As this articles goes to press, I do not know the state of the conflict over the seizure of the Rectory Tower of the UNAM [National Autonomous University of Mexico. The students left on Wednesday, May 1]]. Nor do I know if the confusing claims of those who have occupied the Tower are legitimate. In any case, they are equal to the teachers conflict in Guerrero, additional symptoms of the pain of the nation and the distance of the State from the reality of the country.
The problem, however, is not the pain of a citizenry that every day is excluded by a State which has decided to kneel to legal and illegal capital forces. The problem also does not lie in their protest--all pain, it has to be said, that shows itself and seeks relief--but instead, the problem rests in the inability of these groups to make sense of and give clarity to this pain and to find the required remedy.
This confusion is shown in their claim of affiliation with and to what they say they belong: anarchism. Are they anarchists? By dint of its taking many forms throughout history, the term is in itself already confusing. Yet there is something that can allow us to distinguish anarchism from what Turgenev called "nihilism"--of nil, nothing. Anarchism comes from the Greek anarkhia, absence of authority. However, from the earliest anarchists, from Lao-Tse and Zeno of Citium to Albert Camus, to Godwin, Thoreau, Proudhon and Gandhi, the absence of authority is only possible if there is a profound moral force in the individuals who form the common. In this sense, every true anarchist is intimately related to the ethical order. If he violate the law, if he opposes or defies the authority, it is because the authority has violated the ethics of the life of the city. His strength, therefore, is grounded neither in violence nor in destruction but in the depth of his ethical conscience and in an action whose measures are consistent with it.
A true anarchist is, in this sense, patient, open to dialogue, clear, creative, assertive, decisive, someone who knows the limits, who practices restraint. The anarchist is the face of a government without the State, who wants balance and refuses any fanaticism. If he disobeys, as Thoreau and Gandhi demonstrated, he disobeys from an impeccable ethic, and from this impeccability he assumes the consequence of his actions without giving way to resentment. Given this close relationship between action and ethics, the presence of an anarchist in itself already poses a challenge to authoritarianism and violence.
In contrast, the nihilist, although he has strong anarchist elements, refuses to stand on ethics. In his novel Fathers and Sons, whose theme is the struggle of mid-nineteenth century Russian students disillusioned by the slow progress of reformism, Turgenev defined it:
"The nihilist is one who does not bow to any authority, who does not accept anything as an article of faith."
The nihilist is someone who radically refuses, who cries out for a vindication of everything and, therefore, ends up vindicating nothing.
The kids who took the Rectory Tower, breaking windows and demanding reinstatement of those who had committed crimes in the CCH [College of Science and Humanities, UNAM's high schools] are, in this sense, nihilistic--just like the teachers in Guerrero who burned the Comptroller's office and party headquarters. Their unquestionable pain under the weight of resentment has made them lose the outline of a liberation struggle.
Behind their violence--their absurd requirement of re-admitting to the CCH students who are an expression contrary to culture and civility, and beyond the confusion of their demands--there is not an anarchistic or libertarian thought but, instead, the Manichean intoxication of poor Bakunin, the nihilist for whom history is governed by only two principles: the State and the social revolution, may it be whatever it may be. Like him, the young people who took the Rectory seem to vindicate the CCH delinquents because like Razin and Purgatchev (leaders of the Don Cossacks) and heroes of Bakunin, it was violated without doctrine or principles in search of "a new world without laws and therefore free."
But is a world without law a free world? We know that it is not. If it is not informed by an ethic, as [is the world of] the true anarchists, it is a world of crime, violence, intolerance and the contempt that they want to fight. Razin and Purgatchev not only built an impromptu civil and military bureaucracy like that of Catherine the Great, but they prefigured Stalin and justified State repression. Claiming total freedom ends in destruction and authoritarianism. It is the shadow of power.
The boys who took the Rectory and the teachers who burned the facilities in Guerrero have fallen into that trap. Far from contributing to a libertarian change and, in fact, in a manner equal to the corruption and stupidity of the State and of the criminals, they are whipping up the fires of violence and authoritarianism.
Mexico needs profound changes, and it needs determined men and women like those kids and those teachers. But it needs that these actions be covered by the greatness of ethics, which is the face of dignity. Without it, all we await is the deepening of hell. ... Spanish original