by Alessandro Stella

from lundimatin #537, 12/10/2026

The student movement, which has spread like wildfire across France in the fall of 2026, was entirely the work of the secondary school students themselves. Without anyone behind them, without a party, without a union pulling the strings, they acted entirely on their own, like adults. They forced all the adults, all the authorities responsible for them, to take them into account.

The Rebirth of a Revolutionary Youth

They did so by denouncing the undignified and discriminatory conditions of their schools, by expressing their material and psychological suffering, and by formulating concrete and relevant demands. They did this by talking and discussing amongst themselves, by organising within the school, by creating a clear message on banners and placards, and then by taking action.

The form of action chosen by these rebellious secondary school students was to block the entrances to their school. They erected barricades of garbage cans, wooden pallets, street furniture—anything they could get their hands on. It was essentially a picket line and a mobilisation effort, forcing people to look at what was written on their placards and to discuss it. This form of action was adopted throughout France within a few days and quickly became a major news story. With very limited resources, through word of mouth, from group to group, via affinity networks, and then through social media, it spread; modern-day self-organisation, and it worked.

Faced with this youth revolt, the possibility of which had escaped everyone, including Laurent Nuñez (minister/prefect/head of the intelligence services), the State immediately decided, “as an adult responsible for protecting its children,” not to listen to the voices of the protesting secondary school students, but to bring them back into line and discipline. “We asked to be able to take the Baccalaureate exam, and they sent the riot police after us,” the students responded. With unimaginable brutality, especially towards teenagers, causing lifelong disabilities, injuries, and trauma: beaten, handcuffed, violently thrown into a police van, then into a squalid police station cell. In police custody, at 15 …

The rebellious youth managed to resist, to refuse to submit, and instead to fight back physically and morally, every single day. Day after day, without giving up, driven by an awareness of the injustices they suffered, rage against those who controlled their destinies, and a desire for a better future. “Fuck no future!” These ideas resonated with young teenagers everywhere, in cities and in the countryside, fuelling the collective movement. They spread rapidly because these ideas found fertile ground. With few resources, no big guns, no money, no central, structured organisation. Without leaders, just facilitators, collective experiences, self-organisation, and coordination.

The secondary school student revolt in the fall of 2026, despite the price paid in the flesh, has already achieved several victories. In the immediate aftermath, without even realising it, they had disrupted all political and electoral agendas and forced all the powers that be to look at them, to listen to them, especially when they shouted to finally be heard.

The visual, spatial, and sonic emergence of this secondary school student revolt clearly reveals that the spearhead of the rebels are young people from the French colonial past, living in disadvantaged working-class neighbourhoods on the outskirts of cities, who have endured generations of daily humiliation, contempt, and exclusion. This is undoubtedly a first in the history of student revolts, from 1968 to the present day.

The other defining characteristic of this secondary school student movement is this cry of revolt, this rejection of “infantilism,” namely, the denigration of a person based on their age. This discrimination should be considered among the structural forms of inferiority and oppression in our societies, alongside classism, machismo, racism, and all forms of supremacy, based on the contempt of those who look down on another person.

These young people are rebelling against all the schizophrenic powers that dominate them;  Legal minors, subject to parental authority, without the right to vote, yet old enough to be beaten, injured, detained, or even imprisoned.

Through their struggle, they have shown and demonstrated that they have ample reason to revolt, that they are capable of taking charge of their own lives and self-organising, as autonomous as adults, without needing anyone to look after them.

Behind the scenes?

To deny that 14- to 17-year-olds could take matters into their own hands and trigger such a social and political upheaval, the State and its government immediately accused “LFI and its far-left proxies” of being behind the rebellious secondary school students. This is a blatant falsehood, a malicious attempt to discredit both the student movement and LFI and its allies. Undoubtedly, the rebellious secondary school students draw their inspiration from past struggles and experiences, both old and new, appropriating and renewing them. But no social movement is ever a carbon copy of a previous experience.

Of course, activists in organised groups dedicate themselves in their workplaces or schools to sparking debates, anti-establishment critiques, and initiatives for resistance. But most often these initiatives remain limited; the influence doesn’t spread, because the influences circulating are numerous. Until the day when, suddenly, rebel groups form, multiply, and coordinate to seize the political space.

At the forefront?

The image of Louis Boyard, LFI deputy, with his tricolour sash, sitting in front of hundreds of students staging a sit-in on Rue d’Assas, is a disaster. For him and the party he represents, but above all, for the nascent student movement. It’s clever. If the goal was to reinforce the Machiavellian insinuation put forward by the government and provide visual proof that LFI was perhaps not behind the revolt but rather at the forefront, it succeeded. Except that the reality is different. It was indeed the students from the universities in the Latin Quarter who had organised the blockades and street demonstrations, and Louis Boyard, with his youthful appearance, could easily have blended in with the others, without any distinguishing characteristics. But the LFI deputy wanted to strike a pose reminiscent of Daniel Cohn-Bendit facing a police officer, implying that the police should step over him to attack the young protesters he had come to protect. In this sequence, everyone clearly saw the LFI’s attempt to co-opt the protest movement for its own partisan and electoral ends.

In constructing the web designed to capture and domesticate its prey, the State has long used the weapon of manufacturing leaders of the struggle, aided by complicit media outlets. Most often, they select representatives from student unions, who are not necessarily the driving force behind the struggle, far from it, and propel them onto the stage through the media machine. Invested with the title of leaders, they will have the legitimacy to speak on television and radio on behalf of all the protesters, and will then be the only ones authorised to represent the movement in negotiations at the Ministry. Now, to pass the audition and have a chance of being promoted to leader, one must obviously fit the required profile: be rebellious yet reasonable, angry yet measured, uncompromising yet open to negotiation. They must also, in all seriousness, present a list of precise and budgeted demands.

And that’s all there is to it. Since May of ’68, we have seen several generations of former “student leaders” who quickly became members of parliament, senators, deputy mayors of Paris, and so on. Have they turned their backs on their social origins? In any case, they haven’t really strayed from them. It is as if the UNEF [National Union of French Students], secondary school student unions, and associations like SOS Racisme, Ni Putes Ni Soumises [Neither Whores Nor Submissives], and others serve only as springboards for ambitious young people to find cushy jobs in institutions run by social democrats; profiteers and traitors to worthy causes.

The search for, construction of, and promotion of leaders is an integral part of the state’s battle to destroy social movements of revolt, which are inherently based on collective rather than personalised functioning. And it must be said that the groups and parties claiming to be revolutionary also reproduce the creation and promotion of leaders, of figures named Jean-Luc Mélenchon or Anasse Kazib. The personalisation of the struggle is seriously detrimental to the struggle itself.

With whom?

The image of Bally Bagayoko, mayor of Saint-Denis, who openly supported the secondary school students in his district from the very beginning, had a different meaning. It represented the support of the closest institution, adding legitimacy to the struggle of the suburban vocational high school students, discriminated against and racialised, proud to revolt. And their mayor was there to support them, like other mayors of working-class districts.

Following the surge of police violence, labor unions, parent-teacher associations, and human rights organisations called for the defense of the secondary school students, “our children,” from police violence and from the violence of the “rioters.” Of course, as if to be promoted to leader of the movement, the labor unions must accept the police information that “the rioters are outsiders to the secondary schools, only wanting to sow disorder and clash with the police.” Given the profile of the thousands of young people arrested—nine out of ten minors and secondary school students—union leaders should revise their analysis and stance.

All participants in a revolutionary social movement, inevitably subject to repression, need solidarity and support from associations, unions, and parties that understand and share their cause. Just as the homeless need blankets, the sick need medical care, and the accused need lawyers. Their institutional position provides a role of protection and defense. And that’s all to the good.

Inside?

To be inside, to truly participate from within, one must be on the same level, at the same footing as everyone else, without distinction. The Yellow Vests understood and promoted this well: in a yellow vest, everyone is the same, on an equal footing, regardless of profession, age, or clothing. Whether in a yellow vest, a black raincoat, or other anonymising clothing, the fundamental principle is that the struggle is collective, that everyone is equal, without any distinction or hierarchy. Everyone participates in the movement according to their abilities and circumstances. No leaders, no one aspiring to leadership, just horizontal, local, and widespread self-organisation.

Without going back to the dawn of revolutionary movements, and focusing on the social movements that have shaken France in recent years, one can only hope that the protest movements of secondary school students, university students, workers, and those in precarious employment of all kinds and professions will manage to escape the grasp of the groups, unions, and political parties that would seek to control and direct them.

Indeed, “left-wing” parties and union confederations have played a decisive role in suppressing the popular uprisings of recent years. By denying its importance and legitimacy in relation to the Yellow Vest movement, and by exploiting the competition between demonstrations, the unions, as is their tradition, refused to join the Saturday protests, the weekly day of the Yellow Vests’ demonstrations.

The power of the national union confederations to impose their agenda of struggles has been a major obstacle to large-scale and determined social movements, such as the fight against Macron’s pension reform. By calling for intermittent strike days, staggered demonstrations, and manipulating the timing of negotiations and other subterfuges, the unions have managed to exhaust and ultimately bring down these widely supported social movements. All of these mass protest movements were simply beyond the control of the unions. They went far beyond the ordinary, comfortable demands that allow the Union, its leaders, and staff to play the role of facilitators of negotiations and compromises—in short, to preserve their organisation’s funding and keep their jobs as union members.

If high school students, like the university students and workers who are rebelling, are well aware that to wage a struggle successfully, one must organise and provide the means to pursue it, why would a centralised organisation be necessary? Why should those rebelling against the capitalist system build a pyramid, reproducing the hierarchical structure they reject, instead of multiplying horizontal links, interconnections, and the coordination of self-organised groups?

Furthermore, why would it be necessary to channel and have converge all the sectoral movements in struggle toward a single program that would summarise all conflicts and hopes? Or toward national demonstrations on fixed dates, instead of allowing free rein to the territorial dissemination of struggles in all possible, imaginable, and surprising forms?

