THE FILMMAKER’S SOCIAL REALISM WAS ALWAYS SUSPICIOUS OF ESTABLISHED POWER ~ Bleart Thaçi ~ Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr died on 6 January at the age of 70, after a long illness. His body of work stands among the most severe and distinctive in late twentieth century European cinema, ranging from the early social dramas Family Nest, The Outsider, The Prefab People, Almanac of Fall and Damnation to the later landmark films Sátántangó, Werckmeister Harmonies and The Turin Horse. Discussion of Tarr has often centred on style and form, on duration, repetition or bleakness, yet his films were shaped just as much by a political outlook formed early and articulated consistently throughout his life. Tarr described himself, without hesitation, as an anarchist. In interviews late in life, Tarr spoke openly about his political formation during his final years of high school. He said that he identified with the far left, recalling that he no longer carried a school-bag, since Mao’s Little Red Book in his pocket was enough. He described himself as a committed communist until around the age of sixteen. What followed was a break rather than a conversion. He came to believe that the leaders he had been taught to admire were false communists, concerned with authority and control rather than emancipation. From that point, he distanced himself from communism as it was practised and presented to him. This suspicion of established power remained a constant. Tarr did not move towards liberalism, nor did he align himself with nationalist opposition. His comments suggest a settled distrust of political systems that claim moral authority while reproducing hierarchy. In later public appearances, he spoke sharply about the historical record of communism, at one point remarking that he had never seen a good communist. His political views were shaped as much by circumstance as by ideology, and when plans to study philosophy fell through he went to work at the Óbuda shipyards. Living and working among industrial labourers informed what he later called his social cinema. His earliest films emerged from the Budapest School and the Béla Balázs Studio, an experimental and semi-underground environment that favoured small budgets, amateur equipment and non professional actors. These films focused on housing shortages, unstable employment, the pressure of economic conditions on personal relationships or the wear of poverty on everyday relations. Tarr spoke of being close to working class people and of wanting to record daily life as it was, rather than impose symbolic narratives. Frame from Satantango He often explained that his turn to filmmaking came from frustration with cinema itself. Films, he said, were full of false stories that bore little resemblance to lived experience. Making films became a way of showing conditions as they were, without embellishment or instruction. This approach extended to his working methods. He avoided professional polish, relied on non actors, and resisted narrative forms that dictated meaning from above. These choices reflected a broader opposition to authority rather than an attempt to promote a fixed political programme. As his career developed, Tarr became more outspoken about contemporary politics. He was an atheist and a consistent critic of nationalism. In a 2016 interview, he described Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán and Marine Le Pen as national shames, framing his criticism in explicitly moral terms. His denunciation of nationalism was especially pointed in the Hungarian context (under the aforementioned prime minister), where he became an outspoken critic of the state’s handling of migration and asylum. During the European migration crisis, Tarr wrote a statement that was displayed near a pro-migration exhibition in front of the Hungarian Parliament. “We have brought the planet to the brink of catastrophe with our greediness and our unlimited ignorance… Now, we are confronted with the victims of our acts.” In it, he argued that Europe had helped bring about global catastrophe through greed, ignorance and wars waged for exploitation. He then asked what kind of morality was being defended when fences were built to keep out people displaced by those same actions. In his final years, Tarr continued to speak out publicly, even as his health declined. In December 2023, he was among a group of filmmakers who signed an open letter (alongside Pedro Costa, Aki Kaurismäki, Claire Denis, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Christian Petzold, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Jia Zhangke, etc.) calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, an end to the killing of civilians, the establishment of humanitarian corridors, and the release of Israeli hostages. To remember Béla Tarr is to remember a filmmaker for whom politics was neither decorative nor secondary. His anarchism was not a posture but an orientation that shaped how he lived, how he worked and how he spoke. It remains present in his films as a cinema that refuses obedience, legitimacy, or consolation in the face of power. The post Béla Tarr (1955-2026) appeared first on Freedom News.

