English The Anarchist Review The Anarchist Review, no. 12/2011
| 16 lutego 2011
Dział:
The Anarchist Review
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Editorial for 12th issue
The 12th issue of the Anarchist Review is dedicated to the memory of Rafał Górski. Rafał was a great comrade who always attended demonstrations, pickets and debates. He lived and died free. We continue his fight against capitalism and the state.
Marek Piekarski | Blowing at the Fire. In Memory of Rafał Górski
Recollections of the long-term activist and historian of the anarchist movement, who died in 2010 after a long illness.
TECHNOLOGY IN THE SERVICE OF POWER
Uri Gordon | Anarchism and the Politics of Technology
Contemporary anarchists’ practical attitudes toward technology seem highly ambivalent, even contradictory. On the one hand, we find anarchists involved in numerous campaigns and direct actions where the introduction of new technologies is explicitly resisted, from bio- and nanotechnology to technologies of surveillance and warfare. On the other hand, anarchists have been actively using and developing information and communication technologies (ICTs), as well as engaging in practical sustainability initiatives that involve their own forms of technological innovation.
Jarosław Urbański | Commentary on “Anarchism and the Politics of Technology”The author of „Anarchism and the Politics of Technology” seems to stop half way. Gordon does not clearly indicate the position of anarchism on the usage of technology. He opposes anarcho-primitivism and the Promethean approach, since both to him seem extreme. He calls for an unspecified third approach.
Val Plurnwood | The State and the Explanation of Nuclear Technology
I want to look at the role of the state and of some other factors in the development of nuclear technology and try to see what conclusions about the centrality of the state are suggested by this. Nuclear technology is a particularly favourable example for a view which treats the state as the central organ of social control to which all other factors may be reduced or are subsidiary. But I want to argue that even in this most favourable case we need to look beyond state structures for an adequate explanation of the kind of social control involved in nuclear technology.
Jany P. Waluszko | Żarnowiec – Past and Present of the Protest against the Construction of a N uclear Power Plant in Poland
Autonomous groups lack ideas for action because they are usually only concerned with their own interests. They use arguments that only convince themselves, they set goals that only they themselves are interested in reaching, and they rarely care about ordinary people, their expectations or value systems. They also rarely understand the very issues they tackle with (rather they usually do not engage in solving the problem but instead contemplate proper ways of dealing with it according to particular dogmas).
CAPITALISM IN GREEN DISGUISE
Kolya Abramsky | Energy And Labor In The World-Economy
The paper will identify, and partially answer, three broad questions: (1) How does energy relate to labor in general? (2) How does labor within the energy sector specifically operate? (3) How can an understanding of energy and labor contribute to understanding current concepts such as “energy crisis” and “transition towards renewable energy”?
Ariel Salleh | Climate Change – And The ‘Other Footprint’
When governments, corporate think tanks, and multilateral agencies deliberate on strategies for combating climate change, you can be sure they’ll bypass one highly salient variable. Global warming causes, effects, and solutions are “sex/gendered.“
Larry Lohmann | Neoliberalism and the Calculable World: The Rise of Carbon Trading
Neoliberalism can be a vague, even incoherent concept when it becomes entangled in the false dichotomies between market and state that are habitually thrown up by its adherents. It is often said, for example, that neoliberalism promotes free markets and reins in the state; yet, as Karl Polanyi pointed out long ago, laissez faire itself is an interventionist state project (‘laissez faire was planned; planning was not’).
Climate change is a consequence of capitalism. An on-growing extractive system entirely dependent on the use of fossil fuels as a cheap energy source that has driven unsustainable practices with socially and environmentally destructive consequences. The climate crisis also embodies the complexities of unequal distribution of impacts, historical responsibility for emissions, the right to use atmospheric capacity, as well as political, economic and social injustices.
THE MOVEMENT AND COLLECTIVE REBELLION
Common sense and historical experience combine to suggest a simple but compelling view of the roots of power in any society. Crudely but clearly stated, those who control the means of physical coercion, and those who control the means of producing wealth, have power over those who do not. This much is the truth whether the means of coercion consists in the primitive force of a warrior caste or the technological force of a modern army.
Piotr Krzyżaniak | Tenants’ Movement, Precarious Employment and Rent Strike
Taking control over the city budget and the reproduction of the labor force would strengthen the bargaining power of precarious workers at the workplace. The bourgeoisie would lose the ability to control the living standards of precarious workers after they leave their workplace, and that could considerably reduce the extent of exploitation.