From the movement against the labour law in 2016, to the Yellow Vests, by way of the Soulèvements de la terre [Earth Uprisings] and the student revolt, all of these experiences demonstrate that it is the proliferation of zones or areas of action, rooted in familiar territories and based on local solidarity and complicity, which shakes the powers that be.

The rebellious secondary school students loudly proclaimed that they wanted to be actors, subjects, not objects of their own destiny. That they no longer wanted to be subject to the decisions of the Ministry of National Education, nor the Ministry of the Interior, and even less so to an “algorithm.” Why should they fall in line and submit to political parties, even if they call themselves “Rebellious,” or to unions that arrogate to themselves the authority to represent them and bring their demands before the government?

Let us hope that this new generation of revolutionaries, who have freed themselves from the constraints of structural authority, wanting to be subjects and not objects of their own destiny, does not succumb to the allure of a protective home—another cage—in which one must behave properly and obey the leader.

Alessandro Stella

Illustration: Bernard Chevalier

Ludivine Bantigny, a historian specialising in youth, the Paris Commune, and revolutions, addresses the strange resurgence of references to May ’68 within the secondary school student movement of September-October 2026. For the historian, the upcoming Tuesday, October 13th, could become the equivalent of May 13, 1968, when parents took to the streets alongside their children, and unions and workers swelled in numbers, mirroring the student movement. From Tuesday, October 13, 2026, to May 13, 1968, will the outcome be positive?

Sébastien Charbonnier analyses the ongoing secondary school student movement and the fierce repression it faces through the lens of the power dynamic between the two age groups. The child, etymologically, is infans, the voiceless one, and today the aim is to silence them, even if it means brutalising them. This violence against their bodies consists of correcting what they have not fully grasped; the State then re-explains it to them. The goal is to maintain the adult charade at all costs, at the risk of exposing it and allowing the children’s revolt to spread.

Source: Autonomies

L’article Self-organisation or governing organisation? est apparu en premier sur RévLibertaire.

from The Transmetropolitan Review, 04/10/2026

Click here for the full pamphlet version of ‘The Woman’

Lucia Mancini was likely born in or around Potenza, Italy in 1884. She immigrated to the US with her brother Eustacchio in 1900, eventually settling in Lynn, Massachusetts where she began to read and support the Cronaca Sovversiva anarchist newspaper in 1905.

Lucia and her brother were members of the local anarchist Social Educational Club, which put on events and fundraisers, although Lucia left Lynn in 1907 to pursue work in Connecticut, likely as a seamstress. She rejoined her brother in Wakefield, Massachusetts in 1910 and it was here that she wrote her article ‘The Woman’ for the Cronaca of July 1, 1911.

This text sheds light not only on the condition of women in the early 1900s, it likely explains why Lucia and her brother fled Italy without any other family members.

The Woman

When a mother, having endured the suffering and dangers of childbirth, brings into the world a female child, the members of the family consider themselves struck by a misfortune. And in this state of mind, one doesn’t even attempt to work. At times, the brutal husband goes so far as to openly express his displeasure at having become the father of a girl, and dares to upbraid the poor mother, even while she’s still suffering, quasi reproaching her for having failed to conceive a male.

Thus, the woman is regarded as an inferior being, a useless and harmful encumbrance, and represents the family’s greatest source of anxiety, for they contemplate with terror all the troubles that might befall them on account of this being who had the misfortune of being born female.

Because, as is well known, the so-called “honor,” the prestige in other words, the reputation of the family, in accordance with the prevailing morality established upon the canons of the Church and sanctioned by the legal codes, is deemed to rest primarily upon the conduct of the woman.

A family is irreparably “dishonored” when a woman belonging to it, by breaking the bonds of bigoted morality and rebelling against the tyranny of the family itself, acts by heeding the impulses of her heart and the promptings of her own intellect.

The education of women is therefore carried out under disastrous conditions. Her education, generally speaking, is limited just enough to enable her to read the hymnal, although without understanding much of it; absolute ignorance is the guarantee of her chastity.

And when the little girl becomes a young maiden, and her conscience is stirred by the first surprises of puberty, her mother will labor to explain the physiological reality to her with some tangled jumble of words from which she will learn nothing other than that “she has become a woman, and therefore is under an obligation to work harder and be more useful to the family.”

Later, the priest, to whom her bigoted mother entrusts the young girl for the completion of her education, takes care within the secrecy of the confessional to initiate her into the secrets of nature through a series of lewd questions pertaining specifically to sexual life and relations with men. And it is the beginning of the moral perversion that is destined to cloud the purity of conscience, the innocence of the young girl. While she learns from the priest that the male is an insidious creature, one to be shunned until the time of marriage, she will likewise discover that in fact there is a way to satisfy “certain natural needs” without the dangerous intervention of a male, and that one can enjoy oneself even more, and much better.

And from the tyranny of the family which measured her steps, counted and regulated the beatings of her heart, scrutinized and analyzed her thoughts, the young girl will seek to free herself through marriage.

But her husband imposes upon her a far heavier yoke, a fiercer tyranny from which she will be unable to escape save through death, unless she possesses the strength to rebel.

To rebel then, even outside the marital sphere, even within the family, against everything and everyone, is the path to follow in order to achieve emancipation.

When a woman has fully grasped her mission in life, when she knows how to liberate her mind from inherited prejudices and the unfortunate consequences of her upbringing; when she has convinced herself that she is not, as social injustice would have it, inferior to men, only then will the woman know she can be called emancipated. But to improve her conditions, to be able to take her seat at the banquet of life with the same rights as man, she must beg for nothing, rather she must conquer, and to conquer requires strength.

Let woman then become strong, above all intellectually and…she will triumph.

Lucia Mancini

Lucia Mancini wrote this article for the Proletarian Collaboration column of the Cronaca, a column which only featured women writers such as Ersilia Cavedagni and Elena Purgatorio. However, this would be the only article that Lucia ever wrote for the paper.

Lucia would go on to act in and likely direct numerous anarchist plays as part of various filodrammatici, or amateur theater groups. Most of these events raised funds for the anarchist movement, just as they raised the consciousness of those who attended, spreading a coherent insurgent message from one stage to the next.

More information on her life can be found in the forthcoming Lucia Mancini; or, the Anarchist Guerrilla War.

Source: Autonomies

L’article Lucia Mancini: The Woman est apparu en premier sur RévLibertaire.

from the CrimethInc. collective, 06/10/2026

A Report

This past week, thousands of teenagers have taken the streets of France, clashing with police as they demonstrate against the deplorable conditions in their high schools and a rapidly collapsing future. This is a promising sign, shifting attention from the seemingly unstoppable rise of the extreme right to the question of what people can do on a grassroots basis to defend themselves. Our correspondents in Paris explore the situation in detail.

Another unprecedented summer of record heatwaves, droughts, and wildfires throughout Europe underlines the desperate situation we are all facing today, while politicians of all stripes and their techno-industrial sponsors continue to turn a blind eye, forcing us down the path to catastrophe in the name of progress.

Hoping to turn the page on these environmental disasters, the French government has hurriedly shifted focus to other priorities. The coming months represent a crucial transition for Emmanuel Macron and his government, as they will bring Macron’s second term to a close, opening a new political era in France. Candidates are already battling to succeed Macron in power at the beginning of May 2027.

In the midst of this political spectacle, during an increasingly menacing surge in the popularity of the National Rally (formerly, the National Front), the extreme-right party, it is especially meaningful that teenagers have started to organize at a grassroots level to defend themselves. This organizing gained momentum last week, when blockades of high schools, demonstrations, and riots erupted across France, taking everyone by surprise.

Licensed to Kill?

Since Macron was elected President for the first time in May 2017, the political discourse in France has been even more dominated by an emphasis on authoritarian and far-right ideologies in terms of security, immigration, and economic and social issues.

This political shift towards an even more aggressive form of governance has led to increasing state violence targeting the social movements and uprisings that have emerged since. From the eviction of the ZAD at Notre-Dame-des-Landes in 2017 to the riots following the murder of Nahel in 2023, not forgetting the Yellow Vest sequence and the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown experimental doctrines, we have experienced a headlong plunge into a world of surveillance, repression, and loss of individual freedoms. This has become today’s new normal.

It was in this already suffocating context that last July, the French government decided to vote on a new bill giving police officers more latitude to use their firearms without consequences—a demand that the far right has promoted for years. If voted through, this legislation could set a dangerous precedent, as it would establish “a presumption of ‘legitimate use of arms’ by police and gendarmes ‘in the exercise of their duty’.”

In other words, not only will police officers be able to freely use their weapons if in any situation they claim to fear for their lives or the lives of others, but authorities will no longer have to prove that the officers acted within the framework of the law, as they are required to do today. It will be up to the victims and their families to provide evidence that the use of firearms was not justified. We can already see how this new law represents a legislative tool enabling law enforcement agents, and therefore, the state, to cover up future murders.

Unwilling to let such a law pass without resistance, political opponents and radicals, who had rightly rebranded this law the “license to kill,” decided to organize massive demonstrations and events throughout France on the weekend of September 18 to 20. Thousands of people took part in these protests in different major cities alongside traditional leftist politicians, rights groups such as Amnesty International and the League of Human Rights, and various lawyers and magistrates’ unions.

In the meantime, another call for action reusing all the codes of the Yellow Vest movement spread online. The origins of this call remain obscure, as some national newspapers have raised the possibility that AI-generated accounts had flooded social media platforms with this rumor on purpose. Nevertheless, media and politicians began commenting on this potential resurgence of the Yellow Vest movement due to the rise of fuel prices and the overall increase of living costs. Rumor or not, the call to take the streets on October 17, 2026 has spread and only the future will tell us if people’s desperation and anger will be able to give birth to another inspiring moment.

Growing Frustrations…

Since mid-September, another form of discontent has been slowly spreading within another part of society. Tired of their working conditions, some high-school students decided to block access to their schools in order to make their voices heard. During the early stages of what became a national movement a few days later, only a few high schools were blocked here and there. This did not create any real impact or worry the authorities.

Among the students’ various demands, we can summarize the following points:

• Reduce the number of students per class.

