, 1953. Important sectors of the proletariat rose up in East Berlin before this revolt spread all over the “German Democratic Republic” and was repressed by the intervention of the Red Army (red with insurgent proletarians’ blood).

We will not here, in this short text, develop in detail how this movement expressed itself. We only insist on drawing the main forces and weaknesses, which historically recur from one struggle to another despite the particular conditions that make emerging such a struggle at a place and a moment, and not at others. Our goal is not to tell a story but to draw programmatic lessons from previous struggles for the future insurrections. Nevertheless, we invite comrades to read Cajo Brendel’s booklet “1953: The Working Class Uprising In East-Germany” (which was one of many sources of inspiration) despite the fact that we have reservations about the ideological framework (i.e. councilism) of this militant and that we criticize in the course of the present text.

This uprising, some weeks after Stalin’s death, put back on the forefront of history the visceral antagonism that opposes two social classes with antagonistic and contradictory interests and programs. And this, whatever shape the bourgeoisie takes to contain proletarians. Because it’s always with force that the proletariat imposes its existence of a class which is deprived of all and its necessity to put an end to this old world, whatever the nature of the facade restoration may be or the colour (red, white, brown…) used to repaint our exploitation. At the strongest moment of the counterrevolution, whereas our enemies robbed our flags, whereas their state proclaims itself to be a “workers’” one and they pretend to manage us in the name of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” (which in fact never existed and was replaced by their dictatorship over the proletariat), it’s the internal contradictions of the social relation that make class struggles re-emerging. Continue reading “June 1953 – Proletarian uprising in East Germany” →

We receive and disseminate:

You take away his voice, we give him back his word! A flyer not to forget the words Alfredo has always expressed and for which he is in 41 bis!

CLASS HATRED AND THE MYTH OF AVENGING ANARCHY.

Comrades, now in the FSB building in Arkhangelsk there will be an attack, for which I take responsibility. The reasons for this are clear to you. In response to the FSB repressing, building frames, and torturing people, I have decided to strike it. Most likely, I will die from the explosion because I will trigger the bomb manually. Therefore, I request you to disseminate information about the attack: who carried it out and the reasons. Well, that is it. I wish you to go firmly and uncompromisingly toward our goal. Bright is the future of anarchist communism!

Mikhail Zhlobitsky

(October 31, 2018 attack claim against the FSB in Arkhangelsk, Russia)

It is also absurd to think that the class struggle is over; we are immersed in it up to our necks but unlike yesterday, the barbarization due to technological isolation (which each of us carries with him or her) deprives us of the real per- ception of the phenomenon as a whole. This barbarization entails a return to primordial, savage (thus purer) forms of class conflict. Mediating figures such as “unions” and “parties” are skipped. In the most technologically “advanced” part of the world, the social subject that once characterized the class of the oppressed, the “proletariat,” has been replaced by an undefined and desperate class that has no self-awareness. Meanwhile, hatred, anger have accumulated saturating the air, making it unbreathable and ready to explode at the first spark of the right intensity. This is well known by the powers-that-be, who despite having less good cards in their hands than ours, play them to their best by fueling conflicts among the poor. But they are only palliatives, only barely effective. Unions and leftist parties no longer work. Their firefighting role has been replaced by weapons of mass distraction such as racism and patriotism. But how long can this last? The strategy of pitting poor against more poor is out of breath, time counted. General impoverishment due to the technological wave and resulting unemployment will defuse racism and patriotism, but only if we play our cards right. In the time it takes for us to readjust and to guarantee citizenship incomes (real and not truf faldini1 like those of the “5 stars”2) to everyone, the system will be exposed almost helplessly to our attacks. In that time, hatred will reach its peak and perhaps it will be the good time that anger in this unfortunate country will be directed toward the real perpetrators of misery: the state and the bosses.

Moreover, the popular madness over sovereignism is weakening parliamentary democracy by undermining it from the ground up. This sort of “populism” produces conflicting and irrational drives that are difficult for the very people who unleashed them to manage. Today the possibility that our action can open a breach becomes real. We must have clear ideas, conviction and tenacity to turn hatred from the field, to open the eyes of the exploited. Will and determination can turn back the clock of history, making us start again where we began to lose those two irreplaceable qualities. A century ago, we were overwhelmed by the force of an authoritarian “communism” that poisoned us with its fruits, “social democracy” and “dictatorship of the proletariat,” which with their brutality brought the “myth” of the social revolution of the “sun of the future” and anarchy as concrete prospects for total liberation to a sunset. We claimed in our “modernity” that we did not need “myths,” but in this way we killed utopia, the greatest weapon we had to subvert this world. Historically, we have focused too much on rationality, on science while neglecting the instincts of revolt, the feelings, the passions underlying the human. Continue reading “Alfredo Cospito: Class hatred and the myth of avenging anarchy” →