Title: Negres Tempestes Presentation
Date: 20th March 2006
Source: Retrieved on 4th September 2021 from negrestempestes.cat

Some time ago different people, with certain ideologic affinity, started to talk about some questions. On the one hand, there is the ideologic lack of different collectives, the contradictions in their antiimperialist fight. On the other hand, the wrong stereotype that makes an important part of the organized people tend to think that an independentist wants the attainment of a state, with the authoritarianism it implies, and that every anarchist despises the own culture and language, in our case the Catalan one, from a false internationalism. It would be the case of the most used: “Independence is fascism” or “anarchism is love of Spain”. Sentences without any meaning that do not solve anything and that allow people to continue using roles and false clichés that hinder people from thinking by themselves.

From this perspective, those of us who see the necessity to destroy the ruling system (the state as a basis of authority, repression and economic exploitation), are aware of the importance of the culture in the relations and in the change of the essentialist/ dogmatic minds that do not see far from their own, and we seek to explain that we do not believe in dogma, states or borders (neither the real nor the imposed) nor in anything more important than the human being. This group, not homogeneous, wants to explain things as we think they should be, without anyone telling us if we are this or that, clarifying that we leave labels for whoever who wants to carry them, believing having fought in who knows which barricade of a certain war, or having killed who knows which dragon in a mystic age…

We do not think to be over good or evil, we do not intend to be more or less revolutionary than anyone, we do not aim to become vanguard or reference. Our intention is simply to show evidence that many times things are not as we have been told, that it is not necessary to follow the white or black tendencies imposed by different people. In the fights to change the basic things that surround us we prefer to approach them rather than leaving them to approach us. We do not want to change what we know, but to make people know that there are more worlds, more ways to know things.

With this lack of will to be more than we are, we decided to gather and to deepen into our approaches. From here, we would like to explain how we see the world and how to collaborate to make it a place a little bit more breathable (at least in our surrounding) and to help the debate to carry this project out.

In this way is born Negres Tempestes, a “collective” that in in its field of relations will try to break the pre-existing schemes. We are organized in an assembly way, so that the debate of the different ideas takes us to consensus. From our point of view it is the only way from which we can talk about democracy, because the different opinions we are given will be represented. This is our ideological base, the one that defines us. We consider ourselves anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist, understanding these two postulates as two approaches which can never be given up and which are inseparable.

Anti-capitalists in order to create a setting where the consciousness of social and economic oppresion leads to the knowledge of the reality that is hidden from us and to the reflection and debate to change it. Anti-imperialist to give voice to the peoples, and to their individuals in their fight for their freedom or their simple existence.

Our intention is to be ourselves and not to define us according to what the others think or do. We know that the attainment of freedom at all levels starts from ourselves, whether as individuals or collective.