For years now, the number of students per class has gradually increased to the point that it is not unusual for a teacher to have an average of between 30 to 35 students in a classroom. This is impacting the capacity for every single student to learn at their own pace.

• Reduce the number of school hours per week.

Even if France is known for having numerous and long school breaks throughout the year, students usually spend a long day at school—sometimes from 8 am until 6 pm—adding up to 28 or 35 hours of teaching per week, depending on the high school level and options.

• Improve high school infrastructure.

Just like the state’s territorial management, high schools reproduce social inequalities. Some high schools located in rich districts have no infrastructure issues, while high schools located in low-income areas are falling apart. For example, some high schools have constant bathroom issues, some have no heat during winter and no proper insulation, some have roofs that leak when it rains.

• Put an end to “ParcourSup.”

“ParcourSup” is the name of an online platform that students have to use during their final year to list what they would like to do after the school year. Created in 2018, this platform allows students to list their “wishes” and apply to different post-secondary education options such as universities, colleges, vocational and trade schools, and the like. Run by algorithms, this platform has been criticized since its implementation for the opacity of the criteria according to which it fulfills or thwarts students’ wishes. The platform creates considerable stress and competition among students, as those with better grades can be accepted more easily while the others might find no options whatsoever after high school, proving once more that this form of computerized selection increases social disparities and inequalities.

• Engage more substitute teachers to maintain continuity in learning.

Students have been complaining that when one of their teachers is sick, there is often no substitute teacher available to take over in order to assist them in continuing to learn. This creates situations in which students sometimes don’t have a teacher for weeks in a specific discipline, even if it will be part of their national high school diploma exam.

All the previous points made by students are the direct result of years of educational restructuring, public spending cuts, and neo-liberal reforms. More and more, public schools are managed like private companies and forced to compete with one another to be more efficient.

This is not to say that without public spending cuts and neo-liberal reforms, the school system would be desirable. Under capitalism, the school system is a tool for the state to coerce us, to crush our individuality, to subdue our rebellious spirits and desires in order to reduce us to a docile workforce that can be exploited for the rest of our lives.

…Burst into Flames

By Monday, September 28, word had finally spread among students to coordinate actions on a larger scale. Early that morning, students started blocking the entrances of their schools, creating makeshift barricades out of whatever they could find nearby and in some cases by setting trash containers ablaze. Some of these blockades might have been the initiative of student unions or small political organizations, but in other cases, these actions were clearly personal initiatives on the part of small groups of highly motivated individuals. Viral images on social media likely helped to spread the word, creating a domino effect among teenagers: “Look at what the other high school is doing. Let’s do it, too!” This first day of action set the tone for the rest of the week as the movement spread beyond Paris and its suburbs.

The following day, while teachers, health care workers, firefighters, and other people from the public sector went on strike and demonstrated by the thousands in various cities against the next government budget cuts and in favor of better wages and working conditions, high-school students increased the pressure by protesting in front of some 400 schools throughout France, fully blockading approximately 40 of them.

Without hesitating, Laurent Nuñez, the current Interior Minister and former Prefect of Police of Paris from 2022 to 2025, decided to repress this emerging movement via brute force. Police were sent to high schools to crush the blockades and disperse the crowds of teenagers. Unsurprisingly, this strategy provoked confrontations between high-school students and heavily equipped police forces.

During the clashes, police used numerous tear gas canisters and shot rubber bullets at students while groups of teenagers and young adults resisted by throwing stones, bottles, fireworks, and other projectiles. By the end of the second day of actions, more than 400 individuals had been arrested across France, with two thirds of those arrests leading to police custody, according to official sources.

Nevertheless, the brutal repression didn’t undermine the determination of the students, who decided to continue the movement, blocking the schools on a massive scale on Wednesday, September 30. Clashes with law enforcement continued to escalate while blockades and other actions spread to numerous major cities, forcing the Interior Minister to officially recognize that same night that despite his repressive strategy, the student movement was gaining momentum and expanding. On September 30, police arrested 625 individuals during the clashes. The first evidence of police brutality circulated online, as at least three students were severely injured by police ammunition.

On Thursday, October 1, the students continued to organize. For the first time since the beginning of the movement, some university students decided to join the struggle—even if they were not as numerous and determined to act as their younger accomplices. Fully 900 demonstrations, riots, and blockades took place all around France. Authorities reported arson attempts both outside and inside some buildings; due to some extensive fire damage, a high school in Nantes will remain closed for a whole month. That day, students were able to shut down at least 160 high schools and to block access to 30 universities. This intense day of action resulted in almost 2000 new arrests, raising the total number of students arrested and detained since the beginning of the week to nearly 3000.

Defending Power at Any Cost

That night, the government realized that its inability to control student unrest was drawing it towards another political crisis.

In order to regain control of the situation, the authorities made several hasty decisions:

• The current Prime Minister called a crisis cabinet meeting for the following day to discuss possible plans and strategies to put an end to this unrest, on the grounds that the situation had shifted from a student movement characterized by school blockades to an unruly situation of urban violence.
• The Minister of Education announced publicly that 400 high schools would be closed on Friday for “safety reasons,” either because the safety of the working personnel and students could not be assured, or simply on account of property damage. Students who can’t go to their schools will be following their classes online. In doing this, the government is reusing some of the strategies implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic in a different context.
• The Minister of Education also announced that, the following day, he would meet with student unions and political organizations to hear their demands and find collective solutions in order to end the crisis. By meeting so-called spokespersons, the government wants to weaken the movement by dividing “good” students with legitimate requests from “rioters” and “violent individuals.”
• The Interior Minister presented law enforcement agencies with an official list of all the high schools considered “high risk” by its intelligence services. In Paris alone, there were 13 high schools on this list. This suggests that the government has identified potential threats to the reigning order and is preparing to do everything in its power to neutralize these threats.
• The Minister of Justice gathered attorneys general in order to discuss the proper legal response to adopt in order to prosecute all the students in custody. It is highly possible that the government will try to process these cases as fast as possible in courts, requesting harsh legal repercussions in order to make an example of these brave young individuals.

Nonetheless, all these announcements barely curbed the momentum of student unrest. Actions, blockades, and clashes with police continued across the country on Friday, October 2 before a well-deserved weekend.

After a full week of political unrest involving intense property destruction, confrontations with law enforcement, and repression, and while the first trials were getting underway, political leaders of every stripe sought to use this situation to their own advantage, reaffirming their various positions.

While Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right party National Rally, emphasized the supposed need to create a new “anti-rioter” law in order to repress those who commit property destruction and resist police, the Macron government criticized the “violence” that took place and played on the classic dichotomy between “good ways of protesting” and “unforgivable ways of protesting”—while at the same time accusing the so-called “far-left” statist party of being responsible of all these events.

On Sunday, October 4, the government officially announced that the following day, more than 400 high schools in France would remain closed as security conditions still could not be assured. The Minister of Education declared that “24 schools had been burnt or ransacked and 78 education staff members injured” since the beginning of the movement.

What Now?

Right now, information is flooding media outlets about the events of Monday, October 5. So far, it is estimated that almost 1000 individuals were arrested today, 589 schools experienced protests or blockades—240 schools in the Paris region alone—and 65 law enforcement agents were injured during confrontations with demonstrators. This suggests that the movement is not slowing down.

We are deeply saddened to learn that on October 5, in Lens, a 15-year-old boy lost his hand after picking up a stun grenade that law enforcement officers used to attack protesters. One of the three teenagers injured last week suffers from a broken jaw, having been shot point blank with a grenade launcher. Currently, the 14-year-old boy can’t open his mouth, as all his bottom teeth were knocked out by the impact and all his upper teeth are broken. Another 16-year-old teenager injured last week lost an eye after an officer shot him in the face with a rubber bullet.

Unfortunately, as the government is not willing to back down and wants to regain control by any means necessary, police violence will only continue to escalate. More and more serious injuries are likely to occur in the next days of confrontations. So far, according to official sources, 215 students have been injured since the beginning of the movement, as well as 85 educational staff members and—supposedly—715 law enforcement officers. These figures are skewed to over-represent police: the state does not distinguish “offensive” injuries such as bruised knuckles from inflicted injuries, while most demonstrators who are injured do not dare to seek treatment for their wounds or, if they do, conceal the fact that they were injured by police violence. Injuring and mutilating people both physically and psychologically is the only solution the state has found to preserve the fragile illusion of order. The police and the government are not here to protect us.

Since the beginning of the student unrest, 5060 people have been arrested, including 4406 minors and 654 adults. As of today, 1802 individuals are facing charges: 1483 minors and 319 adults. Of those, 14 are in pre-trial detention—10 adults and 4 minors.

Right now, people are holding their breath on the eve of the Third Act of this high school movement. On Tuesday, October 6, there is another call to join students in the streets. Several sectors are already planning a variety of blockades elsewhere in France in solidarity.

No one can predict what will happen next or if the current political unrest will continue to gain momentum, reinventing and extending itself until October 17, the next day that there is a national call to take the streets. No one knows if the movement will find its resources to survive the brutal state and police repression that it is experiencing.

All we know for certain is that nothing is written in advance. The courage of the students taking part of this movement should inspire all of us to act now and to continue to push forward in order to fight against all odds for a better world!

Further Reading

These articles, written in French, explore these events further:

• À nos enfants et lycéens
• La jeunesse emmerde l’État policier
• L’ordre contre la jeunesse
• Des cauchemars et des rêves
• La mobilisation lycéenne à travers les yeux d’une professeur du 93
• Brûle ton lycée

Source: Autonomies

L’article French Youth Take the Streets against a Bleak Future est apparu en premier sur RévLibertaire.

from lundimatin #536, 05/10/2026

A surprise lesson. It was the surprise of the start of the school year, one that no one saw coming, let alone predicted. While everyone seemed resigned to waiting for the next presidential election to hope for change, high school students burst onto the scene and shook all political agendas. Starting in a few high schools in the Paris suburbs, the revolt quickly spread throughout France. Without any leading organisation, without a party or union pulling the strings; just groups of students self-organising, blocking the entrance to their schools, and spreading the word among themselves and on social media; a sign that embers were beginning to rekindle beneath the ashes, just waiting for a spark to ignite the blaze.

