International Errorist

Errorist Comrades of the world, welcome to the International Errorist movement's website. This issue proposes to think and discuss the notions of State of Emergency - State of Exception, not any more as temporary situations but as a constant condition in a permanent state of crisis. We have invited colleagues and collaborators from different countries and disciplines. Most of the texts have been written or edited for this number, and some articles have been adapted or translated specially for their publication on this site.

Fifteen years ago, the world took a turn on its history: the towers of financial capital collapsed and the old specter of the terrorist enemy revived. The numerology of the calendar wasn't casual: a call to 911 that relighted theories of complot and conspiracy to a global scale. Lodges and clubs of businessmen that try to dominate the world through a plan of permanent wars and crises. Like global warming, the old cold war was reheated in the microwave of the same continental blocks. The democratic dictatorships of a two-party system were reinstalled in a simulation of civic participation. The illusion of continuation in a Welfare State was so deceitful as the hope of recovery in the post-war period. Resources plundered from the colonies for centuries seemed to be exhausted and the logic of terror-error was the solution to justify new wars and invasions in search of fuel, minerals, water, food and imaginary weapons.

Capitalism is dead, and we live inside a corpse. Frantically we are searching a way out from the corpse, and not finding it. Thirty years of neoliberal aggression are presenting the bill, and it’s going to be harsh. Financial capitalism has systematically depredated society, and after the 2008 collapse social resources have been transferred to the bank system, while salaries went down. Not surprisingly the demand is free falling, and the economy is going towards a slump. Should we regret the extinguishing of the economic flame? Well, yes and not. An alarming article by Clifford Krauss appeared in the New York Times on Jan 9th: China’s Hunger for Commodities Wanes, and Pain Spreads Among Producers “The flood of raw materials is pressuring prices, prompting a painful shakeout. Oil companies have laid off an estimated 250,000 workers worldwide….

They’re out in force again, jumping on the bandwagon of terror: all those who’ve been sitting on their reactionary ideas on identity and on sealing off the borders and who have long had their draft laws on national security ready and waiting. After the attacks in Paris, they feel the time has now come to push their agendas. Even before the attacks it was almost impossible to have a rational discussion on migration. And yet we have to. Migration was, is and will be a fact of life. According to the UNHCR, an estimated 60 million people were displaced in 2014 alone. But contrary to the impression often given, nine out of ten refugees stay in their own region, i.e. in the countries of the so-called Third World. Only a tenth manage a longer journey. The question is, how will Germany, and Europe, respond?

Enemy leaders look like everyone else; enemy combatants look like everyone else; enemy vehicles look like civilian vehicles; enemy installation look like civilian installations, enemy equipment and materials look like civilian equipment and materials. -American Defense Science Board “It is the strangest of bureaucratic rituals, “write two New York Times reporters. “ Every week or so, more than 100 members of the governments’ sprawling national security apparatus gather, by secure video teleconference, top ore over terrorist suspects’ biographies and recommend to the president who should be the next to die.[i]” In Washington, this weekly meeting has been labeled” Terror Tuesday.” Once established, the list of nominees is sent to the White House, where the president orally gives his approval to each name. With the “Kill List” validated, the drones do the rest.

Emergency! It is the choked shout of a life that unmultiplies in zones of adaptation and comfort and zones of suffering and rage. Is it all about learning to control our passions? Isn't precisely this power of auto-regulation what we have been stripped of? Isn't this last chapter, about the individual and community subjective dispossession, what we basically call neoliberalism? Is there a possible politics without questioning this disappropriation that makes us governable, without appropriating ourselves of a collective passion autonomy?

“This refugee crisis we are facing...” announced the white and well-off European news presenter at the Spanish Radio and Television Corporation (RTVE). “Where is our humanity? I feel ashamed of being European,” wonders a Twitter user, sympathetic to the ideals of the progressive left-wing, “What are the values of the European Union?” they exclaim on different platforms of the white social movements, in relation to the deal between the European Commission and Turkey. Since the images of the border between Greece and Turkey started to appear in September 2015, most of the complaints have been centered on the loss of what the citizens, the media and political class in Europe, call the “fundamental values of the European Union”. To those same “foundational values” referred the President of the European Council, Donald Tusk, with the phrase “we are the most open and the most tolerant continent and societies in the whole world”, during the press conference in which they presented the conclusions of the agreement between the European Commission and Turkey.

