A-Infos (en) Mission statement of Alarm (//alarm.solidarita.org)

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THE WORLD WE LIVE IN IS DIFFERENT THAN THE ONE WE KNOW FROM
OFFICIAL MEDIA
And this is not just because "they lie". They often don't lie:
if newspapers write that lay-offs are neccessary, because they
are helpful to economy, they are right: shares, value of
companies, which sack sufficient numbers of workers on a
pavement, rise. If TV lectures us, that one have to be a
flexible workforce, who is willing to forget about his/her own
life and move to this or that place, change his/her skills for
this or that occupation, it's a realistic testimony about life
under capitalism: people are just specific goods, labour force,
which has a value as far as capital needs it to produce profit.

And that there is something missing in the image given by media?
That they don't look at the world from the viewpoint of a
lay-offed worker; shop assistant, who is slaving in a
supermarket; worker, who is performing a degrading job at the
assembly line in a factory of so much praised foreign investors;
or student, who is struggling on between studies and day
labouring, or who is studing with remorses, that he/she is a
burden for his/her parents and can study only thanks to their
self-denial? That official media don't understand the tragedy of
a fate of a "foreign" labour force, which has to choose between
a status of a burdensome "foreigner" to keep his/her family
alive, which separated by hundreds of kilometres (he/she is
described as an economic immigrant, who is searching "for a
better lot", as if it is possible to measure a human life with
money and as if a man could force capital to need the very
workers in the Ukraine - how many of us in the Czech Republic
were successful in persuading an employer, that capital needs
you?)?

That media don't give a whole picture about this world?

Journalists don't withold the whole reality intentionally, their
lies, tendentious obscuring and diverting attention is not
largely deliberate: they just follow specific demands dictated
by market. Journalists are specialists, whose task is to
reproduce capitalist ideology, confusion and alienation.

Official media just aren't "our" media - but media about us:
they rob proletariat of his daily experience, they také away our
lives - to swallow them and throw them out as an episode in an
alienated social spectacle. From thousands of our daily
humiliating Sophi's choices become statistic figures; tens of
thousands of little resistances, when we try on our workplaces,
in our communities or at our schools to take our lives in our
own hands don't get into the media, one can't see beyond
millions of our daily consents with the system how we resist
them (and therefore a potential for revolt) - they become just a
document about vitality of the dictatorship of capital.
Everything what could contain only the smallest embryo of a
radical tendency and critique of todays anti-social society,
media interpret according to needs as a positive critique, an
anti-social expression, a healthy civil activism's impuls or
pardonable (and so much neccessary for capitalism!) idealism.
Here they paternaly appreciate, there they support repression:
and every time they serve the system to absorb, dominate - and
survive everything.

It is not our aim to make a counterweight to official
newspapers: we just want to express our everyday experience of
life in the capitalist society, its reflections and the
anarchist-communist tendency, which is an expression of this
experience: tendency, which rejects present private capitalism
in the same way as state capitalism, which ruled the Eastern
bloc before 1989, as arbitrary forms taken by the dictatorship
of capital.

After all, we are not messiahs, who would, as a Leninist left,
see as their task to command workers - our activity comes from
an understanding, that we have no other chance for a worthy,
human life than resistance. And we do not wish to speak for
others, only for ourselves, we do not want to interpret the
world, we want to change it. We should paraphrase a well-known
statement of the anarchist Durruti from the Spanish revolution,
"a new world exists and it is growing already in todays
proletarian resistance against capital." Indeed, a libertarian
communist movement is being born within the old, alienated
society as an expression of its total negation. It might
disappear from sight, it might pause - but it will reappear,
because the need of it will exist, as long as capital rules the
world.

We will build the other world ourselves - workers, whose lives
diffuse in a spectacle of the official media; who are sacked
today, forced to carry out stupifying, degrading work; who are
thrown in this or that direction as a pile of sand; who are
shaken with by capital according to its needs; who are nothing
else than (necessary or unnecessary) goods on the market
(workforce) - and who refuse to be such goods anymore. For that
matter, history made the other world neccessary and also
possible.

