The successes of the 1st of December 1988, which had the merit of serving as a catalyst to the will and talent of those who wrote this pamphlet, had the added merit of placing themselves abruptly and with no return towards the “immensity of their tasks”, up to the point of putting an end to the continuity of such a promising beginning.
There’s nothing to be sorry about, however negative the unfolding of events. Only the platformist bureaucrats and militant groups defend, above all, the perpetuation of their formal existence; subversive associations, on the contrary, deliberately put their existence at stake when confronting crucial issues and immediately suffer the consequences of their shortcomings.
With this indispensable exception established, one needs to recognize the positive aspects of the pamphlet. Besides its sound and corrosive use of the language, it overflows with critics of undisputable virtue and unfortunate validity, and passes without difficulty from the most colloquial questions to the theoretically complex.
With this indispensable exception established, one needs to recognize the positive aspects of the pamphlet. Besides its sound and corrosive use of the language, it overflows with critics of undisputable virtue and unfortunate validity, and passes without difficulty from the most colloquial questions to the theoretically complex.
Among these one must place in the spotlight the critic of the university and student universe, which the French group Os Cangaceiros did in the context of the student movements of December 86, whose analysis Unconditional Defense owes a lot to.
No less concrete and pertinent was the critic of the politics, including of the “apolitical” that cemented the first antiterrorist student mobilizations to the point where it furthered the future well-known general actions, such as the one orchestrated in July 97 due to the sequestering and assassination of Miguel Ángel Blanco. The potential of the aberrant “apolitical” humanism of the students didn’t pass unnoticed to the State in order to “spontaneously” spread antiterrorist hysteria into the population. An achievement that the entire political spectrum operating in consensus would not have been able to achieve by their own means and that afterwards, due to the size of the political incomes in question, would threaten to destroy. Not so long ago, and in the global context created by the 11-S, we were able to confirm how a terrorist action serves to replace a political team with another and to feed an international pseudo-controversy that promotes the existing militarism. One supposes that the origin, just like our glorious and praised “transition”, would take long to be exported to wherever the change of power demands it.
The link between the form of the successes of the 1st of December and the Algerian rebellion crushed in the same days also stands out and that despite the repeated “antiterrorist” barbarism of the Algerian State in its efforts to subjugate it, it has nonetheless reappeared periodically. It’s left to point out that while the “anti-globalization” incidents of Göteborg occupied the front page of all the newspapers and the headline of the TV news, the Algerian rebellion, that almost reached the point of general insurrection, was the object of absolute silence and despise from the media, without the “anti-globalization” altar boys making the slightest explanation of the reason for such.
Finally, the pamphlet showed us another defining trait of the moment, since the current CGT (at the time CNT-A) revealed itself at the time as a good preacher of citizenship when “instead of lowering to the gruesome level of the Stalinists and their supposed “fascists”, resorted to the ethical and moral denouncing of these vandals whom at their eyes were excluding themselves from the respectable community of “alternative” citizens”.
The duty of any spectacle’s neo-militancy cannot be anything other than to prevent the access to the words and conducts from which all real revolutions begin, to forge and to repress the debate from within. As little as they may seem to have in common and no matter how real the differences are that separate them, from the NGO volunteers to the “radical” algazarras of the anti-globalization tourism, without forgetting the propagation of spontaneous civic movements and “democratic revolutions” with generous media coverage, the current movements of pseudo-resistance – well prefigured by the enemies of the vandals of the 1st of December – still represent the modern face of order, and we’ll soon see how they’ll merge in their practices.
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