ill will editions

Reflections on Violence

The following text first appeared on the French website Lundi.am on April 18, 2016. Below is an English translation posted anonymously to Anarchistnews.org, with minor revisions by Ill Will Editions. 

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Preface

Since the events of April 9th and the wild week that followed, the Nuit Debout (Rise Up At Night) assembly placed the question of violence at the center of the debate. While citizens persist in their rigorous pacifism, stances in favor of the “diversity of tactics" are also multiplying. The National Student Coordination itself has explicitly refused to dissociate rioters and demonstrators.

Amidst this proliferation of discussions, the Nuit à Bout Action Committee has gathered a few positions that seem pertinent reinforcement of the movement as well as its repression. The more seriously we our presence in the Place de la République becomes, the more frequently situations leading to confrontations will present themselves. We must prepare for them. It isn’t a question of convincing everyone that violence is a viable option, or a necessary route. It’s simply a matter of finding those forms of action, perhaps frightening, that will deliver us from fear.

Reflection I

What must be explained is not why things sometimes get out of hand around the Nuit Debout gatherings in Paris, but why it doesn’t happen more often. In the end, it’s clearly understood why people who have been gathering every night for  two weeks to envision the end of capitalism end up wrecking the windows of the Société Générale bank (#PanamaPapers). This is obviously correct, it makes total sense. The problem lies elsewhere. Which is why neither the moral apologias for violence nor the theoretical or ideological justifications for smashing things will succeed in bringing more people to fight against the police or break bank windows.

We shouldn’t forget that if many people are staying quiet in demos, it’s not because pacifism is in their blood, but simply because they’re afraid. To overcome this fear is a collective task, one that is nowhere better accomplished than in the streets. This begins with taking care of everyone, and not only one’s friends—with us all taking care of each other, even in the worst situations.

Reflection II

"Diversity of tactics” is an expression which, like its cousin, “convergence of struggles”, tells us nothing about what must be done when people are brought together who don’t have the same way of struggling, or don’t have any way of struggling at all. The expression conceals what is actually a pretty liberal idea: everyone struggling next to each other, in their own way, without bothering or talking to one another. Diversity of tactics is nothing but a subtler form of dissociation. When will we get a “diversity of corteges”?[1] In fact, the FIDL [Fédération indépendante et démocratique lycéenne] already asks for it at every high school demo.

Reflection III

The question is not whether to be violent or not, but of being offensive or inoffensive. Three gangs of five friends determined to smash ATM’s but incapable of organizing on a larger scale than their own affinity group are just as inoffensive as 10,000 unionized citizens slowly marching behind the CGT’s sound-system-french-fries-van. Conversely, 3,000 people holding their ground in a cloud of tear-gas while a small group throws rocks from behind a banner almost succeeded in having a nightcap at Valls’ house.

All the most powerful moments experienced in the streets since March 9th have demanded, at one point or another, that those who were ready to fight and those who were not took care of each other, decided to stand together, and not just side-by-side in polite and diplomatic indifference. On April 9th at Place de la Nation, there weren’t enough tear gas grenades in all the capital to tear apart the hundred or so people who were bombarding the CRS lines from the hundreds of people who booed and filmed the cops, while cheering or nursing the rioters [émeutiers].

Reflection IV

Little by little, the "question of violence” appears for what it is: a diversion. As long as we continue to talk about this, and moreover to speak about it in moral and ideological terms, we won’t confront the true strategical problems posed by the demonstrations. To write one more apologia for violence will accomplish nothing. There are plenty of people ready to defend themselves from the police. What’s missing is precisely the cortège to defend.

Reflection V

A demonstration is not a symbolic ritual. It is a test of strength, wherein those who have reasons to revolt physically encounter those paid to maintain the world in the deplorable state we find ourselves in. Every demo is the actualization of a rapport de force between those who are ready to take risks to change the situation, and those whom we pay to preserve it. The problem of official union demonstrations is that they deny the very existence of such a force relation. The image of life and of struggle they offer us is disgusting. Sponsored balloons, sausage-slogans and security squads; if "struggling" means to march like the CGT, then to struggle means to remain passive, to repeat the same gestures again and again, to never take risks. That, in addition to being deceptive, is intolerable. One only starts to fight when one ceases to be inoffensive: this may sound tautological, but the entirely of the union forces spend their time affirming the contrary. Their gestures in the streets express nothing but submission.

Reflection VI

The police maintain order.[2] Because it is a protest against the order of things, a demonstration is, in its essence, a confrontation with police, no matter what form it takes. Therefore, when night comes, there is a winner and a loser. Either the police win (April 5th), or the demo wins (March 31st). The police win when everything goes as planned by the prefecture. Demonstrators win when everything doesn’t go as planned by the prefecture. What freedom we win consists in what we manage to collectively pull off under the noses of the police. Winning matters. As much for the construction of the rapport de force as for our ties to each other, for our courage. Too many people come to rallies like tourists, unconscious of the importance of successfully breaking the mold. They might be sympathetic clowns dancing in front of the CRS, or rioters who are indifferent to the behavior of the rest of the march. It matters little: both are inoffensive.