This has been a spontaneous, unpredictable, and sudden revolt, like all revolts. As with the emergence of the Yellow Vest movement in the fall of 2018, and so many other social uprisings before it, in the fall of 2026, all political attention seemed destined to focus, inevitably, on the upcoming presidential elections, once again reducing aspirations for change to the bleak choice of the ballot box, to delegating power over one’s own destiny to others.

Defying all predictions, and disregarding the electoral calendar with a carefree attitude, the high school students wanted to say, first and foremost, that they existed, that their present and future lives had value. Even though, as minors, they had no right to vote and no added value for political parties.

They had reasons to revolt. Those put forward, relayed by the student unions, denounced overcrowded classrooms, fragmented and restrictive schedules, unfilled teaching positions, and dilapidated and unsanitary school buildings. They also denounced the humiliation and incongruity of the cell phone ban in schools, given that their teachers, like the parliamentarians who voted for it, were constantly glued to their phones. They were treated like children who needed to be punished and disciplined, even though they were young adults who refused to resign themselves to a bleak and undesirable future.

Clearly, behind the structural reasons for the lack of resources and the state’s disinvestment in national education, lie deeper criticisms. At its core, it is a denunciation of the school system of a so-called Republic which, under the guise of formal equality, merely reproduces and perpetuates class and racial privilege and discrimination.

A lesson in sociology. What is entirely new in the history of student revolts, from 1968 to the present day, is that the movement of autumn 2026 is not led by students from the city center, by offspring of the bourgeoisie who have (temporarily) deviated from their social class, but by high school students from working-class neighbourhoods. Moreover, those most mobilised in the struggle appear to be students from vocational high schools, already steered toward work and excluded from higher education. Furthermore, images of the blockades show that many of the rebellious high school students have Black or brown skin. These are young French people, of course, representing this new France which, while not recognised and appreciated by white supremacists (except, marginally, for the performances of PSG football players and the national football team), embodies its history and its future.

This is very likely why the State and its government decided, from the very first blockades, not to listen to the voices, the grievances, the demands of the striking high school students, but to repress them immediately and brutally. It’s unspoken, hidden, certainly not openly displayed, but how can one not suspect that behind the (completely unnecessary) decision to immediately resort to force in response to the students’ demands, there lies a deep-seated racism embodied by the Minister-Prefect of Police and so many officers under his command? That, like Éric Zemmour and many other descendants of Oran settlers, Laurent Nuñez is consumed by resentment and a visceral hatred towards Arabs and Muslims? That the police, accustomed to hunting down young Arabs and Black people in the housing projects under the pretext of fighting drugs, do not feel justified in beating high school students who fit the same physical profile?

A grammar lesson. To unleash the full force of the repression, ministers, police officers, and complicit journalists set up the discrediting machine. While acknowledging that high school students might have legitimate reasons to complain about their learning conditions, government officials and complicit media outlets attributed the revolt to “LFI and its far-left proxies.” To the perennial denial of the autonomy of social movements, to the ritualistic conspiratorial insinuation of a deus ex maquina using poor, naive individuals for its perfidious ends, the system’s spokespeople, disguised as independent journalists, added the label “far-left proxies.” A deliberate choice of terminology: until now, this term referred to Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and other politico-military groups fighting against Israel and American imperialism, allegedly manipulated by Iranian devils. Just another layer of paint intended to discredit the protesters.

Faced with the inevitable reaction of the protesting high school students—beaten, tear-gassed, tackled to the ground, handcuffed, and taken into custody at police stations—the tired old trope of “rioters” was trotted out once again: masked revolutionary militants supposedly infiltrated the movement. From the very first blockades of the high schools, what we witnessed were not demonstrations by rebellious students, but rather “riots,” “urban violence,” “an outburst of hatred against the police,” who were supposedly there only to protect the population, and in particular “our children,” from the evil rioters. Thus, faced with heavily armed police officers and gendarmes protected from head to toe in body armour, the protesters allegedly used formidable weapons such as “mortars,” without mentioning that these were firework mortars, far less dangerous than any of the projectiles used by the police.

A lesson in semantics. Drawing a distinction between good, well-behaved high school students, concerned with their studies, and “individuals, groups from outside the schools, seeking only to sow chaos and attack law enforcement,” aims to justify police repression. A fierce and massive repression: in one week there were 5,000 arrests, hundreds of people injured and brutalised, two high school students blinded in one eye and another left without a tooth; a ruthless and disproportionate crackdown that fell upon girls and boys, most of whom were minors. But the perversity of the Ministry of the Interior, echoed by the mainstream media, relentlessly focuses on the daily toll of burning garbage cans and injured police officers (where, how, and by whom is never specified) at the hands of “villainous masked rioters.”

The height of this reversal of responsibility for violence against individuals was reached in Belfort, where the Prefect of Police and the Public Prosecutor opened an investigation against protesters accused of “attempted murder of a person holding public authority.” This individual, who had been punched and kicked, was in fact a high-ranking local police officer, without a uniform, without even an armband, masked, and disguised as a black bloc member to infiltrate the protesters. Before being identified and beaten, he had assaulted a high school student, holding his head underwater in a stream for an extended period. Subsequently, the charge was reduced to “intentional violence,” two minor high school students were imprisoned, the police officer received his eight days of sick leave, and the congratulations of his superiors.

A philosophy lesson. What do these rebellious high school students want? Their grievances, demands, and objectives are clearly written on the banners and signs displayed in front of their schools. Complaints about their study conditions, criticisms of unfair treatment between city center and suburban high schools, protests against the selection process of Parcoursup [the French university admissions platform], and the lack of resources and teachers are juxtaposed with slogans like “Free Palestine,” “ACAB,” and “Stop police brutality.” The list of objectives continues with the fight against patriarchy, gender-based violence, colonialism, racism, and all forms of discrimination and injustice; a whole program written by high school students, young people, legal minors, not taken into account by all the authorities supposedly deciding their fate.

Anti-authoritarianism, the driving force of the ’68 generation, is resurfacing. Should we be outraged if head-teachers have been booed, sometimes even mistreated, by students? Must we agree with the self-righteous moralisers that setting fire to the gate of a “public” school is unacceptable and must be severely punished? Or should we try to consider the reasons for these actions? Can we imagine the resentment, the bitterness, the hatred accumulated by a secondary school student who, throughout their schooling, has silently endured bullying, humiliation, and contempt from the adults who are supposed to educate them, not mold them into obedience to the authorities?

The revolt of French high school students this autumn of 2026 cannot be confined to the school environment. It is overflowing everywhere. This new generation of rebels seems to concentrate and amplify the legacy of many struggles, both old and new. From anti-capitalism to anti-racism, from anti-sexism to anti-authoritarianism, it embodies principles of solidarity with all the oppressed worldwide. It emerges as a social movement of free people, without imposed or constructed cages, without leaders, without the need for representatives. It makes struggles, the construction of analyses, discourses, and collective actions the means to envision a desirable future.

This nascent movement seems to bear the traces of movements that preceded it, drawing inspiration from and renewing discourses, methods, and practices. There is a certain blend of the uprisings in working-class neighbourhoods, particularly following the murder of Nahel, and the Yellow Vest movement. A beautiful mix of colours, too, smiling faces, and groups of solidarity. These “young people” are demonstrating, day after day, without giving up, a courage and determination in the face of police repression that only their conviction in the justice of their struggle can sustain.

Are these “young, determined, and revolutionary” people, as they chant in unison on the barricades, opening new paths to dismantle this world ruled by a consortium of powerful men—economic, political, military, and media? Will they attract students, teachers, cleaning staff, the unemployed, precarious workers, skilled labourers, artisans, and retirees? Could the “young” teach the “old” a lesson?

Alessandro Stella

Source: Autonomies

L’article Lessons from high school students in rebellion est apparu en premier sur RévLibertaire.

by Laura Vicente

It is quite possible that no one will pay much attention to this brief piece, but just in case, I will say in anticipation that my aim is modest and that I do not intend to be polemical, although I would not mind sharing arguments and thoughts, moving beyond the stereotypes we all hold that lead us to be obtuse and, at times, blind.

There are comrades who have been pondering the existence, or lack thereof, of the proletariat for some time, searching for the lost revolutionary subject, building “the” anarchist organization capable of developing “a” program, “a” strategy, and concrete tactics that will lead us down the path of revolution. I have not read all their writings, I am sorry to say, because I am exhausted by anarchism’s difficulty in imagining a way out of capitalism that does not involve returning to the past and to nostalgia, even melancholy. This is how two authors, Julie Graham and Katherine Gibson [who go under the pen name J. K. Gibson-Graham] perceive it in their book A Post-Capitalist Politics. They claim that a lack of imagination is a pathology of the left, something that reminds me of the “melancholy” of the left, applicable to anarchism, which Wendy Brown discusses in her essay on this topic. Leftist melancholy is a stance in which attachment to an identity or a political analysis of the past is stronger than interest in current possibilities for mobilisation, alliance, or transformation. The melancholic subject identifies with lost ideals and experiences their absence as feelings of desolation and dejection. This fixation on the past has a clear connection to the total paranoid theory that says nothing can happen. Fisher calls it a “severe Leninist superego”.[1]

The proletariat, the working class, was the subject of the revolution in another era of industrial development that ended in the mid-20th century, not because there were no other subjects, but because of the power of the narrative that championed the proletariat. When we speak of workers’ consciousness as the foundation of their “being a subject,” it seems we’re talking about something pre-existing that simply needs to be awakened, discovered. But consciousness-raising, in reality, is a practice of collective discussion that underscores the inequalities under which people collectively live. Consciousness does not pre-exist, it is not given, but rather it must be constructed from our place within a structure of inequality (capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, colonialism). The way to construct it is with other people who share a similar material existence.

Class consciousness has receded because the idea that there is no alternative to capitalism has advanced; the narrative has fallen apart.