AS EUROPE’S RULING CLASS RESPONDS TO THE POST-PAX AMERICANA WORLD WITH ANGUISH AND ARMAMENTS, HERE ARE THE OPPORTUNITIES AND THREATS FACING BRITISH ANARCHISTS ~ Rob Ray ~ Part one of this article, covering strengths and weaknesses, is here. OPPORTUNITIES Putting a cynical hat on, in many ways there has never been a more opportune time to be an anarchist. We are watching the collapse of the liberal capitalist dream happen in real time as Starmerism discards any semblance of velvet glove for the working class. The cobweb left is in utter disarray and even the new wave left of Corbynism has zero ideas. Re-capture Labour? Dead. New/radical party? Don’t make me laugh. Capture the Greens? You’ll kill them by trying—the project is already an uncomfortable balance of red-greens and liberal shire Tories talking round their very different reasons for being there. The need for a confident, radical base building its own resources towards the goal of acquiring leverage that can actually threaten government policy once in a while, could not be clearer to see. We have an ample example both from our own recent history and from across the pond of what happens to a progressive movement that puts all its eggs in the basket of electoralism and then loses. It’s also important to consider that both the current Labour squeeze on working class life and the oncoming wave of nationalistic, military first, sod-the-environment politics set to dominate the 2020s sits in both the Threats and Opportunities column. Watching this happen will be a focussing, radicalising factor for a great many people. We have not had a serious military drive in this country for quite some time, and it will be a culture shock. On top of all the other economic beefs the working class have right now, many leaning leftwards but with nowhere to express it, we do have some open doors to push at, if we’re canny about doing so and avoid alienating potential allies. Reform’s dangerous position too will have elements of both threat and opportunity. The former will see the usual There Is No Alternative merchants telling us the only way to stop fascism is to get out and vote, keep things nice and calm and disciplined, the usual twaddle that’s manifestly provided not protection against but breathing room for fascism to develop Europe-wide. The latter is our ability to say this. That the post-Thatcher consensus, with its flood-upwards economics and retreat of State support is the problem. That the solution is not tying ourselves to that disintegrating status quo, giving up our agency and confidence to suited corporate goons, but taking personal responsibility and action. One of our strengths being mutual aid fits perfectly into this grim scenario. Our politics encourage self-starting, do it yourself solidarity which is often undercut by State assumption of welfare mediation, the smothering apolitical liberal kindnesses of Big Charity and economic alienation. But the State is in retreat from these zones, charity is not going to pick up all that slack and the days of cheap goods are coming to an end. Community solidarity is what’s left, structured as solidarity rather than the often-mistaken process of a half-dozen worthies providing a service with radical trappings  to people who still think and act like consumers. THREATS There’s almost too many to list, but to pluck from the more obvious … I was having a drink with Phil Ruff once, talking about direct action campaigns of the 1970s—the Angry Brigade, bank robberies to raise funds and such. He, as with several people from the time, was in forgiving mood about the modern movement’s lack of similarly forceful street-level activism, in part because the situation then was so different. As he noted, CCTV was not a thing. And it’s not just CCTV. Vast, automated, easily-searched databasing and biometrics were not a thing. Social media and sousveillance were not a thing. And increasingly we don’t just have ever-present eyes watching us. It’s AI-fed, and can steal wholesale from every corner of the internet. If you walk through the centre of London on a rally today you will be filed away and in the event that you forget to mask up for an action, years later, it’ll be used. For the careful—those who know to mask up early and often, and stay out of reach of cops looking to expose faces, this may be manageable. For those less experienced it will be a potent means for the State to identify, categorise, and heavily repress those it deems troublemakers, present or future. A pre-crime punishment system arresting people simply for having public meetings, bolstered by an experienced (and now, shamefully, legally-immune) undercover policing operation and an extraordinarily powerful media machine gives the ruling class more powers than ever before to disrupt and destroy putative movements. Our preferred methods thus become more dangerous and difficult in a situation of rising military culture, allied with such potent tools of police and State repression. With laws now tightened around even basic protest to the point where we need police permission just to have one in the first place, our options can look limited. The city centres are increasingly zones where we cannot be effective in the absence of massive crowds and operational security that’s considerably more serious than that of the US military. Which is not to say activities can’t take place, but our strategies will have to change to reflect this reality. One great saving grace of the Tories’ fall last year was the collapse of a bill banning masks, but we can’t rely on that even under Starmer, let alone whatever comes next. Another is that it seems unlikely Labour will have much better luck with fixing prison overcrowding