No.1368
First of all I hope you are well. I take it that you're a euro who has second-hand knowledge of the events at the ZAD. I was very surprised because as a burger there are many things I'm not privy to, but I recall your complaint was basically that anarchists got the boot from the ZAD because the Appelists decided to go a legal route with the state, doing their 'petit-bourgeois goat cheese' farming or something. I don't think this makes them Marxists as you say, but it rings of Lenin at Brest-Litovsk, trading space for time. I just wanted to hear more about the Appelists actions at the ZAD, the different factions (I've read a little about them on English websites like autonomies and ill-will), and what you think of the following. The Appelists say this;
>There is no “other economy,” there’s just another relationship with the economy. A relationship of distance and hostility, to be exact. The mistake of the social and solidarity economy is to believe in the structures it adopts. It’s to insist that what occurs inside it conforms to the statutes, to the official modes of operation. The only relationship one can have with the structures adopted is to use them as umbrellas for doing something altogether different than what the economy authorizes. So it is to be complicit in that use and that distance. . . We should make use of economic structures only on condition that we tear a hole in them. . .
>As for the structure with holes in it, it draws its meaning not from what it communicates but from what it keeps secret: its clandestine participation in a political scheme immeasurably larger than it, its use for ends that are economically neutral, not to say senseless, but politically judicious, and for means that as an economic structure it is designed to accumulate without end. Organizing in a revolutionary way via a whole resistance network of legal structures exchanging between themselves is possible, but risky. Among other things, this could furnish an ideal cover for international conspiratorial relations. There’s always the threat, however, of falling back into the economic rut, of losing the thread of what we’re doing, of no longer seeing the sense of the conspiracy. The fact remains that we must organize ourselves, organize on the basis of what we love to do, and provide ourselves the means to do it.
as someone who is more of a Marxist, I admire the shift towards the politics of conspiracy (the bourgeoisie's greatest weapon) and existentialism implicit in the last sentence. Do you think that this is a veritable path of revolutionary activity or not and why?
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No.1369
>>1368basically I was surprised at hearing that the Appelists took this legal route and couldn't imagine what you were saying is right, but these passages clarify their position. I suppose you don't think it's the right way to go about things. It seems like a way to grow power and influence, though. And tell me, what has become of the ZAD and its productivity and factions after the fact? Have the Appelists lost credibility in the eyes of the others? Has it been a major setback for France as a whole? How does it now relate to the Yellow Vests and how are they faring?
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No.1370
Do you really believe that operating a print shop so that you can print pamphlets on the weekend is some conspiracy?
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No.1373
>>1370No but I believe that smuggling contraband in shipments of X commodity can be.