On the other hand, holding closed seminars, waiting for the right information, the advanced political and ideological discussion that shapes a well-defined strategy to “awaken” the revolutionary subject, bringing to the surface a situation capable of awakening action by the people or any other subject, does not fit with what I have learned in history, either today or yesterday. No theory has ever transformed reality.

I have not forgotten of the need to “organise anarchism” as if it were not already organized. It gives the impression that the real aim is to impose order on anarchist diversity and multiplicity, transforming these interconnected, horizontal, decentralised, and non-hierarchical networks into parts of a whole that must be “the” effective, hyper-organised anarchist organization with strong militancy, etc.[2]

I recently said in an anarchist space that this debate is a men’s debate. The reality is that, even with women involved, the writings I have seen are by men. Reflecting on this, I concluded that women, and those perceived as such, have long known that there are other revolutionary subjects (think of Mujeres Libres, creating their own revolution between 1936 and 1939 and being ignored by the world, which is why I want to highlight them).

The struggles and events of the feminist movement were able to mobilise social transformation on an unprecedented scale, without resorting to a vanguard party or any of the other “needs” we have associated with political organisation (strategy, tactics, ideological narratives, modelled revolutions, etc.). Non-bourgeois, trans-feminist, libertarian, horizontal, and decentralised feminisms focus on building embodied practices and a shared language, constructing, through on-site actions, an imaginary capable of reversing hegemonic tendencies within our situated and territorialised lives.

Struggles, not just feminist ones, always occur in specific places, and it is there that they disrupt the workings of domination. Organising always happens whenever there is a struggle, however humble it may seem, because it equips itself with the necessary tools, which will never be the same as those of other contemporary struggles or those produced in the past. They are valuable in themselves, in their singularity; they are not parts of a whole. It could be (or it may not) that they end up building a revolutionary subjectivity that conceives of the possibility of ending capitalism, patriarchy, and any form of domination.

Forgive me, the more orthodox among you, for ending with a non-anarchist, for ending with Mark Fisher when he said in Postcapitalist Desire that all leftist projects are inadequate, and all for the same reason: in the sense that they do not take seriously the desires of the capitalised. They reject it and continue to re-inscribe moralism, and in doing so, they continue to invoke the distinction between inside and outside, between imminence and transcendence, between the realm of capital and a realm outside of it, which would be pure and free from capital.

And another cruel gem from Fisher: One may ethically claim to live in a different world, but libidinally, at the level of desire, the commitment is to life in the current capitalist world. That is why it is important to ask the following question: Is there really a desire for something beyond any form of domination?

[1] Mark Fisher, Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures, Repeater Books, 2020.

[2] All of this is much more developed in an article I authored, published on various websites, including Redes Libertarias.

Source: Pensar en el margen, 13/09/2026; Redes Libertarias, 02/10/2026

Source: Autonomies

L’article The subject, the proletariat, anarchist organisation and other nostalgias est apparu en premier sur RévLibertaire.

In 1932, Ernst Jünger published Der Arbeiter [The Worker], a work in which this new figure of humanity pointed to the new world order. The centrality of work corresponds to the dominance of technology. Expanding on concepts he had expressed in his book of two years prior, Total Mobilization, Jünger writes: “Technology is the way in which the worker form mobilises the world.” This diagnosis, which revisited Marx’s analyses from an entirely different perspective, exerted considerable influence on both the right and the left of the political spectrum.

It is therefore all the more surprising that this decisive figure of the era has disappeared for some decades now. Technology continues to govern the world and has certainly increased its power everywhere, but it is no longer “the way in which the worker form mobilises the world.” On the contrary, in the form of artificial intelligence, it seems to imply rather the decline of the centrality of work that Jünger had in mind. Instead of the servitude linked to exploitation and mobilisation, technology, by progressively blurring the identities of social classes and estates, seems today to be heading towards an unprecedented form of subjugation through a kind of general demobilisation.

Quodlibet, 01/10/2026

Source: Autonomies

L’article Giorgio Agamben: A general demobilisation est apparu en premier sur RévLibertaire.

from the CrimethInc. collective, 29/09/2026

On the 2026 Elections in Brazil

In Brazil, the third term of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of the Workers’ Party is drawing to a close. Lula could win a fourth term—making him the most-elected politician in the country’s history—if he defeats the son of former President Jair Bolsonaro. However, Flávio Bolsonaro—son of the man dubbed the “Trump of the Tropics,” who attempted a coup d’état in 2023 strikingly similar to the one Donald Trump attempted in 2021—is dangerously close to taking the lead in the polls.

It is time to assess the threats that a new Bolsonaro administration would pose, as well as the risks that will remain or emerge under a continuing center-left government. We spoke with fellow Brazilian anarchists active on a variety of fronts about the challenges that both scenarios could pose to human beings, the environment, and social movements resisting capitalism and colonialism.

What the 2026 Elections Mean for Brazil and the Americas

The 2026 election will determine to what extent the gains achieved through hard-fought social struggles are stripped away. Just as Trump returned to power via the 2024 election, there is a risk that Flávio Bolsonaro could resume his father’s attacks on the working class, marginalized groups, women, Indigenous peoples, and the environment. The Workers’ Party and the left in general have not managed to produce new figures to succeed their charismatic leader; without Lula, they appear doomed to electoral defeat.

There is a risk that the left will fail to field an effective new candidate for 2030, when Lula will no longer be eligible for reelection. It is also likely that, if elected, Lula could fall victim to the so-called “incumbency crisis“—a pattern that has emerged in elections worldwide this decade. Leaders on both the left and the right see their public standing erode after taking office, as they fail to address the inexorable impact of capitalism on the lives of ordinary people. Symbolism and abstract ideology carry significant weight in the increasingly polarized political landscapes of bourgeois electoral politics, and around the world, the ruling class is relying less and less on the carrot and more and more on the stick.

Therefore, it is likely that the far right will soon return to power. This is a reality we must face. It could happen in 2030, but it could occur as early as 2026.

This is taking place in a context in which Trump’s United States is attempting to reorganize the world order through force, showing everyone what anarchists have always known: that representative democracy, international law, and institutions like the United Nations exist at the pleasure of the ruling class and will not protect us. In the course of its first fourteen months in power, the second Trump administration toppled two heads of state—killing the Iranian leader and abducting the Venezuelan president. In both cases, there was open talk of seizing the oil from these territories; in Venezuela, the administration successfully stole billions of barrels, which are now under Washington’s control.

As head of state, Flávio Bolsonaro would voluntarily hand over Brazilian workers, forests, and land to US imperial interests. We are already in a dire situation under the neoliberal arrangement that Lula manages; with a fascist who is beholden to the US in power, the struggle for survival would become even harder. Furthermore, the oil, minerals, rivers, and forests in the territory known as Brazil would serve to fuel the technological, military, and nuclear arms race that endangers life across the entire planet.

The United States is openly attempting to interfere in Brazilian elections to favor Bolsonaro by sending “observers” to question election results and threatening to impose further tariffs on Brazil. At the same time, the US-based company Meta—which controls much of the content circulating on social media—is blocking Lula’s campaign content just weeks before the election without explanation. The same elites with the same reactionary agenda control both military power and the companies that dominate technology and digital communication.

The Consequences of Lula’s Third Term

The administration of Jair Bolsonaro left a landscape of scorched earth, which still haunts those who endured it. Bolsonaro ruled the country through a global pandemic without any consideration for ordinary people, guided by conspiracy theories and spreading misinformation. He managed to shift the entire political spectrum a few steps to the right. Against that backdrop, Lula emerged as the only way out. Although his platform has become increasingly moderate and conservative, many left voters see his administration as an oasis in the desert. They hope that, over one or two terms, Lula will resolve the nation’s social, economic, political, and environmental problems, while once again forging alliances with political oligarchies and transnational capital.

After a narrow victory in 2022, Lula took office and ascended the ramp of the Planalto Palace alongside representatives of marginalized groups and social minorities: a Black child, an Indigenous leader, a disabled influencer, a teacher, a metalworker, and a recyclable materials collector. Yet within months, he had allied himself with the Centrão (a bloc of pragmatic, centrist parties), the right wing, and the usual elites. Although his administration started out with high popularity thanks to income tax cuts for the poor and falling unemployment, agrarian reform and land demarcation remain stalled, while the administration has imposed spending caps on social programs. Lula’s third term is serving to mitigate the traumas of capitalism that were pushed to the extreme during the Bolsonaro administration, yet it has done so without challenging the gains of elites who profit from interest and rent-seeking. Little is being done to regulate the “platformization”—or “Uberization”—of precarious labor, while digital betting platforms hook and drain the earnings of minimum-wage workers.

Even more restrained than the first four Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) administrations under Lula and his successor Dilma Rousseff, the Lula-Alckmin term has been characterized by heightened economic conservatism and the suppression of social struggles. While meeting with government and corporate representatives at the COP30 in Belém, in the middle of the Brazilian Amazon, to discuss environmental “solutions” with the very ones destroying the environment, Lula moved forward with a decree privatizing the use of the Amazonian Madeira, Tocantins, and Tapajós rivers as waterways for transporting grain, ore, and timber. This was in addition to implementing various other projects with significant social and environmental impacts under the third iteration of the PAC (Growth Acceleration). Despite gesturing at the so-called ecological transition, the PT government has repeated the same extractivist, raw-material-exporting formula that has given rise to environmental disasters.

The president of Petrobras (the majority state-owned Brazilian multinational energy corporation) has echoed Donald Trump’s “drill, baby drill” slogan, emphasizing that drilling for oil at the mouth of the Amazon River remains a government priority to generate the dollars needed to balance the books—despite public opposition and warnings from scientists regarding the risks of exploration in an area with such sensitive biodiversity. In the name of expanding capitalist production infrastructure, entire biomes and populations are being sold for scrap. In the Yanomami Indigenous Territory in Roraima—a symbol of the humanitarian crisis that struck Indigenous peoples during the Bolsonaro administration—the death toll remains at least as high as it was under the previous government, if not higher. Lula promised to bring the crisis under control during his election campaign, but this has not occurred.

