Pylimitics

Selections from The New Anarchists. It’s no longer new; David Graeber wrote it in 2002.

• “The phrase ‘anti-globalization movement’ is a coinage of the US media and activists have never felt comfortable with it. Insofar as this is a movement against anything, it’s against neoliberalism, which can be defined as a kind of market fundamentalism — or, better, market Stalinism — that holds there is only one possible direction for human historical development.”

• “The noborder network — their slogan: ‘No One is Illegal’ — has organized week-long campsites, laboratories for creative resistance, on the Polish — German and Ukrainian borders, in Sicily and at Tarifa in Spain. Activists have dressed up as border guards, built boat- bridges across the River Oder and blockaded Frankfurt Airport with a full classical orchestra to protest against the deportation of immigrants (deportees have died of suffocation on Lufthansa and KLM flights). “

• “…the size of the US border guard has almost tripled since the signing of NAFTA. Hardly surprising: if it were not possible to effectively imprison the majority of people in the world in impoverished enclaves, there would be no incentive for Nike or The Gap to move production there to begin with. Given a free movement of people, the whole neoliberal project would collapse. This is another thing to bear in mind when people talk about the decline of ‘sovereignty’ in the contemporary world: the main achievement of the nation-state in the last century has been the establishment of a uniform grid of heavily policed barriers across the world. It is precisely this international system of control that we are fighting against, in the name of genuine globalization.”

• “In the corporate media, the word ‘violent’ is invoked as a kind of mantra — invariably, repeatedly — whenever a large action takes place: ‘violent protests’, ‘violent clashes’, ‘police raid head- quarters of violent protesters’, even ‘violent riots’ (there are other kinds?). Such expressions are typically invoked when a simple, plain-English description of what took place (people throwing paint-bombs, breaking windows of empty storefronts, holding hands as they blockaded intersections, cops beating them with sticks) might give the impression that the only truly violent parties were the police. “