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NEITHER COMMAND NOR OBEY

ATTACK AND DESTROY ALL FORMS OF POWER

In this issue:
About the Extension of Control and the Response to Repression
March 29th of Memory and Confrontation
About the Constitutional Farce and the New Electoral Circus
Anarchist Activations: For the Destruction of The Existent or Nothing

Translated by Act For Freedom Now!

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NEITHER COMMAND NOR OBEY
ATTACK AND DESTROY ALL FORMS OF POWER

Here we are, once again, reaching unthinkable places in CONFRONTATION against all forms of power and authority. Yes, all forms of authority, including that which disguises itself as revolt and “revolution” trying to bring the struggles toward new and old ways of taking, controlling or constructing power. With clear anti-authoritarian conviction we tirelessly shout: neither command nor obey! Attack and destroy all forms of power!

In this new special issue, we continue agitating against and reflecting on elements of reality that we feel are important to view from an anarchist perspective, far from all dogma, rigidity or idealization. We hope that you like this new issue and that you receive it as a contribution to the propagation of the anarchist tension among diverse individuals, groups and territories.

ABOUT THE EXTENTION OF CONTROL AND THE RESPONSE TO THE REPRESSION

Using the statistics from a new wave of cases in the COVID-19 pandemic to their advantage, the Chilean state managed to extend the “State of Catastrophe” into the month of June 2021. With this, the curfew and military presence – on top of the police presence – remain in the streets, something that we already experienced throughout the previous uprising and the pandemic. And so we arrive at a new period of repressive and sanitary management of the pandemic marked by the failed attempt to force schools to restart in-person classes, the start of vaccinations and the implementation of measures which restrict mobility, oblige confinement and punish disobedience. Punishments which, as we have seen, are imposed unequally in a society marked by privilege and the impunity of those who have historically held power.

With a wrongly named second wave of COVID in Chile (given that the number of cases never had a considerable decrease) we also witnessed the state once again point its finger at the public whose
(ir)responsibility, according to them, would be the principal cause of the new cases, the new collapse of the hospitals and the new wave of deaths. On the other hand, there are those who accuse the government of being “ineffective”, as if they were not conscious of what they were doing. Contrary to this, we have experienced the inevitable consequences of a calculated strategy of necropolitics (politics of death) in favour of a corporate government. In a world of uprisings and uncertainties, the Chilean state has the opportunity – after the start of the most important uprising of the past thirty years – to once again position Chile as a model country configured by the dictatorship and deepened by democratic governments since 1990: a paradise of triumphant neoliberal
governance that secures peace for international business and capital.

However, in spite of the expansion of control and restrictions,
anarchist action continues to intervene in real life, within and outside of the contingencies associated with the social uprising.

For a brief overview of some significant highlights, we can’t forget
that in February there were intense days of protest following the murder of a young juggler who defended himself against police harassment with his machetes. The protests were also sparked by the murder of the comrade Bau by private security guards while defending territory reclaimed by a Mapuche community. Both cases occurred in the town of Panguipulli only a few weeks apart, at the same time that a young person was found dead in a police station in Santiago after being detained for violating sanitary measures. As in other such instances, the repugnant
police hand in hand with the official media presented these cases as police “self defence”,  or as a “confused incident” and “suicide”,
unveiling once again the complicity of the media in the fabrication and shaping of reality in the service of power.

Already in March, along with the continuation of protests in the centre and peripheries of Santiago, Antofagasta and other cities,
demonstrations were planned for International Women’s Day, marked this year by the participation of the Feminist Coordination 8M in the electoral game and by disputes and tensions with pacifist and trans-exclusive feminists.

Also in March, the government removed the monument of the “military patriot hero” located in the Plaza Dignidad which, from the beginning of the uprising, was intensely targeted and attacked by protesters. After being painted, scratched, set on fire and almost brought down with saws, those in power decided to remove the monument. However, not without first allowing fascists and members of the military to gather there to cry at its base and demand the construction of a steel wall to protect the chunk of cement that held up the statue of the infamous soldier.

There is no doubt that this last step is a concrete and symbolic triumph of those who continue to revolt. Even so, from the anarchist struggle we will continue promoting the necessity of going beyond the symbolic, attacking that which permits power and its constructed society to function on the basis of authority, obedience and technological domination.

Continuing with this brief overview, we remember what happened on March 18 in Iquique, the day the police detained 17 people in massive raids, accusing them of participating in riots, arson and attacks against the police as part of a supposed criminal association. This accusation, as in other cases, seeks to create an “internal enemy” and justify repression, just like they have been doing against the Wallmapu and anarchist insurrection for years, using long-standing counterinsurgency methods.

