Paris: “Back off, or else your friends won’t be released”

A first-hand account of an unpermitted march by the cops in Paris

Translators intro: This article really wants to insist on the actions of the police being illegal and on the problem being “police impunity”, not policing itself. But in spite of these weaknesses, it’s still worth reading and discussing. Although this kind of discourse is annoying, here the talk of legality can be understood a bit differently, because the police aren’t just any group of people. Of course, the police break the law all the time — the law is a weapon in their hands, not something that binds them, and as anarchists we shouldn’t uphold the myth of the just (or the accountable) cop. But it is worth noticing when a mass of police feel that they can openly break the law, disobeying the minister of the interior, to march armed on government buildings at night.

The police marches are, most immediately, a response to a molotov attack against some cops who were guarding a surveillance camera that had been getting destroyed. The police started rallying in front of the hospital where one of the injured cops was being treated and then leaving from there on marches. Similar rallies by the police outside of their union structure are being held in most big French cities

From paris-luttes.info

For the past four days, the police have been illegally protesting in the streets of Paris each night. On Wednesday (October 19, 2016), their meet-up was set for 9:30pm in Republic Square. Some friends decided to go down and show their opposition to the gathering. First off, we were very few, at most fifty, and not nearly enough to confront the growing crowd of police, from 200 to a thousand. Here’s the story of a strange night caught between the state of emergency and the scent of mutiny. Read the rest of this entry »

Montreuil: Oct 29-30 – Solidarity Weekend for Prisoners of the Social War

Solidarity Weekend for Prisoners of Social War
Saturday October 29 and Sunday October 30

Read the rest of this entry »

Blasphegme: An anarchist broadsheet on the walls of Paris

[From the first issue of Blasphegme: An anarchist broadsheet on the walls of Paris. It’s been getting pasted up around the city in the past month]

Introduction

“I spit on your idols, I spit on your gods, I spit on the homeland […] I spit on your flags, I spit on capital and the golden calf, I spit on all religions: they’re jokes, I don’t give a shit about them, I don’t give a damn. They only exist because of you, leave them and they’ll fall apart.
You’re resigned, but you’re a force —  you don’t even know it, but you’re a force nonetheless, and I cannot spit on you, I can only hate you… or love you. Beyond all my other desires, I want to see you shaken from your resignation in a terrible awakening into life. There is no future paradise, there is no future, there is only the present.”
Albert Libertad, To the Resigned, 1905

Blasphegme: A neologisme designating a blasphemy delivered in the form of spit (or phlegm) on all religions, whether monotheist or polytheist, whether  the religion of the state or of capital, the religion of work or of the ego.

The blasphegme spits in the face of all gods and of all prophets, with no distinction between the various collective delusions that poison us, that keep us in awe of a higher power before which we must kneel.

The blasphegme is the individual expression of non-resignation in the face of a society that leaves us no time to breathe, using the power dynamics between individuals to keep the cattle calm, too busy competing and acting out our frustrations, products of lives that have known only the coercion of laws made to regulate social life.

This journal aims to agitate, to spread anarchist ideas, to spread seeds of subversion in a daily life as boxed-in as graph paper.

We’re not trying to teach, rather we hope to spark debates on the ideas that matter to us and that seem essential for any individual seeking to liberate themselves, here and now, from all that shackles that keep us from soaring high. Read the rest of this entry »

Clermont: Revenge of the weeds: On attacks against schools

From La Bourrasque, an anarchist broadsheet of critique and agitation written in Clermont and the surrounding area. Issue 2, Juin-August 2016.

A little something for the back-to-school season…

Revenge of the Weeds

We still remember those nasty, horrible people who, in 2005, during the three weeks of rioting that rocked the banlieues (1), vandalized “their” schools. Groups of rebels smashed up this idea of schooling, blew apart the framework of social integration (2), set ablaze the whole democratic symbol of a national education. These images were seen around the world and many onlookers were deeply impacted by the scenes of civil war and the reactionary rhetoric of the journalist-cops. There had always been attacks against schools and they haven’t stopped since. Each year, we can count a good twenty of them that get ransacked. These revolts are less visible today than in 2005, but sometimes the ruckus still manages to reach us from the other side of the bars. If we were to really spend five minutes reflecting on what this institution represents, would we be so surprised to see it targeted by those who refuse to submit?

The school, with its perimeter wall, its yard, its cameras, and, coming soon, its metal detectors, is nothing but a reduced version of the prison. Its priorities — bow to authority, stay in your place, say thank you — must be fully internalized before stepping out into the real world. Discipline is strict and the child is brought into line using punishments or rewards. Education is a garden stake, straightening up the weedy plants they could grow into. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »