Red Libertaria de Buenos Aires

What is Red Libertaria (Libertarian Network)?

19th and 20th of december 2001 found us in the streets, in the neighbourhoods, organizing ourselves, discussing and resisting ; holding out with sticks and stones the attacks of the police and infantry, who covered De La Rua´s back as he cowardly fled.

With this scene as background, we, comrades that shared their libertarian ideas, started to find each other in the struggles, all of us looking for the way to overcome the lack of libertarian spaces. And so, the last days of December 2002, the first formal meetings of Red Libertaria took place.

Red Libertaria´s goal is anarchism´s resurgence; in the streets, in the factories and workshops, in the schools and universities, in the neighbourhoods and shambles; so that anarchism can be a revolutionary force again, a force that combats and destroys capitalism everywhere, wielding the weapons of direct action, horizontality, federalism, solidarity, self-management, freedom and equality.

Anarchists although we are many, we are scattered; and because of our dispersion we see our capacity reduced, our influence decreased; due to this, we are unable to sustain any important project and we go back home hopeless and resigned.

Sometimes comrades choose to participate in projects of other tendencies, with which although they agree in many issues, they also keep important disagreements.

Seeing this, we decided to join strengths: to strengthen popular organizations and struggles, and drive into them a libertarian tendency, to sustain a permanent presence on the streets and make activities so comrades with sympathy for the ideas can gather to talk, discuss, learn and join so that we all push in the same direction.

We militate in different spaces (cooperatives, unions and syndic groups, students centres and students groups, neighbourhood work groups, social and cultural centres, etc.) to strengthen popular organizations and struggles, propelling libertarian ideas and trying to make people assimilate them and, over all, practice them as their own.

We carry on propaganda in the streets, also (wheat-pasting posters, painting slogans, distributing flyers, anarchist publications, presence in marches, etc.), and carrying out events (talks and conferences, cycles debate-workshops, movie shows, parties, etc.) and also with the edition of publications (pamphlets, booklets, books and a periodical newspaper).

In Red Libertaria we discuss subjects of the day, we elaborate a common vision of the general situation and the different tendencies at play, and we agree on common plans and lines of action to move forward. We do the same with historical and theoretical subjects to learn from past experiences and recover memory, so we can be in better conditions to act today.

Trough his 4 years of life, Red Libertaria has worked organized and awkwardly for the reinsertion of anarchism into the people, pushing ideas and practices to our work spaces, to where we study and live, explaining our positions in every meeting and assembly in which we participate, propagating from our press and flyers.

And something that's not minor: We've established contact and strengthen our relationship with comrades all over the country.

Our Anarchism

Anarchism as a philosophic and political practice has developed a multitude of variants or tendencies throughout its century and a half of history. All of them criticize the present state of things, share rejection to the authority and have a common goal: a society of free and equal human beings. Several anarchist tendencies coexist nowadays and come together in the libertarian movement. Mainly, their differences rest up on the methods that they propose.

We have our own opinions regarding means and methods to achieve that goal. We place ourselves in an anarchism tendency: the specifism; which holds that anarchists´ organization it's necessary in order to achieve the social change that anarchists themselves try to raise.

Our anarchism aspires to influence people – society's oppressed and exploited part - in order to promote its liberation, which is as well the liberation of the human kind. We see a strong contradiction (as well as faced interests) in this society, since few live in wealth at the cost of majorities' suffering. And as solution we propose Social Revolution, that expropriates the possessors and destroys its tools of oppression - the States, the churches, the nationalism, the machismo, the family, the dogmatism, etc. -, and finishes off with the injustices, establishing the Anarchical Communism.