In addition to all of this, the month of March was marked by the start and development of various hunger strikes inside the Chilean prisons by anarchist and subversive prisoners and prisoners of the uprising. Using their bodies as a tool of struggle, in this case for the repeal of the modification to a decree (decree 321) that delays and hinders the release of comrades with long sentences and against the extension of preventative imprisonment as a method of additional punishment for those who are awaiting trial. In this context, against any self-victimizing or legalist position, we are in solidarity with our comrades in confrontation against power and its prisons.

MARCH 29 OF MEMORY AND CONFRONTATION

March 29 arrived and despite the fact that Santiago and many cities were under total quarantine, many people defied the curfew and took to the streets on the eve of the Day of Combatant Youth, agitating with barricades, attacks on the police and torching cars and buses. It was an intense day with fire acting as a meeting point for diverse individuals and groups, lamenting only the fact that some comrades remained in preventative custody for carrying molotov cocktails and that a masked youth was murdered at a barricade after being intentionally run over by some miserable citizen.

We know that since the uprising began in October 2019 many more people have joined the turmoil and rebellious riots, which without a doubt brings us joy. Equally, we feel clear that the anarchist struggle in this territory has its own qualitative development of actions and reflections concerning this date.

For years our iconoclastic memory has manifested itself as
CONFRONTATION, even in periods of massive social slumber when the figure of the encapuchados  (the hooded ones) engendered animosity and cop-like attitudes from people who today most likely applaud the struggle in the streets. However, we recognize the opportunity that we all have to hone our positions in the face of the conflict, which we are of course also undertaking in the permanent insurrection against authority.

This is how the anarchist memory, constructed over recent decades, distances itself from the “heroic” memory of combatants of the past – in general that of leftist parties – taken up instead from combat and the antagonistic memory that is against all illusions and confidence in democracy, representation, the State, its justice, and all authority.

Claudia López, Maricio Morales, Sebastián Oversluij, Jonny Cariqueo, Lambros Foundas and Javier Recabarren are the names of some of our comrades, the last three murdered in the month of March, all killed under democracy. For them, with them, the anarchist struggle continues beyond emblematic dates and mass marches, always pointed towards the
destruction of power.

ABOUT THE CONSTITUTIONAL FARCE AND THE NEW ELECTORAL CIRCUS

For a few weeks now, the streets and the media have been filled with publicity for a new electoral circus, this time for the May election campaigns of candidates for the Constitutional Convention (the new constitution), mayors, councillors and governors. After the euphoria experienced by many who placed their hopes in the October 2020 polls in which the option to form a new Constitution won, today we are witnessing a decadent and deplorable spectacle.

Despite the appearance of “new faces” of inclusion, images and
discourses of protest in the electoral propaganda and wishful thinking in the form of a heap of new laws that could come to shape a new state of pure justice, the electoral circus is showing itself to be what it has always been: a pathetic show of politicking that demonstrates only the capacity of power to perpetuate and save the social system, reformulating itself through new agreements, laws and comforts that aim to pacify social uprisings through institutional solutions.

Historically, in moments of institutional crises, polls and votes are a concrete and seductive offer, given that many people will remain hopeful and continue believing that structural transformations of reality can be achieved through this path. They may even believe in their ability to subvert the current way of life through institutional channels. But reality inevitably demonstrates something contrary to hope and good intentions.

This is that after practically having the powerful walking on thin ice, incredibly terrified after seeing how their social order was literally set on fire and fell to pieces with the uprising, the social acceptance of the “peace agreement” forged between left and right-wing politicians handed victory to reformism. Citizenist discourse like “we destroyed it, now let’s build a new country”, displays trust in the old and obsolete dream of a kind, pluralist State and “real democracy”.

ANARCHIST ACTIVATIONS: FOR THE DESTRUCTION OF THE EXISTENT OR NOTHING

Fortunately, many people never believed in the referendum or knew enough to realize – sooner or later – the farcical nature of the elections. In this universe, there are anarchist comrades as well as people and groups that sympathize with anti-authoritarian ideas. We always invite these people to acquaint themselves with and practice anarchist methods of struggle without leaders or managers, and organize themselves for action through affinity as seditious and desirous individuals for total liberation and the necessary destruction of everything created by order of authority.

This form of approaching conflict assumes a special importance when we see – without any surprise – how the authoritarian “revolutionary” organizations (marxist and leninist including MIR, FPMR, Lautaro or trotskyists) intervene either explicitly or covertly, trying to revive their obsolete paradigm of struggle through generic slogans of popular revolt and rebellion. But why do these hierarchical structures call for the elimination of capitalism and the bourgeois State, but never speak of the destruction of power or any form of State and/or authority? Well, because they actually believe in authority as a fundamental element of the political and social Organization, the formation of which they call for with such force, camouflaging their programs of struggle with subversive rhetoric.