The situation in cities has not been much better. While sticking to the formula of exporting ore and agricultural products to fund social spending, the Lula-Alckmin administration has only paid lip service to popular demands to end the “6×1” work schedule (six days of work followed by one day off). They only incorporated the topic into their campaign platform on the eve of the elections. If Congress ever does approve an end to the six-day workweek, it will be the consequence of popular mobilization, not action by the self-proclaimed “workers’ government”—an administration that intentionally undermined national marches calling for an end to the 6×1 schedule by calling for its base to take to the streets against amnesty for Jair Bolsonaro and other participants in the 2023 coup attempt. This is the same pattern we saw when the Workers Party refused to support pandemic-era protests against the Bolsonaro government.

In 2024, Lula acted to prevent any official government statement regarding the 60th anniversary of the 1964 business-military coup, yielding to pressure from Defense Minister José Múcio—an ally of Jair Bolsonaro and the military high command that had orchestrated the attempted coup of January 8, 2023.

The government began adopting a right-wing approach to public security, even as femicide rates hit historic highs in the country and police massacres grew increasingly brutal—such as the 2025 mass killings in Penha and Alemão (Rio de Janeiro), the deadliest police operation in history, which claimed over 120 lives. To sustain a declining republic and implement the “PAC 3” developmentalist infrastructure projects designed to appease foreign capital, this administration has ramped up policing, further armed security forces, and expanded the prison system and mass incarceration. To this end, it launched a new version of the National Public Security with Citizenship Program (PRONASCI 2).

Speaking of the “security” industry, Lula’s government spent 50 million dollars on Israeli weaponry over the past three years. While condemning Israel for the Palestinian genocide on several occasions, such as at the UN General Assembly in 2025, the Lula administration never severed ties with the Zionist government. Likewise, despite condemning the embargo that endangers the lives of millions in Cuba, Brazil continues to withhold fuel shipments to the island while having sent oil directly to fuel the Israeli war machine.

And if the Far Right Wins?

Flávio Bolsonaro is the son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, who attempted a coup in 2023 with the help of the country’s security forces and political and economic elites—in a manner similar to, yet arguably more dangerous than, Trump’s actions following his 2020 defeat. His governing agenda is openly inspired by the authoritarian public security programs of Donald Trump in the US and Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, as well as the dismantling of social protections championed by Javier Milei in Argentina.

We have already witnessed how the far right can exacerbate a large-scale tragedy like the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, as events like El Niño strike a world already grappling with global warming, the class divide deepens; politicians and the super-rich expose the sham of international law and push for a global civil war, as evidenced by US aggression against Iran and Venezuela. A Bolsonarista government operating with direct US intervention could create even more devastating catastrophes. We must prepare now for the moment when the institutional Left can no longer mitigate the consequences of capitalist collapse and ascendant fascism, nor prevent narrow electoral victories by the right. That future is no longer a distant prospect.

Thanks to their destructive ideologies and lack of genuine management skills, Trump and Bolsonaro were defeated in democratic elections. Their unpredictability makes them dangerous even to the elites who desire a measure of stability and a solid governing agenda. Yet popular and electoral support for these leaders remains steadfast, effectively splitting society right down the middle.

It is no longer just “the economy, stupid”—as the political playbooks of the 1990s and 2000s put it. What mattered to voters then—more than ideology or moral values—was the tangible impact that government actions had on the average citizen’s pocketbook. In the 21st century, other factors are coming into play. Both Joe Biden and Lula achieved strong economic indicators by the end of their terms: low unemployment, rising average incomes, and controlled inflation. Yet neither managed to win over a large enough share of the electorate to secure a commanding lead. Democrats failed to prevent Trump from winning a second term in 2024, and Jair Bolsonaro’s son is threatening Lula’s lead in the polls for the 2026 election.

The so-called polarization between dominant camps in electoral politics derives from factors far more complex than objective economic figures. For Trump supporters of the MAGA (“Make America Great Again”) movement in the United States and members of the so-called “Bolsonarista Digital Party,” the battle between left and right is an existential struggle—a fight over identity. It is often framed as a “holy war” between “good and evil,” in which everything is negotiable except devotion to their leader and “savior.” Far-right populist leaders hold such appeal for the public precisely because they present themselves as anti-establishment figures in a world in which no one believes in the system any longer and both right-wing and left-wing elements of the state have worked together to ensure that no genuinely grassroots alternative to it can emerge.

When we speak of a social base as fundamental to advancing a long-term political agenda, we must acknowledge that the Brazilian far-right—much like its counterparts across the Americas and parts of Europe—is far more mobilized for propaganda and recruitment than any left or anti-authoritarian formation. It achieved this by appropriating the tools, digital platforms, and decentralized organizational methods originally pioneered by the radical left. They continue to operate independently, championing their leaders’ rhetoric and recruiting activists.

When figures such as Bolsonaro, Trump, Vladimir Putin, or Milei take control of an entire nation, the perils of this mobilization become starkly apparent. The greater the concentration of economic, military, and political power and perceived legitimacy a state holds, the more severe the consequences for vulnerable groups when that power falls into the hands of authoritarian, egocentric leaders. With a single government order, they can dismantle the policies and structures that sustain millions of lives or declare war against internal, external, or even imaginary enemies.

The heads of companies such as Amazon, Meta, Google, Apple, and Tesla/SpaceX attended the Trump’s second inauguration in 2025 to hail the “return of the king,” standing alongside leaders intent on dragging capitalism back to an era of raw colonialism and genocidal expropriation. Some—such as the owners of Meta and Google—have abandoned the ostensibly progressive rhetoric that characterized Silicon Valley a decade ago, embracing masculinist and authoritarian values.

Voting Cannot Defeat Dystopia

What happens in Gaza—or in any slum, ghetto, or forest—can happen to any population deemed undesirable, to any insurgency or rebel territory. The same military equipment Israel uses in Palestine is sold at international trade shows to police forces for controlling the outskirts of the Global South or arresting and deporting immigrants in the United States. The tech companies controlling the social media platforms, banking transactions, and messaging apps that billions of people use every day are the same ones developing the software and artificial intelligence that control increasingly autonomous lethal weaponry. They harvest our data just as they harvest the data of Palestinian, Lebanese, and Iranian civilian targets. We need ways of communicating and sharing data and resources that do not fuel a war machine that will turn against us if ever we rise up, or—if we never do—whenever our leaders see fit.

Floods, fires, droughts, heatwaves, misogyny, racism, epidemics, forced migration, and police forces that are increasingly brutal and heavily equipped. Political leaders and tech billionaires speak openly about waging genocidal wars to protect their interests. Those perpetrating the most documented genocide of all time in Gaza have faced no consequences or obstacles. The proponents of fascism exploit these crises to re-emerge unabashedly across the globe. Today, crisis is not a passing moment, but a permanent condition that will continue to deepen until the day the system collapses.

In this context, all discontent that fails to become revolutionary serves as fuel for reactionary movements and parties. We need ways of being and acting in the world that do not rely on the benevolence of a ruler who leaves office in four years, or on institutions so powerful and centralized that we cannot exert leverage upon them. We need ways to act outside and beyond the electoral cycle—rather than delegating our power to representatives, we need to take action and organize ourselves to defend the world we wish to inhabit.

By seeking to reform the institutions of state democracy, we only help to perpetuate a system of domination that imprisons and kills Black and Indigenous populations, that drives femicide as well as the destruction of biomes, of the essential foundations of life on Earth. Unless we organize society in a way that prevents tyrants from holding power, nothing we achieve will ever be secure.

Just as Bolsonaro shifted the entire political spectrum to the right—reducing the Left to merely seeking to conserve social gains and basic rights—new far-right candidates are normalizing even more authoritarian proposals. Even without a real chance of victory, figures like Renan Santos (of the Missão Party and the MBL) attempt to break away from Bolsonarism by making even more extremist and sensationalist statements. Their goal is to normalize fascist discourse for future generations so that, during times of heightened social conflict, their “easy solutions” appear more appealing to groups seeking to use violence against the oppressed to safeguard their own privileges.

The recent Banco Master scandal—the largest case of tax fraud ever recorded in Brazil—involved the misappropriation of 57 Billions Reais (11 billion dollars) from pension funds, companies, and private citizens. The fortune of its owner, Daniel Vorcaro, helped finance a propaganda film supporting Jair Bolsonaro—in English and featuring Hollywood actors—which served as a slush fund to bankroll the lives of his relatives and allies in the United States. The idea was to persuade the Trump administration to intervene in Brazilian politics and the economy. At the same time, Vorcaro uses his money and influence to buy off members of the judiciary and parliament, bankroll emerging far-right leaders, and facilitate illegal mining ventures in Minas Gerais. These operations pose environmental and social risks—much like the ventures that led to the tailings dam collapses in the towns of Brumadinho and Mariana, which killed people and animals and destroyed forests and entire rivers.

This single case illustrates how the elites are united and organized to defend their interests, promoting an agenda that links corruption, fascism, and environmental destruction in a war against the people for control over our lives and territories.

The only way out of this scenario is to organize and forge alliances to defend ourselves and the planet against the tyrants and the genocidal forces that serve them. We must take direct action, just as the peoples of the Lower, Middle, and Upper Tapajós—alongside the Tupinambá, fisherfolk, and quilombolas—did when they occupied the multinational Cargill’s port terminal for over a month, halting the company’s distribution and logistics. Movements from cities and other territories joined in, raising awareness, showing solidarity in person, and escalating the struggle by occupying company offices and organizing protests in various cities.

Autonomous action—unconstrained by the pacifying influence that characterizes movements under the tutelage of the Workers’ Party—is the only way forward. At no point in history has fascism been defeated solely through electoral victories. We need to draw inspiration from and publicize urban and rural occupations, the self-demarcation of Indigenous lands, app-based delivery workers’ strikes, and mutual aid networks in the outskirts. We need to build collectives and social movements that are organized and self-determined from the grassroots up—like the women in Argentina and Mexico fighting for abortion rights and against femicide, or those fighting for life and freedom in Iran. We must learn from the youth in Nepal and Indonesia challenging their governments and police; from immigrants and citizens organizing resistance against ICE—the immigration enforcement agency acting as Trump’s militia in the United States; and from the territories linked to the Teia dos Povos (Web of Peoples), which fosters alliances among quilombos, Indigenous lands, and urban and rural occupations in Brazil, grounded in an anti-colonial and anti-capitalist perspective.

