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The libertarian left in Belgium

Libertarian socialism in Belgium never got many chances. In the 19th century it gained some ground within the workers' movement. Radical intellectuals who supported the poor were much influenced by the ideas of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Workers and farmers also got the support of anarchists active in the First International. The historian Jan Moulaert has done much to get the story of the anarchists in the Belgium of the 19th century much known.
The Social democrats gave a boost to alternative economy in cities like Gent, they had the money for it. And because of this, the libertarian left became marginal again. At the beginning of the 20th century, anarcho-communism and the libertarian left were gaining ground in Mechelen, a city not far from the capital Brussels. This gave hope to the movement in the Dutch speaking part of the country (the north), anarchism mostly had been happening in the French speaking part of the country. But two World Wars virtually destroyed the movement in Belgium.
The counterculture of the sixties made anarchic tendencies influential again. One of the people responsible for that was Hem Day (picture), an anarcho-pacifist and a friend of the Spanish anarchist leader Buenaventuri Durruti.
A famous writer called Louis Paul Boon started to sympathize a lot with anarcho-syndicalism. Other anarchists were active with actions against militarism in the seventies, like refusing military service, and in the nineties also more and more with squatting and ecological direct actions.
A journal called Alternative libertaire received many readers in Belgium and France. Cities like Liège, Brussels and Gent attracted many anarchists and other radicals to be active in.
Philosophers like Leo Apostel, a libertarian marxist, and Roger Jacobs did much to infuse the movement with social theory. Jacobs also did a lot to get Murray Bookchin more known in Belgium and the Netherlands.
In Belgium, the libertarian left of the 21st century could be described as a movement in which the ideologies of those active in its main center, the Anarchist Center in a big city called Gent, are very important. This place is in the north of Belgium, not far from the border with The Netherlands.
What is the Anarchist Center? In their own words... "The Anarchistisch Centrum is a meeting place for individuals and groups active in Gent with anarchism and/or direct action. Anarchism means for us that we want to work in an anti-authoritarian way at an ecological society in which all power is equally divided." Ideas are spread by several independent media centers, indymedia.
I think the anarchism of the now in Belgium is a lot like that of Sweden, but with less syndicalist influences and a lot more people interested in squatting, because the laws around it are not that strict. It's also close to the anarchism of the Netherlands.
Recently, two people started a new project. Their website, www.anarchyisorder.org, is almost fully in English. The portal site of anarchist groups in Belgium is anarchie.be

The "clash within the Muslim world"

Phyllis Bennis at Znet:

The political framework of this “Global War on Terror” has tweaked the idea of a “clash of civilizations” to refer to something slightly different. Now the Bush administration speaks not of that clash between civilizations, but rather a clash within a civilization – specifically within the Muslim world. It is a “clash,” administration officials warn, in which “we” must prevail. This has shaped the latest version of how the U.S. proposes to understand the Arab world, the Middle East, the Islamic countries – as a clash between “moderates” and “extremists.” Those people, governments, countries, dictators, militias whom “we” define as “moderate” support U.S. efforts towards control and domination of their country/region/world. The “extremists” are those who resist such efforts.

Cartoon Kate

Cartoons by Kate Evans...

The bombings in Madrid

The end of the Spanish army participation in the "global war" was coming, the governing Partido Popular (PP) soon after it lost the elections...

Maggie Schmitt, 2004:

Around the rest of Europe and the US the hypothesis that the bombings were produced by Al Qaeda was circulating since midday: here in Madrid the media has treated that hypothesis as a "subversive campaign" and suppressed it entirely. The government has called for a massive demonstration under the slogan "With the victims, For the Constitution, Against Terrorism." "For the Constitution," you must understand, is to say 'for the centralized state', perhaps even 'for the present government': the Spanish Constitution of 1978 was a compromise made to facilitate the transition from Francoism, but which left many (from the Left and from the autonomous regions) extremely dissatisfied. It continues to be a point of tension. Thus the demonstration proposed is a means of gathering up all the pain and fear and anger and confusion of the people and soldering this into a national consensus of support for the PP, a ban on any criticism. Three days before elections.

