The Last Day Of Summer – Für Achim [Part ll] Through the night

"Grief comes in many forms. It is like a light that turns on and off. It is there, it is unbearable, then it disappears because it is unbearable, because you cannot bear it permanently. You are filled and emptied. A thousand times a day I forgot that Ole-Jakob was dead. A thousand times a day it suddenly came to me. Both were unbearable. Forgetting him was the worst thing I could do. Thinking about him was that Worst thing I could do. Cold came and went. There was only cold and the absence of cold. Like standing with my back to the sea. Then it came again.

Stig Sæterbakken – Through the night

My dear, as promised a few days ago, my second letter to you, now that the second anniversary of your death is coming up in a few days. They recently re-uploaded an old interview of yours with Autonomy Magazine [1] on the Leipzig platform Knack News. The need is so great. Not that your words aren't worth remembering.

"Today the surplus population vegetates on the thin line between survival and liquidation. And when it expresses itself politically on the streets, it is not confronted with the agents of production, but directly with the state and the police. These struggles therefore have a proto-political dimension from the outset."

But it's like watching time twist around itself in the same loops. The interview is now eight years old and there is nothing, absolutely nothing, that builds on your thoughts and statements. Words that seem to exist in an absolute vacuum, lost in space and time. It makes me think of the gold-plated records they shot into space in the late 70s. Wind, rain, the sounds of animal calls, music from Bach to Chuck Berry. Will they eventually be found, deciphered and understood by intelligent creatures?

In my last letter to you [2] I ended with the problem that French comrades described as follows: “The lack of one's own language and a positive project now represents the greatest obstacle to revolutionary action and even to revolutionary thinking.” All the conjunctures of traditional approaches to “left” politics that have long been believed to be dead – the new K groups; the totality of identitarian schools of thought, which has manifested itself worldwide in recent years, especially in the “Free Palestine” (as if there had been no self-critical reappraisal of the solidarity movement with the ‘liberation movement [3], just as it was not even remotely understood how a bourgeois, culturalist concept of decolonization undermines any materialistic, real revolutionary perspective [4]); the rampant left-wing populism, a reformism against which the “left turn” of the Jusos at the end of the 70s seems like a “revolutionary instant program”; all these ideological and theoretical dead revenants flood any flaring discourse with their zombie programs.

But we ultimately have to place the responsibility for this on ourselves. For so long we have been in love with the new conflictuality that has exploded around the world in the last 20 years that we failed to draft a fundamental revolutionary program in our enthusiasm. Of course we had hoped that these movements, revolts and upheavals would put their own revolutionary program on the agenda, but they exhausted themselves in the radical negation of everything that existed, their total negation prevented their reformist absorption, but in the end we only listened to the swansongs of these fundamentally honest, desperate eruptions.

So now there is all this to discuss between us, but you are no longer there and in my helpless helplessness I miss your clever thoughts and honest objections. It's so easy to say: irreplaceable. But that's how it is. At least for me. So I write my thoughts into this vacuum, and the more I do this, the more I become aware of what it is like to call out into this void, messages flying around the room, immature drafts in capsules hoping to be rescued and understood.

Black flies on the windowsill

That we are

That we are

That we are to know

Ben Howard

But I also want to write you the few pieces of news that fill me with joy. Berlin comrades are currently in the process of founding a small but fine publishing house. Another beacon in the night that surrounds us. A small fixed star in the middle of the quadrangle of war, permanent state of emergency, fascist mobilization and the general attack on the negotiated regulations of exploitation, the encirclement that paralyzes and constricts almost everyone, drives people into self-destruction and the paralysis of powerlessness. One of the first books will be the “Marseille Chronicles” by Emilio Quadrelli [5]. A crazy guy and a unique person like you. Politicized in the Autonomia Operaia, spent 10 years in Italian maximum security prisons, translated Foucault into Italian, after the 2005 riots in France he traveled to Paris and spoke to some of the protagonists of the riots [6]. Like you (and a little bit of me too, we often agreed on that) he understood early on the importance of the struggles of the surplus proletariat for the presence of class antagonism and also supported this theoretically. Probably only a few hundred will read it in German, but unfortunately you had that experience too.

You see, we strive and don't give up, or to speak with your beloved Marx:

"But the revolution is thorough. It is still on its journey through purgatory. It carries out its work methodically... And when it has completed this second half of its preparatory work, Europe will jump up from its seat and cheer: Well done, old mole!"

I'll write to you again in a few days, maybe I'll think of some wiser thoughts by then.

Sebastian Lotzer

Berlin – Kreuzberg, September 12, 2026

P.S.

Today in Paris a few hundred Gilets Jaunes warmed up for the October 17th mobilization, which calls for nationwide protests and direct actions. Without the usual suspects from the left and trade unions. I thought you'd like the view and we'll see what happens.

Notes

[1] The unabridged interview with Achim can be found here

https://www.autonomie-magazin.org/blog/2018/11/22/die-surplusbevoelkerun...
[2] The Last Day Of Summer – For Achim [Part l] – Grandeur

https://kontrapolis.info/18538/

[3] Two texts from the RZ can be mentioned here as examples

The End of Our Politics (1992)

http://www.freilassen.de/div/texte/rz/zorn/Zorn05.htm

Gerd Albartus is dead (1991)

http://www.freilassen.de/div/texte/rz/zorn/Zorn04.htm

[4] A critique of decolonial ideology

https://www.xn--untergrund-blttle-2qb.ch/politik/theorie/eine-kritik-der...
[5] See also the translation of the preface by Sandro Moiso to the “Chronicles of Marseille”: ‘The Barbarians against History’

https://bonustracks2.noblogs.org/post/2025/08/14/die-barbaren-gegen-die-...

Alternatively, after the “disappearance of noblogs here

https://telegra.ph/Die-Barbaren-gegen-die-geschichte-09-12

[6] Political Militants at the Grassroots: The Banlieusards and Politics [2005]

https://bonustracks2.noblogs.org/post/2024/07/21/political-militante-an...

https://kontrapolis.info/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/maulwurf-gross-jpg-1...decoding="async" src="https://kontrapolis.info/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/maulwurf-gross-jpg-1...width="150" height="150" alt="maulwurf-gross-jpg-17180-.jpg" style="display:inline-block" />

web address: https://kontrapolis.info/18649/author/group: Sebastian Lotzerfeed date: Sunday, September 13, 2026 - 5:31 p.m