The struggle is for life, freedom, and self-determination. No matter who wins the elections, one thing will not change: the worst-case scenario is already playing out, and neither elected leaders nor corporations will pull us out of the apocalypse they themselves created. As the saying goes in land defense movements: “If Bolsonaro wins, they kill us; if Lula wins, they let us die.”

Whether we vote or not, we must become ungovernable. We must act as if the life of the planet depends on it—because it truly does.

Source: Autonomies

L’article “If Bolsonaro wins, they kill us; if Lula wins, they let us die.” est apparu en premier sur RévLibertaire.

On old maps, it is common to see areas populated by mythological creatures, mermaids and Amazons, dragons and unicorns. The beings that inhabit the most remote and unexplored regions – those known or presumed to exist, but which are not yet understood – are depicted in great detail. The accounts of the few travellers who have reached these places are passed on by word of mouth and become distorted as they are retold; they are magnified and exaggerated, until from a narrative—presumed to be more or less reliable—an entire imaginary topography emerges, which serves at the same time to prove the existence of the mythical creatures whose territory it delineates. The circular reasoning is evident.  Dragons exist because they live there, at the edge of the world. This places them on the map. And they live there because they exist and must be somewhere. That is why they can feature in the depiction of the world.

Similarly, in the nineteenth century, with the fantastical excesses of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance now a thing of the past, Victorian explorers – salacot hats on their heads and rifles at the ready – set about methodically filling in the gaps that still remained on the maps. Particularly on the African continent, these blank spaces acted as magnets for the colonial powers, which meticulously mapped out the coastline, yet still knew nothing of what lay inland. This presented a seemingly irresistible invitation to minds imbued with evangelising and imperialist fantasies. After all, as Kipling reminds us, it is the white man’s burden. Something similar occurs in politics too. Most of us grow up virtually as functionally illiterate in this sphere, which is not normally considered necessary for adult education. Generally speaking, the education system and society as a whole take the view that a country’s inhabitants must acquire a body of knowledge that will equip them as future workers and productive members of society, but this does not extend to the civic skills essential for political engagement.

Be that as it may, the fact remains that current democratic models restrict effective participation to a caste of professionals, which means that the rest of the population need only possess a bare inkling of how the system works – just enough to cast a vote in a ballot box and accept that the direct management of their affairs is no longer, if you’ll pardon the redundancy, their concern. But it seems that the tendency to invent what one does not know is a constant feature of human psychology. Just like the monsters on medieval maps, the political landscape is riddled with dark and unknown zones – grey areas of which one usually has only vague notions – from which a fantastical image is constructed that replaces more detailed knowledge and makes the latter seem unnecessary. On the basis of these vague notions, the political landscape is divided up, associating certain elements of the ideological spectrum with distant cardinal points and populating it with the corresponding mythological creatures that inhabit it. Evidently, these beings are not a spontaneous product of the imagination, but are often supplied by interested parties, through channels suited to the level of representation being sought. Cinema, television and, above all, the mainstream media supplant formal political education (in the broadest sense), and disseminate prejudices and preconceived images across a mental map that is intuited rather than drawn. Thus, most people (though not all) know that National Socialism lies somewhere to the right (the east?) of the conservatives, but not exactly why, or what the differences between them are. Similarly, the Marxist left lies to the west, in a zone populated by enemies of private property, although nobody knows how they got there, or why. And the anarchists? That’s where the dragons are…

If our knowledge of, shall we say, conventional political options is generally sketchy and vague, our understanding of those that transcend the conventions of the civic common sense of an era enters the realm of the nebulous. We find ourselves on fertile ground for the mythical. Any notion that goes beyond the parameters accepted as unquestionable in the foundations of the current democratic system is perceived as nonsense, difficult to take on board or even to conceive of as possible. Everyone knows that someone has to be in charge, and if not, things descend into chaos. Everyone knows that every person counts as one vote, but in a company the boss is in charge, and that’s that. Everyone knows that one’s freedom ends where another’s begins. And it makes no sense to consider, for example, that freedom—or the lack thereof—is a social and historical phenomenon that is collectively constructed, and that each individual’s freedom arises from that of everyone else. Much less that there are effective forms of collective decision-making, or that political dictatorship—even if it is called democracy—is based on economic dictatorship, and that this is largely the cause of the perpetuation of the class structure and wage labour. In truth, there are areas on our map that lie beyond the confines of the world—not just the known world, but even the imaginable one.

In this realm of undefined shadows dwell the anarchists, creatures who might be said to lack a voice of their own, who cannot explain themselves, because their plight comes up against a barrier of incomprehension and ignorance. Instead, the powers of the established economic and political system colonise this mist-shrouded region and populate it with their own inventions. The propagandist by default becomes the indiscriminate terrorist driven by criminal and anti-social zeal; the naturist who promotes free love, a promiscuous satyr; the atheist rationalist, a fanatic who devours priests; the libertarian educator, a corrupter of children’s minds. And more recently, the counterculture has become hippie-ism; anarcho-syndicalist workers’ demands, idleness or cronyism; and active abstention, utopian short-sightedness, which fails to see that the only path to social transformation is the novel method—never tried before—of voting for some tiny party, the true champion of revolutionary aspirations.

This defines a peculiar topography of anarchism, colonised by its opponents on the right and left, which distorts its proposals and presents a region inhabited by monsters where no human being with half a brain would venture to enter. As a fantasy, it may well be fine, but, it must be emphasised, the true political project lies elsewhere. The worst part of it all is that, just as in colonised populations, which change to adapt to the image the coloniser has of them, some anarchists sometimes adapt, consciously or not, to this distorted image. In fact, there are those who are precisely drawn to that false image of irrational radicalism, that nihilism devoid of proposals which the Sex Pistols sang about so well, even though it has little to do with historical or consistent anarchism. Or they are simply comrades who have not moved beyond the vague perception of the “Idea” that is common in the bourgeois interpretation of anarchism. For it is not enough to hate the police or to wear a hood at every demonstration to be a consistent anarchist, just as shouting loudly at assemblies does not make anyone more radical. What these comrades fail to realise is that they are taking the distorted image and bourgeois prejudices against anarchism at face value, even though it is precisely these that they find appealing. They get lost in questions of form, unable to get to the heart of the matter. And in this way, the cycle is reinforced. Anarchists exist to the extent that they conform to the stereotype and validate all the clichés from the moment they come into being. Otherwise, they are not perceived as such and therefore do not disprove what the map depicts. The window of the bank or McDonald’s is smashed because that is what anarchists do, and one is an anarchist to the extent that one smashes the window. And hundreds of camera flashes immortalise the moment, much to the delight of the front pages and prime-time news programmes.

Just as peoples free themselves from the yoke of colonialism, we anarchists must learn to look at ourselves and see ourselves through our own eyes; our specific history, told by ourselves, with all its successes and grave mistakes; our ideas, conceived not anew, but once more; what makes us who we are, brought to light and rescued from the mist. Let us draw our own maps and reconstruct our own topography, to decolonise and recolonise ourselves, and conquer our own frontiers, without blank spaces or foreign mythologies. To emerge from the night and the mist that conceals the confines of the political world and conquers it. We want it all… we are dragons!

Gladys P.

Source: “La topografía política del anarquismo”, acracia.org, 15/08/2016. Originally published in the magazine Des-Bordes #1, Madrid, Fall 2014.

Source: Autonomies

L’article The political topography of anarchism est apparu en premier sur RévLibertaire.

from lundimatin #533, 15/09/2026

This is often the case during election campaigns, and it is probably even more so given the rise of fascist tendencies: everything is put on hold – common sense, reality, boldness, autonomy, determination. Instead, people sound out the situation, calculate their moves, whisper little secrets in each other’s ears and spout posturing that rings hollow. Everyone thinks they are manipulating everyone else, but it is always reality that we are scheming with. The author of this text sets out to examine what this appetite for political manoeuvring entails. Spoiler: the very logic of a world it purports to criticise.

Every political strategy, whatever its political persuasion, is based on two key concepts: the sovereign subject and the state apparatus. Whichever side it takes, it implies intervention from the outside into the structures. Whether they aim to prevent the decline of the white race or ward off the coming of fascism, political strategies rest on the same hackneyed fiction: the political – subject. The fact that their aims are opposite changes nothing of their form. One hates what the other defends, but both call upon a subject to rise up, a people to count themselves, a mass to allow itself to be led. Yet there is no subject, any more than there is an object. There are compositions, decompositions, recompositions, speeds. Strategy, for its part, imposes this grammar: a subject that aims, that calculates, that stands at the forefront; an object that it names, that it fixes, that it promises. The reality is that there is no political subject standing there, before the structures it claims to be able to alter. There is a singular production of a particular context: the political subject is a fable of the modern state just as much as the modern state is an effect of this fable – each needs the other as the riverbank needs the river.

So the strategists suggest that the situation is grave, more so than before, more so than ever. That, in the name of all those whose livelihoods are under threat, we must get our hands dirty, campaign for the century-old structures of a republic that massacred our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents. “In the name of”, means that these voices have never been raised in the wake of the massacres; but from university lecterns, from lucrative chatter on Twitch, from parliamentary delegations, from publishing houses: from very specific interests whose voices are clearly heard. In this respect, whatever the objectives of the various strategies, their architectures are analogous. They share the same blind spots and perpetuate the same structures. They suggest the same modes of action, the same relationships to the world and to the masses – What should be done about those who abstain from voting? How can neighbourhoods be mobilised? Should we abandon rural areas? Thus caught up in the same fallacious representations of the State, the People and Power, strategists share the same obsession with the administration of the masses, using levers that are more or less ridiculous, increasingly paternalistic, and still far too didactic. For the State is a mode of governmentality whose fundamental axiom is separation: between subject and object, the individual and the collective, the public and the private, the political and the everyday. This separation, however fictional it may be, produces relationships and exists through them. On this basis, anything that strategically aims to take control of the state apparatus cannot claim to be anything other than a product arising from the relationships codified and distributed by the state apparatus itself, and cannot therefore bring about anything other than the continuation of those very relationships. However revolutionary the strategy may be, it delays the revolution.