than the Tories did, meaning they are unlikely to deepen the use of imprisonment against protesters (though it seems equally unlikely, short of a major crisis, that they’ll dial it back to previous norms). Culturally, Britain seems to be headed at full speed into a dark place. On the one hand we have, similarly to elsewhere, the rejuvenation of old misogynistic ideals as part of the marrying of hustle culture to alienation in young men. On another, we will have the next great military recruitment drive promoting the nationalistic impulse. While the rampant individualism of the former does not necessarily gel all that well with the die-for-your-country ethos of the latter, machismo and guns certainly do, leading to the dangerous likelihood of a new generation of far-right young men entering the services en masse. What that might mean for the future of fascist street thuggery is anyone’s guess. What had seemed the far-removed possibility of a Reform-led government meanwhile, stymied for many years by first past the post, is increasingly looming. Their prospects seem much improved in recent months (largely through Labour’s efforts) but the conversion of this into real power is perhaps a way off yet. It’s pretty certain their direction of travel will focus more on courting the “anyone but” vote alongside anti-migrant sentiment but from an anarchist perspective their positioning and message is at its most potent in changing the tenor of the national conversation. With the likes of GB News, social media, and increasingly the right-wing broadsheets behind them they are performing in like fashion to other groups of their type on the continent such as National Rally in France and AfD in Germany.  In the nationalist sense it’s hard to see whether Reform’s isolationism with Atlanticist aspects or Labour and Conservative tendencies of European rapprochement in the cause of solidifying the EU-Russian borderline will be more influential, but neither of them herald much good for the anarchist cause. In either direction expanded defence spending is certain (either to appease the US or fall in with European norms) and nothing in Reform’s policy slate suggests any interest in rolling back the neoliberalism that Labour and the Tories are so hopelessly addicted to. As noted above, this ties into both opportunity and threat, with an economy already in hoc to more powerful blocs leading to impoverishment but not necessarily the mobilisation of counter-power. IN SUM Anarchism has for some time acted as a fringe of the broader left, albeit one which regularly denounces and rejects that role, thanks to our lack of size and in-house resources. Suffering from both our lack of a solid class base and a public view of our activities as poorly-organised teenage rebellion at best, mindless destroyers at worst, we’ve struggled to grow beyond the role for many reasons. Some factors I’ve already mentioned, another might be the perennial problem that we’ve been poor at converting rapid growth into an improved long-term position. We have repeatedly failed to deal with the “crisis of success” where an influx of people leads to challenges to the status quo, arguments, burnout and splits.  These are things we will need to consider how to work past (in the former case) or through (in the latter) if we are to take best advantage of the opportunities to come and, perhaps more importantly, work out ways to counter the threats. We know we absolutely cannot count on politicians be they centrist or “radical”, and the left seems barely aware of what’s coming let alone preparing to aggressively fight it. The response to far-right mass demonstrations has been to call out the same doughty anoraks as ever, increasingly outnumbered outside a few heartland zones, while few ideas have been forthcoming to counter Reform or even Andrew Tate. Changes to the law are met with the same trade union and NGO faces writing columns as ever with precisely the same minimal impact on government policy. Small as we are, if the anarchist movement can build something of that energy and creativity we’ve seen rise to the surface repeatedly over the last couple of decades we have every opportunity, like Reform with the Tories, to grab the flag of resistance that a large section of the population still hopes to see raised. But we then have to hold it, knowing the State will be rather more interested in us than it would ever be in the amblings of loyal oppositions. Which requires discipline, forward thinking and structures that are rather more robust than we have at the moment. We’ve relied for a long time on a churn of young people coming in, burning themselves out, then heading off to have families and make homes which has left us with precious little of what State and corporations love to call “institutional memory”. We need to find a way to break that cycle, to not just encourage youth action but give it tangible links and knowledge and a sense of continuity, rather than having 20-somethings, a bunch of people in their 50s-plus, and a gap between. And that requires a struggle to reverse the alienation we’ve fallen prey to. An expansion of physical interaction within communities and in our own spaces. A break with social media and a re-engagement with anarchist led, anarchist-controlled media which doesn’t simply get siloed within directly-engaged circles and then disappear when the campaign is done. A re-establishing of the principle of human engagement at workshops, festivals and co-ops.  The field is, in fact, wide open for those anarchist seeds beneath the snow to start growing. And there is no more important a time to get gardening. The post Anarchism and the New Military Wave (pt. 2) appeared first on Freedom News.