Alarm!

Alarm, the magazine of Libertarian Communism, is maintained by
the Organisation of Revolutionary Anarchists - Solidarity
(ORA-S), however all articles will not be our own. But because
we are the organisation, which is based on a principle of
collective responsibility towards a unified theory/practice, we
thinks it would by honest to differentiate collective positions
of ORA-S:

-  under the collective responsibility of ORA-S will be included
those articles, which will be signed by an ORA-S member (unless
it is stressed, that it is his/her personal view, for example
because of the fact, that questions, which are dealt with in the
text, are beyond a political agreement of ORA-S);

-  on the contrary, texts of our members, which express only
their personal views, articles of our supporters/co-workers,
monitoring or translated texts of other groups we publish,
because we consider them as fecund and inspirational for
theory/practice, but maybe in some things ORA-S would not agree
with them.

What you will find in Alarm...

We do not want to pose like we were present everywhere - just
because we are able to rewrite news from iDnes or Ceské noviny.
News based on information both from official sources and, for
example, A-Infos or IMC we want to separate from our own: those
you will find in the section News (and we admit that there will
be rather less of those), borrowed in the section Monitor.

Interviews you can find in Interviews and shorter
considerations, commentaries and reflections by members of the
Alarm collective, again surprisingly, in Gloss.

In the section Class in struggle we want to bring short little
news about proletarian resistance from all over the world.

Essays, Analysis will contain another texts, which have some
connection to the libertarian-communist tendency or can be a
challenge or contribution to it. Again, we would not "sign" all
of them, but they might contribute to understanding of history
and the world around us.

In Announcements you will learn about discussions, talks,
exibitions and also demonstrations, which are in preparation,
and into the section Reviews we would like to catch as much of
the most interesting things from books, concerts, etc., as we
will be able to do.

In the section Statements you will find speeches, leaflets or
posters ... and also those statements.

Once upon a time we would like to introduce interesting webpages
of all kinds in Tips from Web - and things, that would look
rather inappropriately in above mentioned sections, you will
come across in Astonishing Things.

This menu will be most probably extended in time - but what we
know already now, is, that one section is missing. However, when
we will find a section Letters and Reactions, depends only on
you!

...and what you won't find there

In Alarm you will not come across traditional sections as "home
news" - "foreign news" or "movement" - "society", which have
become domesticated even on the pages of anarchist publications
(including our own ones) - and this is not just a formal nuance,
but rather an expression of our position.

The separation between movement and society often reflects a
fact, that with an arrogance of activists it is overlooked, what
is happening outside the space, which is called movement. Yet,
how are we to determine, what is still movement and what is not?
Is even the most "marginal" and may be even the least successful
practical activity (action), which activists often even do not
learn about, of workers themselves from the most neglected
workplace or neighborhood an expression of a movement, or is it
often boring and stereotyped and thought and action unprovoking
actions, we do? Beyond outlining and fetishization of the
movement's terrain a fear might bleed, that activists will lose
their privilege, their sacred soil and an inability to
understand, that tendencies towards an emergence of a real
libertarian communist movement are breaking onto surface as
always in the history of class struggle, regardless of whether
they call themselves or whether someone will benevolently award
them tha label "movement."

You will not find here neither section "From home" nor "From
abroad." Even this is not a formal fad for us. It is an
expression of the fact, that proletariat has no homeland.
Borders are not drafted between nations, states or races, but
between bourgeoisie/counter-revolution - and
proletariat/revolution. Workers from France or Brazil, in
contrast to "our own capitalist class", belong to the same world
of the same class interests as we do.

We refuse, though we run the risk of being labeled as
"lifestylists", to remove arts from our life as something
secondary or extraordinary. We believe, that libertarian
communism is an abolition of separations between "work", "art",
"entertainment", "leisure", or "education" - and that those
things, which are in todays world separated by commodity economy
based on a capitalist production mode, will merge into a
creative social activity of man.

  June 2002

http://alarm.solidarita.org



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