What causes the normal course of events to vary is not so much the objectives we set ourselves to bring about that variation as the practice of variation itself. Adopting a mode of action characterised by procrastination, waiting for macro-political mechanisms to take effect, and faith in institutions—this stabilises, this institutes. And what establishes necessarily wards off variation: the position and those who covet it are made of the same code. That which truly varies has no position; that which has a position does not truly vary. In form, then, nothing changes from the enemy: the rally, the programme, the leader, the fervour. And everything is a question of form. The problem with the State lies less in its direct consequences on our lives than in the form of the relationships it produces between us and within us. The problem with political strategy is not that it is ill-suited to the situation it claims to be fighting; it is that it is a pure emanation of politics as conceived by the state apparatus: it is that its form is strictly endogenous to that which ravages the world and prevents us from inhabiting it. So when we hear that we must mobilise affects to rally support for a particular camp, and then get a reformist party elected, we see in this, if not a profound misunderstanding of what affects are, then at the very least a colossal materialist fallacy. Affects, too, are productions. They take place in the world. If the predominant emotions are those of security, refuge, identity and borders, it is not because people have decided as much or because so-called dominant figures have made them their rallying cries, but because the economy, insofar as it separates and administers, necessarily produces forms of life organised around these fetishes. It is therefore not a question of courting the masses by mobilising emotions produced by a given situation – which, quite logically, can only lead to the continuation of that situation – but of allowing practices to emerge that dismantle all the relationships inherent in the situation we wish to see disappear.

The strategy believes it looks towards a world yet to come, without realising that it is the result of a presence that denies itself. It believes it is determined by an objective it has supposedly set for itself, without realising that both itself and its objective are the direct consequences of its blindness to what is taking place here and now. And since it is fixated on what will never happen, everything seems to remain as it is. Indeed, is this not what it wishes for?

What strategic thinking avoids is the singularity of what is taking shape within what it deems non-political: attention to what is already taking place, to what is organising itself immanently, without a plan, without a programme, to what eludes the ravages of management. No dramatic gestures, no noise, just silence. Since it is based on an objective that is always already deferred, strategic thinking starts from an absence. Conversely, starting from a presence means nurturing potentials in order to allow variation to occur, to shape non-prescriptive relationships, to keep the world open.

Source: Autonomies

L’article Opening essay/An effort at an openning: The State, the people, the strategist est apparu en premier sur RévLibertaire.

from Ficcíon de la rázon, 10/09/2026

Peregrinatio. La extrañeza como contrapoder

Federico Ferrari

We have been taken in by the hypnotic fable of the apocalypse. Public discourse, intoxicated by the spectacle of imminent ruin and by the narcissism of catastrophe, continues to tell us that we are living through the end of time. An end that drags on indefinitely, like a well-structured Netflix series in which the epilogue is always postponed to the next episode. In reality, the mass apocalyptic narrative is nothing more than a form of anaesthetic: it serves to mask the only true tragedy of the present, namely that nothing changes in the great continuum of the history of oppression and that things continue to slide, without the slightest disruption, along the tracks of their political and social collapse.

However, beneath the ashes of this spectacle of ruin, something profoundly new has taken root. What we must come to terms with today, in Italy and at the heart of Europe, is not merely the continuation of the ruthless violence of classical liberalism, nor even a straightforward reproduction of the historical fascisms of the twentieth century. We have entered the era of a new authoritarian and xenophobic mindset—the principle of authority and fear of the stranger, the unfamiliar, the alien—: a post-ideological mechanism that finds its most striking global embodiment in export-oriented Trumpism.

In the face of the entrenchment of this new authoritarianism, we are witnessing, as a counterpoint, a further metamorphosis of the “aestheticisation of politics” theorised by Walter Benjamin. Whilst in the 1930s this took the form of the imposing stage-set-like displays of mass rallies, designed to sublimate the masses into a mystical body, today it manifests itself in the digital aestheticisation of the world: an uninterrupted production of images and narratives saturated with a fictional and hallucinogenic excess in which the dividing line between reality and virtuality, between truth and falsehood, becomes blurred. The masses no longer need to take to the streets to feel part of the ritual; rather, they are incorporated into a continuous virtual flow, where reality blurs into fiction and anaesthetic seduction replaces the gathering of bodies. Social anaesthesia is complete, the alienation of bodies within an empty and, above all, paralysing hyper-signifying sphere.

This defensive, possessive and identity-based authoritarianism therefore has no need for the traditional ethical state. It thrives on fragmentation, exploits the loneliness of individuals, transforms resentment into a political agenda and the fear of the “other” into a social glue. It promises false protection by fortifying borders — not only physical ones, but also psychological and identity-based ones — whilst, on a material level, it dismantles the welfare state, employment and essential rights; it thus renounces any prospect of redemption or social regeneration and is content to govern the fear of an impoverished and precarious humanity.

Faced with this stranglehold, the Leninist question re-emerges with uncompromising ferocity: what is to be done?

The answer is dramatised by an inescapable historical fact: the political subject is missing. There exists no collective subject, no organisation, no class force on today’s political stage capable of taking the lead amongst the oppressed, of gathering the scattered suffering and transforming it into a project of rupture. The forces of the institutional left, now reduced to mere agencies for managing the status quo or to accounting guardians of the status quo, have lost even the basics of opposition, let alone revolutionary discourse, which is now a dead language incomprehensible to the majority.

When the subject is absent and history seems at a standstill, the greatest danger is to succumb to impotent protest, to a futile head-on collision with an adversary who draws strength precisely from direct conflict. The other danger, naturally, is a comforting retreat into the private sphere. Today, given the balance of power within society, it is not a question of opposing a blind force with a mirror-image reaction, but of understanding the need for a lateral shift: to defuse the logic of the clash endured through that austere stance which—as the late Tronti reminded us—is conveyed to us by the memory of monasticism and the philosophy of detachment, that is to say, xeniteia, peregrinatio.

To become strangers. This is not a flight from the world—fuga mundi—nor an ascetic or disdainful withdrawal. As Jacob Taubes demonstrated in his reinterpretation of Pauline political theology, the eschatological dimension is not a passive waiting for the end, but the introduction of a break in the present moment: a way of inhabiting the structures of the world “as if” they were not the ultimate horizon. The peregrinatio is a political and existential decision of the first order: it is the Johannine choice to situate oneself in the world, though not of the world, embracing the pathos of distance as the only possible response to the dominant homogenisation. When society becomes unliveable and its traditional political forms prove useless, becoming an outsider and offering no footholds to power is the only way to avoid assimilation, which subsequently amounts to servitude.

Early desert monasticism did not arise as an alibi for the vanquished, but as the foundation of a counter-power. Those monks who abandoned the cities of the crumbling Empire were not seeking peace of mind: they were seeking the strength to build a way of life that could not be assimilated. In that silence lay a concentration of forces, an active and militant waiting that refused to be dispersed by the chatter of the present.

To navigate this time of transition and oppression, it is necessary to forge a link between the individual’s ethical resolve and the practice of detachment, articulating it through three fundamental mechanisms: contemplation, struggle and strategic concession.

Contemplation is not a narcissistic cure for introspection, but a free and unsparing gaze upon reality. To contemplate means keeping one’s faculty of judgement clear, unmasking the ideologies of the new authoritarianism and being able to recognise the transience of its seemingly impregnable constructs. It is an exercise in desaturating perception that allows us to extract the real from the uninterrupted flow of distorted communication, freeing ourselves from a distracted consumption of the world.

The struggle is the translation of this strangeness into everyday practice. It is the construction of communities out of step with the times, of strongholds of conceptual and ethical resistance where the welcoming of the stranger, solidarity amongst fragments, and the rejection of market logic become the rule of a new way of living. But it is also the struggle—daily and steadfast—within institutions, with the State and against the State. In a nutshell: it is about being, always and everywhere, mit und gegen [with and against].

Strategic concession: withdrawing from the obsession with immediate victory does not mean turning defeat into a virtue — in politics, defeat is never a merit — but rather refusing to let oneself be worn down by the rules of the game established by the enemy. It means learning the art of withdrawal: not allowing oneself to be crushed by the logic of dominant power, knowing how to loosen one’s grip where a head-on clash is a trap, and repositioning oneself to preserve one’s own autonomy. Rather than expending energy on passive resistance or lost battles, one goes along with the adversary’s onslaught to throw them off balance and reduce its impact, whilst keeping one’s own freedom of manoeuvre intact.

We cannot expect a new political subject to emerge as if by magic, though we must not cease to believe in the impossible. Rather, we must practise that form of attentiveness taught by Simone Weil: a patient gaze capable of discerning the slightest signs of change—even the most insignificant and hidden ones—in order to grasp the emergence of new symbols around which a social and political subject may finally coalesce. Meanwhile, the individual regains their coherence through the discipline of strangeness, through the ability to bring solitudes together around a shared rigour, through the steadfastness of those who reject the war between the poor promoted by the new authoritarian right. If society is xenophobic, we consciously position ourselves as the object of its fear; we become its very strangeness: a foreign body within the social body, an intruding body.

It is a matter of aiming, realistically and rationally, towards achievable goals whilst never ceasing to turn our gaze towards the unattainable.

The peregrinatio is not a surrender: it is the training of strength. It is the act by which we declare ourselves strangers to this present in order to safeguard our immeasurable freedom and to be, when the breach opens, the beginning of another world.

Source: Autonomies

L’article Peregrination: Foreignness/Strangeness/Otherness as a counterpower est apparu en premier sur RévLibertaire.