France: We are against work

[From a leaflet distributed in the summer of 2016 against the Labour Laws in France]

Because we are against a system that exploits everyone.

Because the managers of this world transform living things everywhere into merchandise.

Because this society offers us no other choices than being put to work, a few crumbs for survival, or incarceration, for the undesireable or recalcitrant.

Because work means selling your time, your energy, your body, and your mind to bosses, leaders, and machines.

Because capitalism and the state try to control every aspect of our lives and take away ever more of our autonomy, including our dreams of something profoundly different.

Because this system of endless production leaves no space outside of itself, where we could each freely decide on our own activities.

Because the state only grants us rights at the price of our freedom: this same state sicks its guard dogs on us in the street, creates and militarizes borders, and wages war in every corner of the world.

Because restructuring (also known as “crises”) means an intensification of misery, social cannibalism, and further techniques and technologies of control.

For all these reasons and for many more besides, we aren’t just against work, but also against world that it sustains and that offers us nothing beyond it.

If we don’t want to just adjust the length of our chains but to truly destroy them, no dialogue or negotiation with power is possible. We need then to push this struggle beyond the limits imposed by those who want to see the struggle smothered in the confines of the existing world (which includes politicians and managers of all sorts).

Instead of always following agendas set by others, we need to ask ourselves how to expand the revolt while deciding for ourselves what we want to oppose, while imagining a thousand and one ways of overturning this world, while associating freely and organizing ourselves without leaders or hierarchy, while taking initiative individually and collectively with direct action. In this way, it becomes possible to confront the powerful who seek to impose their law on us, to do away once and for all the endless war they wage against us with their authority, money, and cops.

They offer big media spectacles of social engagement to reduce revolt to a simple matter of democratic indignation and to bring it back into the realm of politics and representation. But conversely, by directly attacking what allows this system to work, and to make us work, opens up possibilities creates the space needed to develop other ways of relating.

Blockades and sabotage aren’t just buzzwords, but rather real practices offering us a path out of the routine of exploitation and the logic of consumption, including the spectacle of opposition. For as long as the metro transports human cattle, as long as electrical lines power factories of death and laboratories of control, as long as money continues to circulate, as long as screens broadcast propaganda, as long as cables and antennas maintain our dependency, as long as the arteries of the city impose their rhythm on our bodies and minds, as long as…

And so let’s destroy the daily grind!

Besançon: Back from the Holidays, Back in the Fight

From Seditions: an irregular anarchist journal the Besançon area. Issue 8, September 2016.

A summer of revolts

While the end of last year was marked by social problems that caused a bit of trouble for the powerful, the summer of 2016 brought fiery revolts against this world of misery and oppression. First and foremost, these took aim at those who most obviously carry of the violence of the powerful, namely the cops and the gendarmes [military-style police].

While some go off on vacation, others stay trapped in the prison world of the ghettos. On Tuesday July 19 in Beaumont-sur-Oise in Val-d’Oise, Adama Traore was killed by gendarmes while being arrested. To conceal his death by suffocation at the hands of the pigs, the state immediately began talking about “heart troubles … respiratory troubles … pulmonary infections” and so on. Every time some dies in custody, power puts on the same grim spectacle, with the complicity of the media. This time, Beaumont and Persan [two towns in Val-d’Oise] responded with several nights of revolt, during which many municipal and state buildings (police stations, libraries, garages for city vehicles) as well as capitalist infrastructure (gas stations, supermarkets…) went up in smoke or had their windows smashed.

These attacks against the institutions and infrastructure of this society are the proof that only by destroying this world will we find justice within it. To demand that “justice be done” is to insist that the state condemn a killer in uniform who is himself tasked with maintaining order, so basically asking power to condemn itself. It’s hoping for a kind of state justice that is and always has been in the service of the rich and powerful. Even if this murdering officer were to be found guilty of voluntary homicide, the exploitation and oppression imposed by this system would continue just the same. Read the rest of this entry »

Paris: We’re still here

Reportback on the events of Thursday September 15 against the Labour Law
Snake marches before the big “joint” march, and another snake march after.  After all, we’re still here, ready to fuck shit up, everyone is down… [Lyrics from On est Encore là by NTM]

[Pics and links in the original post. Square brackets are translators notes]

Before

From 6:30 in the morning, high school students were already throwing down. Some short reports are available here.

At 11am, there was supposed to be a secret meetup with some high school groups at Nation square, but the cops found out about it: tons and tons of pigs all over the square. While some demonstrators got kettled, about 200 of us (mostly higschool students or youth) regrouped in front of Helene Boucher school on Cours de Vincennes and decided to take the metro to Lyon Station.

There had been a meetup called there for 12h by the general assembly of interpro/interluttes [across struggles] to collectively refuse searches and ID checks before the big union demo and to head over there as a group. But when we left the metro, we weren’t able to get to the meetup in hall 1 of the station: too many cops everywhere controlling the entrances. Read the rest of this entry »

Paris: There will be no presidential election

A call to break with the electoral circus

(Translated from an anonymous leaflet distributed in the September 15th 2016 demo in Paris. All brackets are translators notes)

There has been much water under the bridge since the Socialist Party (Parti Socialiste, PS — party of French president Hollande) backed down from holding their summer congress in Nantes after a simple call to crash it. This came at the end of four months during which the movement against the “Work!” law (reform to the labour code) managed to dictate the terms and timeline of the debate. Four months during which the many attempts at concealing the real political questions of our present moment by launching the presidential campaign, with it’s clever catch phrases and insignificant revelations, were utterly rejected. It took the summer, the dead-time of the vacation season, and a few terrorist attacks to allow the elites to climb back into the saddle. The effect was immediate: public discourse immediately took a nose dive into the most crass nonsense, to such a degree that Marine Le Pen (leader of the far-right Front National) stepped in to moderate and the Prime Minister set off philosophizing about the burkini. We turned our backs for a moment and politicians of all stripes set up their little electoral and rhetorical machines, their pathetic personal ambitions, their desperate ideological mantras — each in their place, each with their own angle, taking aim at each other and setting each other traps that they end up caught in themselves. This whole spectacle wouldn’t deserve our attention if it didn’t have such real effects on our relationships and mental health, if it wasn’t able to suck all the air out of the room. We’re left with an even more intolerable atmosphere than what we had before the movement against the “Work!” law. Read the rest of this entry »