Recuperation – Dark Nights

The purpose of this piece is to better understanding of mass media’s relationship to rebels (including anarchists of all stripes), in general as well as in the context of a repressive atmosphere in Bristol. As well as raising local specifics, it hopes to encourage stronger awareness around wider issues of representation and counter-insurgency…

… even in the best-case scenario, on the level of sheer pragmatism, the mass media cannot be made to serve liberatory purposes. It works by systematically removing events, ideas or proposals from their context, to then re-package and re-serve them as fragments so we can consume them while never actually living them. What sense can critiques with the depth of anarchist ones make when presented as a 60-second jumble sandwiched between ten others in contradiction, how can anything meaningful take root in an environment dedicated to keeping everything restricted to surface level only?

Revolutionary memory is not an empty letter. It is not a museum affair. It is not a dry ritual that is exhausted in anniversary recurrences. Revolutionary memory is the thread that binds the past to the present and that lays the foundations for a future that will do justice to those who sacrificed for a different world. A world where no one will see the sky through barbed wire, where no one will have their bodies broken in the sweatshops of class exploitation, where no one will be murdered on land and sea borders, in police stations, in the urban ghettos of metropolises. Revolutionary memory brings together those who are missing from our side, making them complicit in our subversive projects and dreams. Revolutionary memory, if we give it the value it deserves, becomes a subversive project, a springboard for struggle, a source of inspiration and disposition in the beautiful cause of freedom. For the words that will form a conceptual framework different from the one spoken today by politicians, economists, military analysts, industrialists, the golden boys of the stock exchange, journalists. Or they will be words armed ready to become an impulsive energy. Or they will be nothing.

The metropolises are the modern steam engines, they are the universal factories of capitalism. The transparent sweatshops where capital’s domination, control and repression of the explosive contradictions it produces are absolutely institutionalized.

The crimes of the state and capitalism within the metropolises become isolated incidents. They are recorded in fragmentary narratives by the bourgeois ideology that imposes its hegemony. Our own memory, which should highlight them and transform them into social consciousness, into a perception of our role and position, is constantly absent. When it is not, it is blurred, colourless, non-existent, empty of content. Fascist censorship here has for the moment been replaced by a new form of active censorship. The production of incessant distorted knowledge, the methodical reversal of facts, their insidious substitution. It is revisionism that attacks consciences, memories, the very history of the struggles. Continue reading “Athens, Greece: 4-11 June Week of Reconstruction of the Alexandros Grigoropoulos Monument” →