A FEW THOUGHTS ON WHERE WE ARE AS WE TEETER ON THE CUSP OF A DECADE-DEFINING SHIFT INTO ARMED NATIONALISM ~ Rob Ray ~ In the deluge of capital-N News we’ve had over the last month, by far the most consequential for our war-distanced isles has been the announcement, Europe-wide, of massive rearmament. In the wake of dizzying spending plans from Germany and the EU, as well as a belated realisation from local powers that maybe outsourcing production to rivals wasn’t good strategy, Labour’s pledge to cough up 2.5–3% of GDP on defence isn’t even looking like the most aggressive commitment around.  But it seems likely that the next decade will be one of transformation on a number of levels, with the further ascension of far-right political groups dovetailing with military revivalism, permanent realignment of the Great Game and, most likely, abandonment of environmental commitments even as the consequences of climate crisis quite literally come storming into our daily lives. As we march towards this catastrophe for the world’s working classes (who will be forced to suffer the costs and consequences even while being told it is all their fault), Britain’s anarchists can and should work on ways to stop it. But we must also consider that, as for most of the last four decades, we won’t have the wherewithal to do so, or even to slow it down. As a movement with limited means, what are our Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats? STRENGTHS Let’s be honest, physically we don’t have many at the moment. There’s a lot of unconnected local groupings, a small (albeit feisty) squatting scene, a smattering of places like Freedom or the Star and Shadow, a few co-ops like Radical Routes, publishers like Active, some legal support, a fringe social network, that sort of thing. That’s not to say the potential is absent—we’ve made serious strides from lower points before now. The last three waves of anarchist-influenced activity, 1999-2003, 2010–2013 and the mutual aid movement of 2020-2021, have not faded from memory just yet and have many lessons to teach, plus there’s a large groundswell of alumni who could potentially be re-enthused by an offering which has learned some lessons about not just inspiring movements but sustaining them.  Unlike our frenemies in the social democratic and trade union scenes, we’re not flailing at the wrong end of a challenge-fail cycle and in fact many of our predictions about the shortcomings of Corbynism were fully vindicated. We have an excellent recent example of spontaneous mass mutual aid (Covid) to point at when arguing our case for (re)building decentralised networks of solidarity across the working class. For all that we lack large federal organisations able to reach across the country, we do have spaces which could act as nexus points for rapid growth, as well as at least some friendly contacts with centres run by fellow travellers (Friends Meeting Houses, workingmens’ clubs, worker co-ops and the like).  And for all the many terrors ahead, our politics are likely to be thrown into sharper relief by the increasingly repressive behaviour of governments both foreign and domestic. The British public has, on the whole, been astonishingly lackadaisical about protecting its own freedoms in the last decade. It looked the other way as protests were reduced to police-approved walkabouts, while direct action was criminalised and prison sentences imposed, as town and city centres across the country were placed under the permanent watch of Big Brother’s glass eyes. We can point to years of warnings and propose action when one event or another, triggered by the new order of things, shocks the public into paying attention. Standard left-wing respectability politics has had little of note to say about these assaults beyond “that’s bad mkay” while the Free Englishman Ruuule Britannnia, so-called pro-liberties mob (Spiked!, right-wing broadsheets, etc.) either ignore it or actively cheer for more. Anarchists are one of the few groupings that have consistently not just warned there’s a problem, or whinged vaguely at a Westminster that absolutely does not care, but advocated for and sometimes taken action to fight it. With the pandemic anti-mask phase some of our more conspiratorial