Catgirls Book Club ~ lectures pour catgirls anarchistes ~♥

Starting from somewhere – Scattered remarks

To begin, we want to share our joy with you . The joy we feel because as we write, we feel, that despite being locked inside the walls of captivity, a part of us is out there free along with you, discussing, doubting and planning new sabotages against the authority of the social apparatus.

Of course, this could never have happened if it wasn’t for the valuable contribution of comrades who keep us informed about the international experimentations of new anarchy and strive to translate our texts.

So, the following notes come from a series of discussions we had inside the CCF Imprisoned Members Cell, on the occasion of the international gathering in Mexico.

The thoughts we want to share during this meeting are not some kind of an official view. As anarcho-nihilists, we do not believe in any absolute and objective truth. On the contrary, we want to set a starting point. One more challenge for thought, experimentation and onset towards the sharpening of the anarchist insurrection. This continous search of theory and praxis keeps anarchy alive and dangerous, far from ideological stiffnesses.

Before we start, we want to underline two things.

First, in our notes you may find some gaps concerning thoughts and positions, that have been publicly expressed and relate to the international developments of the anarchist current. That’s because the condition of captivity, in which we stand, hampers the immediacy of the updating and the communication we would like to have.

Second, words are not objects. They are meanings carrying the experiential of each one of us. Some times the same words may express different meanings, depending on the place and the time, in which they are being expressed.

Probably this creates the desire to invent new words that are free from the wear of confusion. But until then, whoever “sticks” to the details as if reading a philological essay, is doomed to drown in them, losing the meaning.

Wrong answers to wrong questions

The war is raging with thousands of faces. With the face of the techno-industrial totalitarianism, of the economic crisis, of the plunder against nature, the repression, the military operations, the tele-propaganda of the spectacle…

The orders are loud…

Economic misery, poverty, arrogant exploitation by the bosses, bank dictatorship, corporatism, electronic policing, digital world, genetic experiments, laboratory diseases, nanotechnology, deforestation, water and air pollution, extermination of animals through vivisection, massive meat-eating, new high-security prisons, concentration camps for immigrants, arrests of anarchists, police everywhere, army against demonstrators, hecatombs of dead in “humanitarian” military operations, nuclear and chemical weapons, propaganda by journalists, uniform aesthetics in advertising, despotism of dead commodities.

Mountains of texts and analyses have fallen upon us about all these, suggesting solutions. The leftist managers of authority fantasize the proposition of the social state, the green development, the economic aid for the poor, the philanthropy of the NGOs, the democratization of the police, the lenience of the lawmakers, the alternative ecological sensitivity, the humane conditions of living in the prisons…

Lots of civil and bureaucrat anarchists run breathless behind the alternative propositions for a more “fair” and “humane” leftist authority. This is the reformist tension of bureaucratic anarchy of the official federations, which crawl behind the social evolutions. Cheap politicians without a party, walkons of the insurrection, theoretical moles who speak with words and interpretations borrowed from the marxist ghosts of the past (self-management of the means of production, self-managed schools, popular assemblies, revolutionary militia, committees etc.).

Especially in Greece, the reformist retreat shapes opportunistic alliances betweens the leftists and civil anarchists (formation of antifascist front, popular assemblies, demonstrations…).

To us, even those civil anarchists who have good intentions, look like dogs chasing their tails. There do exist some analyses from their part, but to us these analyses are just wrong because the questions are not the right ones.

If the official writing of history insists on basing the social interpretation of the world on economic plans, numbers and statistics of unemployment, what reason do we have to contribute and suggest the solution?

Why lose our time speaking a dead language, that promotes social reforms, since we desire the ruins of civilization? Why constrain the onslaught and the attack by reminiscing communist ghosts? They make political computations, we do not.

We make war.

Challenging the challenges

So we don’t want to answer predefined questions of a social dialog, that we do not consider ourselves to be a part of. On the contrary, we want to provoke by creating new authentic questions of life.

Insurrection means to ask, authority means to consider that you possess all the right answers.

So we challenge the challenge.

The challenge of creating a plan for a never-ending insurrection. A plan that combines the mind with the feeling, the ice of strategy with the fire of praxis, here with now, the tension with the duration, with the direct aim of destroying the social apparatus and the liberation of our lives.