Preliminary considerations At the moment of writing this report, it is necessary to present a picture of what is happening right now in the country: the politicians, divested of every instrument to exercise national sovereignty, which has been ceded to supranational organizations, have decided to concentrate on a task they can do efficiently and without any kind of interference: we refer to the repression on the population, especially on those who organize themselves, what has led to the passing of laws (among which it stands out one commonly known as Gag Law) that take the country back to the years of Franco's dictatorship, of which this democracy is a heir. For these reasons we should conclude that the state of emergency, or at least the state of exception, by means of which the government determines who are the enemies, is the present condition of the Spanish society despite there has been no insurrection.

Let them, nevertheless, put through their anti-revolt bills, make them still worse, transform the whole penal law into india-rubber, they will achieve nothing but a new proof of their impotence. (Friedrich Engels) On his 1895 introduction to Karl Marx's The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850, Engels is sarcastic about the relation between socialists and parties of order, since the former show a pretty consistent democratic trajectory, while the latter -allegedly republicans-, the main mentors of anti-subversive laws, resorted to outright illegality to manage their government. Who were, then, the subversives ones? Engels seems to point at the necessity to face the weakness of "order" on its moment of largest exercise of accumulated power, with illegality without further ado and laws of exception. Together with Marx, since the 40s, they had bet on the worker's viewpoint, as a class in struggle and under construction, so that, all along their theoretical practice, the exception was on the side of the most active forces of the society in the making; the rest was a symptom of impotence.

State Terrorism has been so excessive and evident in Chile that different international organizations dedicated to the “Defense of Human Rights” have visited us to confirm what we have been denouncing for years. Fruitless visits -indeed- given that they have no concrete utility. Without going any further, today, members of the UN Committee Against Torture go all over Chile to see how different types of torture are applied in the country. Let's remember that less than a year ago, two young students of the UTEM University were brutally tortured after being arrested without a cause, in the context of a student protest. Their heads were covered with plastic bags to choke them, their limbs were broken, they lost consciousness for a couple of minutes, all this happening inside a police car that ran through the streets of Santiago, livened up by laughs of the pigs who enjoyed torturing these defenseless young men. And the point is that the police cars have become no man's land, and they are the scene of different beatings and tortures in a systematic way. In spite of the many complaints presented by different organizations and civil lawsuits against the institution Carabiniers of Chile, we know that it is useless because those are practices that have become institutionalized, validated and obsequious to the power.

An emergency traverses the Argentine language: if the disappeared disappears, Videla's words win as a project of daily speech; and it is necessary to take direct actions against the posthumous triumph of the dictatorship of the disappearance of persons. The Disappearance of persons is the worst crime a State can commit. And there are no antecedents in the whole world of State that makes its own citizens disappear in times of peace, without an armed conflict, without being at war. The Argentine State subjected all of the population under its responsibility to the systematic disappearance of thousands of its inhabitants, who were selected in state offices, by public servants, on lists written by ministers, secretaries, the military of all ranks, members of intelligence services who employed interrogation under torture against citizens who, after speaking, lacerated ad nauseam due to that physical and psychological torture, most of the time were also disappeared –and just a few hundreds survived to express what has no words: disappearance.

New World Summit recently started building a revolutionary public parliament in Derîk, open to all, and a true home for Rojava’s stateless democracy. Two cranes circle above a large pit in the ground, lifting heavy, black metal arches into the air. They are covered with hand-painted words: Yeksani Regezi, Gender Equality, Xwe-Bergîri, Self-Defense. Neighbors surrounding the construction site have walked out of their homes to see the choreography of cranes, cement trucks, and bulldozers — some of the machinery decorated with flags of political parties and councils. Among the observers is Amina Osse, the Minister of Foreign Affairs in Cezîre Canton, watching the spectacle together with some women of the local security forces, the Asayish — famous for its public statements about the wish to auto-dissolve when the entire society has become capable of organizing its own self-defense. Osse is one of the driving forces behind the building process, one of its co-authors. The day passes by and her silhouette turns dark. In the remaining light a large spherical shape has emerged in front of her. A constructivist globe that we hope will be a symbol for a new world in the making.