COLLECTIVE REBELLION AND DOING
Millions throughout the world have given up the dream of a radically different type of society. There is no doubt that the fall of the Soviet Union and the failure of national liberation movements throughout the world have brought disillusionment to millions of people. The notion of revolution was so strongly identified with gaining control of the state that the failure of those attempts to change the world through gaining control of the state has led very many people to the conclusion that revolution is impossible.
Sergio Tischler | The Crisis of the Classical Canon of the Class Form and Social Movements in Latin America
One of the most important issues regarding social movements in Latin America is related to the question of class and class struggle in current capitalism. This is a thorny theoretical issue that is usually left aside as a consequence, among others, of the dramatic changes associated with the end of the Cold War and the fall of the so-called Really Existing Socialism of former Soviet Union and its satellite states.
STATE – THE APPARATUS OF DAILY REPRESSION
Magda M. | Mothers’ Strike. Struggle Against the Coercion of Work
The mechanism of authority is disturbed not only through law-breaking or the rebellion of individuals or groups against state institutions. State and capital are continuously facing disruption of their functioning because they are never able to fully control the people who are questioning the rules of their existence.
Andrzej Grzybowski, Łukasz Weber | City Surveillance – Aims and Effectiveness vs. Usefulness and Necessity
The authorities’ insistence on employing video surveillance systems is met with public consent. Reasons for this consent are public ignorance, lack of will and limited knowledge. As a result it is hard to question and reject the usefulness and effectiveness of monitoring.
Agnieszka Maria Wasieczko | Biometric IDs. Convenience or Tool of Surveillance?
Just two years ago Poland finished the extremely expensive replacement of the old identity cards. Meanwhile, the present government has quietly and without any public debate prepared the next „real revolution”: the introduction of biometric identity cards.
Jarosław Urbański | The Development of Police Forces in Poland and Abroad. A Historical and Statistical Account (1918-2010)
Along with the processes of urbanization, industrialization and the advent of capitalism, a coercive machinery was developed. The police, as we know it today, entered the scene in the 18th century and became not only „a tool of political control over conspiracies, rebellions, and opposition movements, but also a disciplinary power”. From this moment – as Michel Foucault writes – „this is the apparatus that is adjacent to the body of a whole society (...)”.
A-VARIA
From May to October 2010 KontenerART – a “mobile cultural center” in a container – was opened in Poznan for the third time. In the past, when it was situated on Wolności Square amidst banks and other financial institutions, the project could be positively perceived as a tool for the recovery of the city center. However, for the time being it stands in the old riverbed of the Warta river – and it should be primarily seen as a tool of gentrification.
Herbert Marcuse | Re-examination of the Concept of Revolution
Marcuse writes: „‘Re-examination’ is therefore an element of the concept of revolution, part of its internal development.” This article should be read as a historical text from the late 1960s., the time of student revolts, the sexual revolution, the Cold War, the success of national liberation movements in the Third World, the war in Vietnam and the peak of the imperial competition between Moscow and Washington.
MOVIES on the attached DVD
(65’, 2010, SzumTV, Poland)
The development of modern cities is mainly determined by investors, entrepreneurs and authorities who want to generate profits. Those who are not able to pay the increased rents and higher prices for food and services are forced to leave their homes and move to the cities’ outskirts. However, tenants stripped of their right to a roof over their heads don’t just give up. They fight back and resist the attempts to push them out of the city centers.
Many Straws Make a Nest. Proletarian Unrest in Delhi’s Industrial Rust Belt
(59’, 2010, KanalB, Germany)
In the last 20 years, the Delhi region has turned into one of the world’s major industrial hubs. The required workforce is recruited from India’s poorer regions, where survival is being made more and more difficult for the rural populace. This is why 4.5 million industrial workers in Southern Delhi are willing to ruin their health for wages their families can hardly survive on. People are almost powerless in this situation, but still they try to find effective ways to collectively resist.
Mothers’ Strike
(22’, 2010, SzumTV and Feminist Think Tank, Poland)
This documentary shows the living conditions of the striking women in Wałbrzych, their struggle against local authorities, conflicts with welfare institutions and their self-organizing attempts. They explain how their living situation relates to the changes in the labour market. The movie was made as a part of the project „Reclaim citizenship. Women and the economy of care”.
An Anarchist’s Dillemas
(7’, 2000, Paweł Sendyka, Poland)
„If we have an example of people doing just fine without the government it is the reason to fight it.” Documentary about Rafał Górski.