As much as it may try to portray itself as being in supposed agreement with the objectives of horizontal collectives and coordinations, the project of any organization that values the existence of hierarchies, leaders, and commanders will always back the instrumentalization of the people mobilized for an insurrection. They understand the revolt as only a transitional moment to destroy the existing power, with the goal of
constituting a new power under the logic of a People’s State,
Proletarian State or whichever variant of the same totalitarian project that is already well known and plastered across history.

Today we are more conscious than ever that the present moment that we are living in, from an anarchist and anti-authoritarian perspective, cannot be approached with solutions that are stuck in the past. As Gustavo Rodriguez recently stated, in the middle of the “health emergency”, the path to a new, much more authoritarian paradigm of domination is opening up. This paradigm begins to reconfigure capitalist management with new technologies. We can thus only establish a position
that is original and non-transferable, re-arming the
theoretical-practical concepts that constitute us as anarchists. This means strengthening our radical and uncompromising confrontation against each and every form and strategy of power, but from a renewed vision of struggle – against the institutions, the patterns and practices of sociability and domination as a whole. This is to say, abandoning the old class-based conceptions of history as “revolutionary change”, stuck in the theoretical understandings of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Our proposal is, first of all, stop waiting for, offering or demanding
recipes. Our wager for total liberation implies affirming our
convictions to materialize them in a thousand and one creative and
destructive forms of anti-authoritarian action. This is how we will
contribute to the spreading of anarchist ideas and practices. This is
how we come into contact with other individuals and groups –
circulating, creating and exploring paths which oppose any obsessive desire for quantitative growth, activating practices of life and struggle from the outside and against the State and its institutional forms, strengthening and expanding anti-authoritarian spaces and affinity groups, activating propaganda and seditious anarchist action, creating concrete strikes against power and techno-domination.

For this we need commitment and conviction, nothing more and nothing less, demonstrating that we don’t need bosses, presidents or commanders.
To once again paraphrase the comrade’s words, our development must be the destruction of this entire existence, persuaded that there is no room for hope, emulating the nocturnal work of termites: demolishing and demolishing, but conscious that the insurrection is permanent. Because if we ever manage to devastate the current edifice of domination, we must be ready to demolish the newly born structures of power, be they
“direct”, “alternative”, “popular” or whatever they may call themselves.

SOLIDARITY, STRENGTH AND LOVE IN WAR TO OUR COMRADES ON HUNGER STRIKE
AGAINST ALL AUTHORITY AND IDEOLOGY
DEATH TO POWER AND LONG LIVE ANARCHY

*In both paragraphs in which the anarchist comrade Gustavo Rodriguez is mentioned, we are paraphrasing excerpts from “About Anarchy. Dialogue and Interview with Gustavo Rodriguez”, available at contrainfo.espiv.net

12 YEARS SINCE THE DEATH IN ACTION OF MAURICIO MORALES

On May 22, 2009, the comrade Mauricio Morales Duarte fell fighting due to the early detonation of an explosive device aimed against the training academy for prison guards.

Mauri was an anarchist comrade who considered himself an antisocial individualist and embraced the nihilist idea. He enacted his ideas in various ways, through music (being part of more than one band), publishing books and pamphlets, actively participating in anarchist squats, libraries and social centres, being in active solidarity with political prisoners, and also through street combat and attacks against the world of authority.

We at CONFRONTACION understand that his death is part of the struggle and attack against power, in which no single action is more valuable than any other that seeks to put an end to the existing order. This is why we continue spreading his memory in opposition to those who, fearing the insurrection without leaders or managers, without acronyms or political parties, criticize the move to the offensive, the attack and the destruction of all forms of authority.

With Mauricio Morales present, we continue to value actions that come from both individuals and informal organization through affinity and free association which open the way to a multiform struggle against power. Such action does not recognize borders, flags, or any other limitation. Freedom is right around the corner because we are free the moment we fight for freedom. Thus we understand the death of a comrade as an eternal call to fight.

WITHOUT LEADERS OF EVERY KIND, WITH MAURI IN MEMORY AND ACTION CONFRONTACIÓN

On March 22, 9 comrades locked up in different prisons of the Chilean state began a hunger strike as a form of protest for the repeal of decree 321. Using their bodies as action in the struggle against the prison machinery and its legal ploys which dress up the perpetual chain in long sentences hiding in the judicial schemes of a democracy that seeks to imprison indomitable, irreducible wills that are in confrontation with this authoritarian and oppressive society.  We are in solidarity and are united with each of the anarchist, subversive, and rebellious prisoners, who have not surrendered their convictions and desire for total liberation. We recognize all of the actions and acts of comradeship and complicity that despite the curfew, the pandemic and the police state have brought visibility to the struggle of our comrades.

Until the last bastion of the prison society is destroyed

Freedom now
for the prisoners
of the social war

If you want to contribute, comment, obtain copies, or support in the distribution of the publication, write to us at:
confrontacion@riseup.net

Drawing of the anarchist comrade Monica Caballero, currently
incarcerated in the San Miguel Prison.