Now as I troll through newspapers all around the world, the hypothesis that Al Qaeda is responsible for the attacks seems more and more generally confirmed. Still the Spanish news insists on ETA. Who knows? As was the case with September 11th, to the degree that I don't have any access to the truth or any criteria for judging what is true and what is not in this case, what is important to think about is not so much 'who did it' as 'what are the consequences.' On the level of immediate consequences, many people from social movements breathed a sigh of relief to hear that Al Qaeda claimed the bombings: at least about that we have something to say. At least about that we can intervene, we can respond with things like: "This is the fault of the government that got us involved in a global war despite the opposition of 90% of the population." Or we can denounce them for having assumed it was ETA. Or we can group around the migrants' organizations, which will no doubt find themselves bombarded by a new intensified islamophobic criminalization.

War reporter Robert Fisk retired

He has related war too much to the concept of anarchy because war is a lot about power and domination, but this is a video worth showing.

The US Military Expenditure

9/11 and the culture of fear

Cindy Milstein, 2003:

The period of a transparent politics-from-below that interlinked a multiplicity of uprisings from the Zapatistas to Genoa in a global movement against capitalism seemed to disappear with New York’s twin towers. Certainly, the nonhierarchical forms of organization that defined the “anti-globalization” movement lingered — from consultas and spokescouncils to a do-it-yourself infrastructure of media, medics, and legal aid — but now only among anti-authoritarian leftists, who had introduced such utopian notions in the first place. In the post-September 11 culture of fear, liberal social justice activists and orthodox Marxists alike raced away from the grassroots practices that had become normative at the mass direct actions of the recent past.

The anti-war movement in North America

Naomi Klein in Socialist review about her new book “The Shock Doctrine” and the movement against the war in Iraq:

I'm not really in a position to comment on the anti-war movement in Britain. But one problem with the anti-war movement in North America was the fear of seeming unpatriotic after 9/11. It really distorted the honesty of the movement.
It used slogans and iconography which were designed in response to this fear. The economic analysis was dropped because it was seen as divisive. I wrote the book because we need to be drawing the connections between the violence and the economic system it serves, and even if it means that there are fewer people out for demonstrations it would be a more sustainable movement.
We don't want activism that is just a short blast and then followed by disillusionment.

German Greens : the transition to professionalism

Janet Biehl (1993):

Almost as soon as die Grünen entered the federal apparatus, the defining democratic impulses of the movement were brought into question and even abandoned by many of the Bundestag delegates themselves. Those who became generally committed to exercising parliamentary power came to be known as "realos"; those who defended the original values, in turn, generally came to be known as "fundis" and later regrouped as the left within the movement; this also encompassed Greens who accepted the use of the parliamentary apparatus to publicize and dramatize their program. It was the realos who now rejected the principles of Green extraparliamentary grassroots-democratic radicalism and adapted to the conventional framework of the parliamentary establishment. Otto Schily, a lawyer who in the 1970s had been a flamboyant, defense attorney for the members of the Baader Meinhof terrorist group, now basked in the limelight as a Bundestag deputy and did as much as he could to professionalize die Grünen and eliminate rotation. (He later left the Greens and joined the Social Democratic Party.) Two former leaders of the "Spontis" (or Revolutionary Struggle, anarchistic street revolutionaries from Frankfurt in the 1970s) ―Joschka Fischer and Daniel ("the Red") Cohn-Bendit― entered the party after it had achieved a measure of success and became media darlings and joined Schily in arguing that Greens should be able to hold parliamentary offices in the conventional way. Together these realos attempted to professionalize the Greens into an environmentalist and pragmatist party that would be comfortable within in the existing system rather than remain a collectivist "non-party party" that would challenge it.

More about the early Greens in Europe...