That’s the only way for the new to become part of our existence. Of course someone could say: “What about poverty? Your ideas are good, but the society is heading towards economic disaster, poverty and hunger, and you talk about experiential poetry…”

The answer is yes, we have neither a political program for the “relief” of the poor nor the recipe for social salvation. We are not healers of a sick world, we are its saboteurs…

The only proposal we have for the economic crisis is to give it a push off the cliff.

Only with the destruction of the economy will the divisions of poverty die. Along with the economy we want to destroy work and mass industrial production. But pushing a magic button is not enough to break our chains. Economy, production, consumption, commodities, all represent specific social relations. Relations between slaves and masters, but the whip and the chains are (usually) invisible.

That’s why we think that the thoughts of the communists and their “anarchist” relatives, who only talk about how to fill their stomach are poor and handicapped.

The authoritarian social relations cannot be healed with boring economic theories. That’s why we want to blow up all standardized relations and overthrow anything given about what is life, joy, friendship, love, egoism, happiness…

Let’s talk about quality of life, not just about the quantity of commodities on the supermarkets’ shelves. Let’s replace the mathematical certainty with the doubt of poetry.

There, where others seek the leftist reflection of the people’s power or the anarchist fantasy of worker’s self-management, we place the mystery of life.

Because nowadays life has no secrets any more, no innerness… every niche of it is rational, like a mathematical equation, every movement is predictable, every feeling is measurable with a scoop.

Each one of us is locked in the cell of his apartment and numbered through credit cards and tax returns, just like being in a prison.

So maybe we are naive and dreamers, but we are certain that life is neither Marx’s nor Bakunin’s theories, not assemblies of purposeless words.

Life is choices and actions, that are being tried on the street. Enough with theory. We try to give duration in the tension of the moments, turning life into an adventure.

From theory to praxis, a critique to the intermediate social struggles

Whoever talks about anarchy without seeking ways to act like an anarchist, has a dead body in his mouth. Certainly, there is no model or unmistakable form of anarchist action, but thousands of different ways for us to become dangerous against the social apparatus.

The anarchist critique is a method to evolve your thought and sharpen your weapons.

The social apparatus often meets with its contradictions, which lead to social tensions. Strikes, demonstrations, local struggles, street-fights with cops, often disrupt the smooth social orderliness.

Struggles that some times get violent characteristics and become points of reference for civil anarchists. The question that appears in those cases is this: the social struggles that go beyond the legal limits, do they simultaneously go beyond the ethics of legality as well?

In other words, even at the most intense moments of fire and clash of the intermediate social struggles, the stake is the satisfaction of unionist demands (wage increases, educational reform etc.) or the anarchist destruction of authority?

We consider that the prevailing trend of the intermediate social struggles wishes a more “fair” authority, not its destruction. Besides, intermediate social struggles do put forward demands. This means that they ask for something by someone. They demand that the authority satisfy them, a fact that requires the recognition of the authority. This starting point of moral recognition of the authority is never being surpassed by the many, even when they throw rocks.

Those clashing with the cops asking for wage increase, tomorrow they may ask, with the same passion, for more police patrols and concentration camps for the illegal immigrants.

Of course, we do not generalize. Nor we consider that we should give the streets and intermediate social struggles for free to the reformists and bureaucrats.

Inside the intermediate social struggles we can meet the unsatisfied of several young insubordinate persons who seek a way to express their anger against the system. They are the minorities that do not fit and are not satisfied by unionist demands.

For us, the comrades of new anarchy we can look for meeting points with these minorities and act as saboteurs. Away for the murmur of popular assemblies and struggle committees, let’s do what we are. Saboteurs against normality, even when the latter transforms itself with the characteristics of the “social struggle”.

We do not co-formulate misery, nor the demands towards the enemy. On the contrary, we as the virus of chaos and disorder, wanting to contagiously contaminate all those who feel unsatisfied by the demonstrations-promenades.

We have no moral problem using the masses of demonstrating promenaders so as to attacks, through hit-and-run tactics, the police, the banks, the journalists. And if this move of ours brings about repression and police strikes against a peaceful demonstration, we don’t care.

Challenging means creating events. Police violence polarizes situations. Enough with the mediocrity. We are at war and each of us must take sides. There is no room for anarcho-syndicalisms and federations of social fronts.

The street-fights taking place in intermediate social struggles, should not make us to be complacent.

Very often, we see insurrectionist comrades, waiting for the next appointment on the road and not creating insurgent infrastructures here and now themselves. Satisfied by the clash with cops and the attacks on symbols of authority, but not trying to carry this conflictual reality, from the rigged appointments of intermediate struggles to everyday life.