comrades went through out of the way, there’s lots of scope for pushing back if we’re smart. We have know-how both active and historic on the true state of the law and our vaunted “freedoms” that gives us an outsized influence at street level when shocks like a wave of military nationalism rolls through. WEAKNESSES Hoo-boy, do we have a few of those. Within the scene there’s a back-biting, rumour mongering, cut-em-off-for-a-slight culture that has hamstrung us for the best part of a decade now, worsened by the tiredness of groups which (understandably) often find it easier to automatically cold shoulder rather than get sucked into yet more interminable arguments and insoluble investigations. We’ve split repeatedly over trans rights, relative positions on international conflict and good old fashioned burnout-fallouts. At the risk of sounding like a curmudgeonly ‘guy points at factory shouting organise’ type, other than thrashing things out over trans rights (directly relevant to our ability to organise where we are) we should not have been self-destructing over these issues.  My personal views, for example, on Ukraine and Palestine are largely consistent—I have been in favour of supporting the people in both countries. In Ukraine the people (and the anarchists) do not wish to be an imperial outcrop of a bloody-handed autocratic Russia known for killing dissenters. In Palestine they don’t want to be ethnically cleansed. I find these both to be pretty reasonable, while understanding and appreciating the broader importance of the No War But The Class War position.  But realistically what I think is unimportant, outside a tiny section of a British left that has historically been really quite rubbish at stopping even its own government’s wars, let alone anyone else’s. And arguments we have on the subject should not be making us worse at tasks where we actually can make a significant difference. I don’t have to agree with people about Ukraine to work with them on other issues, and our movement, lest we forget, is supposed to be heterodox. As it stands however it is often alien and unwelcoming to outsiders (sometimes to insiders) held back by constant internecine bickering, often hiding personal beefs behind hyperbolic Political Disagreements.  More broadly, we suffer both poor integration with the left base that does exist in this country and from the long malaise that base has been experiencing. Anarchism has a history of plucking many of its best organisers from the ranks of trade unions, student movements, minority activism and the disillusioned far left, all of which are struggling. Those unions and left groups are politically moribund and for the most part have been in managed decline for some time bar a few groupings in strategic industries, such as RMT on the tracks or healthcare workers in the chronically understaffed NHS. NGOs, where they aren’t just flat-out liberal in ways useless to us, have been in large part neutered by the government simply making “being political” a black mark for their funding, or even illegal. The co-op movement has long since lost most of its radical edge, bar a fringe of smaller entities active in fields like housing, book selling, bikes and wholefoods (those last being a small one to potentially put in the strength category, though they often struggle to compete effectively enough to provide a financial backbone). The institutions’ slumber and our haphazard connectivity with them undermines or ability to successfully approach and mobilise extra-parliamentary action in communities – and the greatest weakness of all is that we lack a clear, approachable base in most places outside certain areas of  big cities and particular small-town enclaves. It will take significant effort to rebuild the base that has historically sustained much of the left more generally as political class consciousness is so fractured, demobilised and alienated. I acknowledge this ends the article on something of a bum note but never fear! It’s opportunities next week and there’s quite a few of those. Part 2 of this article will appear next Sunday. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Pic: Number 10/CC The post Anarchism and the New Military Wave (pt.1) appeared first on Freedom News.