Let’s change everything… From the roots

This is a couple days old now, but I think it at least gives an interesting perspective on the general mood.

Let’s change everything… From the roots

Article from Una Posició published in Catalán in Solidaridad Obrera

In these last days, despite the continuing agitation and the feeling of living in a moment of exceptional mobilization, we have entered a time of waiting characteristic of the moment before a battle, generating a sentiment of uncertainty that can affect the initiative of the masses in the street. In spite of that, the neighborhoods, towns, and other actors are still very alive. Strategically, it is clear that without a lasting mass mobilization what is being called the “Catalan Republic” will not exist. Not to summon it out of fear of its ungovernable element could mean letting go of the opportunity to turn everything upside down. --Two days ago it was confirmed that three different unions, including CGT, CNT, COS, IAC, and INTERSINDICAL-CSC, have called a general strike for October 3rd. See you in the streets!

These days, with the enormous mobilization to defend the referendum of October 1st, who isn’t feeling that it’s time to fucking change things?

Catalans and people from all over who live and work in Catalonia, an immense labour has been realized, showing the world that the framework of the Regime of 78 is unbearably small compared to our determination to prevail in our collective capacity to decide how and where we want to live!

What is being called the “Catalan Republic” is within our reach. Rajoy [PM of Spain] could only try to stop it by unleashing an unusual violence. It is difficult for him to do so because then the entire world, both inside and outside the Spanish state, would be all over him. Furthermore, when you start something like that, it is hard to know how it will turn out.

Traditionally, opportunity is painted bald. Bald in the back and with hair in the front because once the moment has passed it cannot be recovered. To take advantage of the opportunity means, among other things, to collect data and analyze it strategically… now.

We are not naive, it is evident that part of the movement is feeling governed (“guided”, they say, but it means the same), by entities, parties, and sovereigntist organizations and by the president of their own Generalitat [The government of Catalonia], which said last Friday: “You can’t put doors in a field”. They count on grand media, economic, and organizational resources, furthermore on the approval of independence that is showing itself to be the lever that permits us to open the cracks in the Regime of 78. A mythico-politico potential of the masses that the red-black internationalism does not now have.

The opportunity, however, is inseparable from the mass movement and the ambiguous feeling, of changing everything, that drives it. The opportunity is also in the self organizing capacity that is coming out in all parts, of agreement with the transformational fraction of the independence organizations, of pushing as far as possible a massive presence in the streets. As well as in the ways of living and struggling that emerge from it. It is this presence that, while it lasts, removes the power of the present order and opens the field of the thinkable. The art of the possible. Not by itself alone, but by resonating, in all the organizations, actions, and words that already exist, as they surge in the middle of the conflict.

The other day, in an article, a woman explained that everything is chaos in the regime and the opportunity to change everything completely made her feel truly alive. One of the tasks of the groups called libertarian or anarchist, despite being a minority in the Neighborhood Defense Committees that are appearing on all sides with different names, could be to try to expand in practice on that feeling of being more alive than ever. Instead of closing down these Defense Committees to quickly, searching for overwhelming consensus, with worm eaten old tactics, of awkward manipulation, that see and hate everything from afar, we have to open space for the free use of the self and the world and for the multiplication of autonomous initiatives. In juridico-politico terms, to use things without having the right is to open the space to another right, one in which the ownership of Roman heritage is in suspense.

Another task could be to make a patient critique, argued and tenacious, of the forms of capitalist life without sense, without exit, and any attempt to steal the initiative, closing the process that opens up with the referendum of October first and, above all, in any space after the first of October where again we are not heard.

What do we want? We want to change everything with independence. We want a broad and true participation in all the things that directly affect us. We want to be able to live well. We want a political price for housing that allows us to return to our neighborhoods. We want to stop, with a determined collective force, anyone who is allowed to exploit and precarize tenants and workers in our neighborhoods and towns. We want to stop the big landlords and big capitalists from having a free hand to ruin our neighborhoods. We want refugees and migrants to feel at home and to learn from them not only what is colonial in us, but also other ways of mutual support. We want the means to provide ourselves with common spaces where, small and large, we can know, learn, steal time from the accelerating markets, and conspire against everything intolerable. We want to open other ways of living, less dependent on the hostile world that has erected capitalist governments over the entire planet which sicken and sadden us.

We want so many things… We want, with independence, to change everything from the root.

The Committees of Defense have been created to defend the Referendum of 1-O. After this Sunday, they should serve to defend the results. But, in this process, it is also necessary to defend the yearning to change everything for fucking once. The feeling of being more alive than ever. These Committees of Defense must not become cheating micro-governments or nests of micro-politicians in search of a reputation, but rather spaces in which to broaden our desire to live by changing everything.

What should become clear in the process of creating the “Catalan Republic” is that this is not going to happen without a permanent movement or without the Defense Committees. It is necessary for the Defense Committees to consolidate their power, their capacities. The Defense Committees should endow themselves with revocable delegates that can coordinate rapidly and with confidence among themselves and with other agents and combative sectors, feminists, students, unions, migrants, etc. They should also create their own powerful organ of propaganda to critique any attempt to shut down the process too quickly as well as to spread the enthusiasm that lives in the desire to sink the Regime of 78 and to change it completely. --We come from the neighborhood assemblies, the neighborhood strike committees, the housing committees, the libertarian ateneos and autonomous groups, which are everywhere because the desire to end the hated order and the organized people are everywhere. We need to find the confidence, the intelligence, and the agility to be everywhere at the same time, to be able to intervene as an organized force and to defend a position. In order to create autonomous zones everywhere, we must at times be more centralist than the centralists, not as a new bureaucracy, but as a force that manifests itself.

A centralized space for the movement should be opened and it will be opened. A corner or a palace. We hope that it will not drown itself in a permanent assembly like a bad copy of a parliament, but rather that it will serve to multiply the initiatives, to inspire everyone that comes, to share ideas, resources and proposals, and, above all, to find ourselves in the eyes of others in the process of giving light to the world that we carry in our hearts.