Because this is what anarchist urban guerrilla exactly means: bringing the attack in first person and present tense, without needing the camouflage of social protest.

At the same time, various anarchist politicians and clowns satisfy their conscience by participating in opportunistic street-fights and fantasize the social revolution of the masses. It is them, who using social struggles as an alibi, characterize the anarchist urban guerrilla as an outdated and self-destructive choice.

For us, as Conspiracy of Cells of Fire, the bet is simple. Through “social struggles”, we want to create bridge, so that rebellious and unsatisfied minorities can cross over to the anarchist urban guerrilla, where the attack is continuous.

Because finally, whoever is satisfied by waiting for the official struggle appointment, demonstrations at a place and at a time chosen by others, by either labor unions or committees , in order to make an appointment with ones insurrectionality, then one will end up losing the appointment with the continuous anarchist insurrection.

FAI, acronyms and the anonymity of the “anarchist galaxy”

What is interesting now, is to discuss and discover new and dangerous ways of expressing the hatred we feel, towards the social apparatus.

We start by identifying a starting point. For us, the starting point is informal anarchist organization.

i) Informal, because we dislike the conditions and norms of predefined roles and organizational statutes. The roles of the orator who captivates the audience in assemblies, of the thief, the bomber, the author of communiques and the arsonist, divide and fritter life and our capabilities. Division is the principle of authority. The informal authority of roles, which we often be encountered in anarchist circles, is more insidious than the institutional authority, as it remains well camouflaged and in this way invisible and invulnerable. We say EVERYTHING FOR EVERYONE. Each of us, away from roles and specializations, can develop his/hers skills andtest everything through comradely mutuality… robberies, arsons, bombs, executions, texts, conversations and any other form of expression, which promotes new anarchy.

ii) Anarchist, because we are anarchists and do not want neither leaders, nor followers. We create the conspiracy of the equals, operating through small flexible direct action cells, which favors circular debate, rather than the centralized model of organization which resorts in bureaucratic pyramidal, hierarchical authority committees.

iii) Organization, because we believe in the continuous anarchist insurrection and the war against authority. If we want to intensify the permanent war against the commanders of our lives, we must organize. We want to create an international informal network of attack cells, which will suggest, plan and coordinate, act autonomously, evolve and help each other in promoting the possibility of anarchy.

This is our proposal, so we wholeheartedly support the international network FAI-IRF.

We are aware of the flattening polemic, which has been unleashed against FAI by comrades and “comrades”. We deliver those to the theoretical misery of their nonexistence. But there are also those, who wish to open a dialog on the issue of “acronyms”, used by the direct action cells and the informal federation.

Let’s take things in order.

Some months ago, we came across a text entitled «Anonimato» («Anonymity» in English translation), written by an anarchist from the tension of political anonymity. This text was a critique, without any comradely mood, towards CCF and FAI. The text had a very distinctive beginning, a quote from the myth of cyclops Polyphemus from”Odyssey.” In short, according to the myth, when Odysseus was asked by the cyclopes to tell him his name, he answered “nobody”.So when Odysseus blinded the cyclops, he shouted at his brothers that he was blinded by nobody, creating confusion, as his brothers did not understand what has happened. This myth is the kernel of thought of the unknown author of the text, to attack against us, talking about the advantages of anonymity instead of the use of acronyms. He specifically mentions that “When an action is followed by an communique, it is like a joke accompanied by an explanation.”The difference, we say, is that we are not fools to tell jokes. Instead, we chose the barricades of war as our home and fire as our comrade. Moreover, because the superficial knowledge is worse than ignorance, the myth of Polyphemus does not stop there. Odysseus, leaving from the island of Polyphemus, shouted from his ship “I, Odysseus, blinded you … ”

So, far from the myths, the Returning Actually, we want to talk about what the FAI.

FAI, the Black International, the CCF, the affinity groups of anarcho-individualists and nihilists is the community we want to live in. This has nothing to do with the cumulative perception of power. FAI is not the model of a centralized organization. On the contrary, it promotes informal organization, affinity between cells and the uniqueness of each individual. We are against the dictatorship of numbers and central committees. Neither do we follow the logic of two fighting armies but instead we promote the diffusion of hundreds of points of rapture and action, which sometimes cooperate in an international coordination and sometimes express themselves as unique cells or individuals. FAI is simply the invisible community where the desires of attack against our era, meet. In this way, we promote New Anarchy and the Black International.

