From Antipolitika
August 20, 2023

The new issue of the Balkan anarchist journal Antipoltika in English is out, and available at different distros across Europe. Soon it will be available in North America as well.

The topic of issue #3 is nationalism and it contains texts written by anarchists from Zagreb, Thessaloniki, Belgrade, Athens, Ljubljana, Paris and Los Angeles. Some of the topics covered are: critiques of anti-imperialism, critiques of nationalist policies of groups such as Young Bosnia (famous because of an incident in 1914) and the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, the anti-nationalist ideas of Robert Musil, and others.

About Antipolitika

We do not have classics or founders whose portraits we hang from the walls, those made out of bricks, or mental ones, all the same. We tear down the walls, and we avoid idolatry like the plague.

Bakunin and comrades did not found the anarchist movement, nor did they synthesize its principals in pure intellectual contemplation. On the contrary, the anarchist movement grew out the wing of the International Workers Association (also known as the First International) which consisted of proletarians who didn’t even call themselves anarchists in the beginning. Bakunin did not join the International as an anarchist, he became one influenced by the practice and vision that was already being done and developed by those proletarians.

These people, at the beginning of the second half of the 19th century already had a strong vision of the possibility of a new world based on solidarity and mutual aid. In that vision, the International was a revolutionary organization, but also an embryo of a new society within the shell of the old world, it was simultaneously organized and imagined as a global network that was supposed to organize and coordinate the whole of social and communal life—a kind of an anti-state.

This indicates to us that anarchist thought came to be as a reflection of practice. But, in order for our movement to breathe freely and truly be alive, it is necessary for practice and analysis to always reflect one another, forever changing, in continuous movement.

Those whose vision didn’t go beyond the idea of “socialist” parties that seize state power, did not understand this movement: for them, it was “apolitical” because of its indifference towards the participation in parliamentary politics. But, in reality, something completely different was the case.

As we refuse the legitimacy of the state, as an institution which with violence secures the existence of an exploitative system, so do we refuse “politics” as a separated sphere of life, one dealt with by specialists. We are interested in life, and in order for us to live and breathe freely, the sphere of the political needs to be dismantled—same as with the state/capital/patriarchy.

Anti-politics is life without walls and fences, it is our heart, and the new world we carry inside it.

***

People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have corpses in their mouths.

Raoul Vaneigem

The anarchists are not promising anything to anyone.

Maria Nikiforova

No theory, no ready-made system, no book that has ever been written will save the world.

Mikhail Bakunin

Fight to maintain this feeling for organization and do not allow it to be destroyed by those who think that anarchism is a doctrine which has nothing to do with real life. Anarchism is the opposite of sectarianism and dogma. It perfects itself in action.

Nestor Makhno, adressing B. Durruti and F. Ascaso

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