1. Although our anarchism's objective is humanity's emancipation, is not humanism. We take side with sector from this society: those exploited, oppressed, dominated and governed class; we talk about the workers, the unemployed, the poor and marginalized by this system, to the people in its set. With them we must construct organization, in detriment of proprietors´ and governors´ power.
2. Our purpose is the Anarchical Communism: a new social order where there will be no classes and therefore, neither will be necessary the state or the religious fraud. Our objective is a society in which life - economy, science, art, etc. - will be organized based on the interests of society as a whole and not of a minority as it happens at the present time. We call this self-management: in the future there will be no few privileged and idle ones as laborious masses die in misery. Everyone will work - excepting children, patients, or aged people - and they all will decide democratically what to produce, how much to produce, and how to distribute it.
   In anarchical communist society there won't exist a single centre of power, State will not exist, neither anything that resembles it. Even though the aim of that State would not be maintain exploitation or any centralized administration, State as itself it's tremendously inefficient and it generates a privileged bureaucracy, which in no time will constitute itself as an exploiter chaste.
3. We understand that in order to reach Anarchical Communism it is precise to expropriate social wealth from the bourgeoisie. For that will be necessary Social Revolution driven by people itself, whom will destroy bourgeoisie' s privileges, take the economy in their own hands and begins to produce looking forward to satisfy the necessities of all. We who integrate Red Libertaria we do not conceive the possibility of freedom and equality within Capitalism, neither in its margins.
4. We are specifists because we think that libertarians must be organized in order to be able to influence society. Isolated we would be unable to carry out any truly great action. The organization that we propose differences itself from the traditional political institutions inasmuch as hierarchies do not exist inwards: there is not a person or group who decides and another that executes.
   Anarchists' organization must be a truly democratic organization, in which the decisions are made through assemblies. Since there's a physical limit of persons that can conform an assembly, libertarians' organization would be a federation: the unit of the multiple and relatively small nuclei, each one carrying on a particular activity, but related to the whole through periodic general meetings. Each group would relative autonomy within the framework of these basic agreements.
5. We are internationalists since we considered that borders between oppressed and exploited towns shouldn't exist. The entire world suffers capital's yoke and state's oppression. An organization with international projection is necessary for the fight against this system that has been constituted on planetary scale.
   Internationalism, that conceives the entire world as battlefield and not only one country, comes with anti-imperialism. In Capitalism, as it was consolidated from mid XIX century, the bourgeoisies of the technologically developed countries extended their political and economic domination beyond the borders of their own territory, intervening military when it was necessary. We are anti-imperialist because we fight against the bourgeoisie that resides in our region and also those who resides in the United States and European countries, those from China and Japan, etc.
   We do not see the possibility of agreeing with the local dominant class to fight against a foreign bourgeoisie. With alliances of that nature, founded on the deceit of nationalism, the bourgeoisie of a country drags people into the fight so they can exploit them even more. Our interests are opposite dominant class' interests; therefore there an alliance is not conceivable.
6. Our anarchism also fights for the equality of the genders, for the destruction of the sexists stereotypes that relegates woman to a second place in society. We understand that all women bear a double oppression: whereas workers, unemployed people, poor women, etc. but also whereas women. We must eradicate the vices of sexism, the machismo and the violence based on the gender.
7. From Red Libertaria we want anarchism to grow and amass among the exploited and dominated people. That's why we sustain works in different spaces: cooperatives, unions and syndic groups, students centres and students groups, neighbourhood work groups, social and cultural centres, etc taking part in different scopes where the inequalities of the system are pronounced, looking forward to promote struggles that result in the organization of the oppressed ones. It is not necessary to clarify that our intervention does not persecute a dirigencialist eagerness, left party style, we look forward to foment experiences of struggle and criticism to the system.
8. By the previous thing, as we uphold the specific organization of the anarchists, we also maintain the fundamental importance of popular organizations. Whereas anarchists, Red Libertaria, and the libertarian movement in general are places where we come together and discuss, plan and organize propaganda and participation in the struggles. Parallel to the libertarian movement, the popular movement develops, sometimes spontaneously, but almost always through union organizations, student groups or neighbourhood work groups in which we must participate. These organizations must be democratic internally and autonomous respect the dominant class.
9. For the present time we think that the regrouping of the libertarians is urgent; in the libertarian movement, and according to the tendency of each one, taking ahead an energetic and coordinated militant action towards the social change.

Our E-Mail is redlibertaria@riseup.net