Someone might say, ” So far so good … but why are you obsessed with acronyms and naming cells ? … ” We answer, that we have no obsession, we just feel the strong desire to define ourselves.

Especially today, we believe that by simply stating that we are “anarchists”, in order to speak through a communique or an action, is inadequate and problematic. We choose to separate our positions from the ” anarchists ” who cooperate with the leftist grassroot labor unions, use Marxist analyzes , unionize their misery, slander direct actions, fantasize workers’ communes, participate in residents’ local committees and transform anarchy into a social therapy.

Also, actions speak for themselves through communiques, because they keep their distances from the ‘ anarchist ‘ opposition , which may sometimes burn down a bank in the name of ” poor people and against plutocracy’s capital”, in order to prove it does at least something.

No, our burned banks is not a way of protest or a token of friendship and solidarity with the ” poor people” who does nothing and sits on his couch. It is a way to express our “I”. An ” I “, that wants to stand out from the herd of slaves, an ‘I’ that does not bow the head down, an ‘I’ not waiting for the crowd to revolt, an “I”, which claims his own name, his own ” acronym ” and does not hide behind anonymity. The meeting time of the revolted ‘Egos’ takes up the name, that we give to it. Its name is FAI and it is our “we”. A collective “we”, armed with razors against our enemies.

So, we choose to identify ourselves and not to be lost in the anonymity of an imaginary anarchist movement.

The exponents of political anonymity often say… “With communiques and acronyms, the actions get owners. ” Defining who you are, is not a contract of property, it is our own way of being aggressive against the social apparatus of the anonymous crowd. We abandon and burn our police identities and we become what we want to be by defining our name ourselves.

This is how a dialogue between comrades and cells begins. We leave marks carved on authority’s face and share experiences, propositions, agreements, disagreements, plans.

Naturally, FAI has no exclusivity. This why our proposal is not the quantitative increase of FAI. One may disagree with FAI even in terms of aesthetics. Our proposal is to organize armed cells and affinity groups, forming an international network of anarchists of praxis. Direct action and diffuse anarchist guerrilla warfare, this is our proposal.

We want to promote the Black International, abolishing the stale ideas of social anarchism. We must overcome the ghosts of the past and the idea of the center of authority and the heart of the beast.

Authority is not just buildings or offices or individuals. It’s a social relationship. It starts from its official temples (parliaments, multinationals, banks, courts, ministries, police stations) and reaches the most simple gestures of everyday life (family, sexual and friend relationships).

Authority cannot be found on a single point. That’s why we want FAI and affinity groups to meet also on new grounds. To combine blown up banks with the debris of an advertising company. To spread our hostility towards the techno-industrial section, corporate exploitation of nature and animals, pharmaceutical industry, civilization and every compromise, that enslaves us. We promote the anti-civilization anarchist tension and invent a new way of life. Away from the fantasies of an idealized primitivism, we want to attack each structure, that exploits and murders nature, animals and humans. Away from the fetishisms of the value of human life, we clarify that our goal is not only the building facilities, but also the individuals who manage them, so we promote and practice the executions of human targets.

Towards this direction, we leave the theorists of the “anarchist” galaxy, who preach political anonymity without doing nothing, behind us. Because, id we want to speak the truth, a part of the tension of political anonymity essentially hides its fear of repression, behind its theories. But let’s face it, prison and death are part of the continuous anarchist insurrection. Whoever does not accept this, does not accept the insurrection itself. On the contrary, for those, who even aesthetically defend political anonymity through their actions, and not only in words, we believe that our difference does not move us apart. Anarchy does not mean to agree, but to know to ask questions and put doubts. As the comrade Nicola Gai from Olga cell/FAI wrote: “Love and complicity with the comrades, who, anonymously or not, continue to attack in the name of the possibility of a life free from authority.”

International “Phoenix project” proved, that there is no copyright and exclusive collaborations under the same name – umbrella. Out of the eight acts, made so far in Greece, Indonesia, Russia and Chile, the Chilean comrades were not explicitly part of FAI, but named themselves Long live Ilya Romanov cell, in affinity with the Black International. So, there are unlimited opportunities for cooperation and creation of new international projects of action, either against some targets or as a form of practical solidarity with the ones missing within the walls of captivity. The issue is to create these chances…

“Freedom does not exist. Not in this world. In this world there is only the struggle for freedom. And what does it mean to be free? Free is the one who is not afraid to kill or die in this fight for freedom”