Editorial: Between a present yet to go and a future yet to come

We missed the deadline for Occupied London #4 by a few seconds – the seconds it took a cop to shoot and kill 15-year Alexandros Grigoropoulos on the night of December 6th in Athens, Greece. Suddenly, the deadline for this issue was irrelevant. The first flight out there. The hurried set-up of a blog* to send out updates and articles from the ground. Day in, day out, demo after demo, assembly after assembly. The rage of the thousands who met on the streets over those long, long weeks. “We are an image from the future”. And the hope, the feeling that this time we might be really getting somewhere, that we might finally make it.

This could seem like a feeling that isn’t yet vindicated; that we are not quite there. But what we all lived on the streets of Athens wasn’t just a glimpse of a possible future; it also contained the seeds that could one day get us there. In-between all the darkness of state repression and the panicked attacks from the side of the crumbling capital things have already started to look promising. People are organising in their neighbourhoods; high school students are becoming politically aware and active. They are taking the lead on the demonstrations. By now, everyone hates the police and at the same time everyone feels the need to take things further: Sometimes, a few seconds can push us deep, deep into the future.

For now we are still standing against a mal-functioning system, yet you won’t find any terms like “crisis” or “recession” here – they’ve been repeated and reprinted enough times mostly by those who, as usual, are both responsible for and beneficiaries of this latest capitalist so-called “crisis”.

A question is, of course, just how we could use the latest capitalist restructuring for our own collective advantage. But the long-term question (because similar restructuring “crises” are sure to follow) has to be how we build communities and movements that can resist the advance of state and capital – and how to go on the offensive. Athens’ December revolt was an excellent example of this and of what is to come. It’s paradoxical – this is a time when the anarchist movement sees its analyses and predictions turn true; its ideas, demands and tactics used more than ever before. And at the same time (or is it because of this?) our collective strength as a movement seems to be dissolving. The challenge must be, then, to look for ideas, tactics and strategies that are not copyable and cannot be claimed by those we are fighting against.

In this issue we tried to put together some thoughts and ideas not just on the current “crisis“ but also on how life and our struggles might look from now on. So here are, among many others, some thoughts on love &riot, on torture, a discussion we had with Manuel Castells, a solidarity letter we received for Daniel McGowan and a presentation of some recently surfacing works, on the occasion of the even more recent arrests in France… and of course, some ideas and suggestions on how “cracks” can turn into landscapes, based on previous moments of rupture along with some first few texts that have come out of Athens. Many more to follow…