Reflection VII

To ensure that everything happens as expected, the cops set up their apparatuses: kettles, closed streets, hordes of plainclothes officers, and so on. In the demonstration, our challenge is to combat the police apparatus: we must prevent it from working, we must break it down. Not only are there thousands of different apparatuses, but there are thousands of different ways to break them down [déborder] [3].

Likewise, there isn’t much to say about a demo where the police apparatus hasn't been challenged. Which is perhaps why, when the media talks about demonstrations, they speak exclusively of the moments that break away [les débordements], for these alone mean anything. To say that “the confrontations occurred on the fringes of the demo,” makes about as much sense as saying “the goals were scored on the sidelines of the football field”.

Reflection VIII

Smashing things [La casse] is the easiest and most obvious way to break a police apparatus. It is also one of the least interesting, and most boring. What most narratives about rioters miss is that the latter would usually prefer to do something else: to free the demo by breaking the police lines, to occupy a building, to start a breakaway march, to hold down barricades, paint inspired tags, etc. Smashing is often a last ditch, stopgap option. It is the degree-zero of the demonstration. As for the classical union rally, family-friendly and good-natured, it isn’t even a demonstration: it is a police operation.

It's worth noting that there’s rarely been as few windows broken in a social movement as that of the month that just passed. When you’re confronting the police, you aren’t worrying about smashing shit. You’ve got better things to do.

Reflection IX

If the Nuit Debout’s assembly can be in turns entertaining, touching or ridiculous, it is a useless tool for organizing ourselves in a revolutionary perspective. It’s a practical problem: you just can’t discuss such matters in the same way one takes a ticket and gets in line at the butcher shop. The infinite succession of stopwatched, disconnected speeches all but abolishes the conditions of a constructed conversation. Nobody can say anything intelligent in two minutes. Everybody sees it, but everybody goes along with it. Whatever the “democratic” will of certain organizers or “facilitators”, the decision and voting procedures are generally nothing but a farce. What they parody from "formal democracy” is the powerlessness related to the fact that the decisions, in the end, touche nothing and reache no one [n’engage rien ni personne]. And yet, to sustain the confrontation does require that we make certain decisions – decisions which the general assembly makes de facto impossible. We attend them in the same way we consume The Voice. To elaborate a revolutionary perspective requires that other modes of speaking, sharing and of collective intelligence be deployed in a parallel fashion on site.

Reflection X

Our marches will begin to add up to something when everyone shares not a principled tolerance towards the actions of others, but a common strategic perception of the situation. That is to say, once we perceive all demonstrations as battles we must win by any means necessary; once we are all inclined, not to violence, but to speed, surprise, and being offensive. It is by our attentiveness to the movements and affects that agitate our demonstrations that we will succeed in finding a common ground allowing a true convergence of struggles—at one central point, Place de la République.

There are thousands of non-violent gestures that then come to mind that would help to increase our efficiency in the streets:

– March en masse on sidewalks in order to prevent the lateral movements of the CRS from catching the demo in its claws.
– Think carefully about the routes of wild demos. Those leading the march, in the heat of the action and improvisation, don’t always choose the best routes. Help them.
– Get in the habit of hiding our faces at the right moment: as much to sabotage the identification and surveillance work systematically and massively conducted by the police as to render demonstrators taking part in confrontation indistinguishable from the others.
– Confrontations tend not to unfold in silence or on mute. Slogans and chanting express the spirit of the movement. Thus, they have their place in all moments of confrontation. When others are fighting, sing and dance.
– Be mobile and do not allow any holes to form in the march when security squads or police attempt to divide it.
– Learn to protect ourselves from tear gas so that it’s not just those who came equipped standing in the clouds.
– Systematically send back tear gas canisters, or at least keep them away from the cortege.
– Stay calm during police charges to avoid brawls. Hold together and don’t back off a hundred times farther than where the police line stops, handing them more free space.

Their morals are not ours.  

Nuit à bout Action Committee

[1] A cortège is a procession, but here signals something more like a bloc within a march. —Trans.

[2] In French, the job of the police is typically described as “le maintien de l'ordre public”, which translates literally as ‘the maintenance of public order’. —Trans.

[3] This term appears frequently in these writings (cf. the article “Build the Hacienda”). Here it can also mean break away, outflank, overflow, jam, or to flee beyond. —Trans.

[The situation is excellent—where shall we toss the ashes of the old world?]

The Wisdom of Rioters

This article appeared on the French website Lundi.am on Monday June 6, 2016. Translated by Ill Will Editions.

Since the beginning of this movement against the loi travail(le) [El Khomri labor law] not a day goes by in which we don’t hear about those “rioters” [casseurs][i]. Reading the news, one gets the impression that the rioter is some sort of separate species that the humanities and social sciences have set out to try and comprehend. Psychologists want to pry open the black box behind the mask. The rioter must be psychoanalyzed, their biography dissected, the idiosyncrasies of their familial history brought to light, in particular those which led them deviate into so-called “radicality”. The paper Le Figaro has claimed that the “psychology of the rioter is hard to seize upon”, nevertheless proceeding to advance their own hypothesis, i.e. that these people are "adrenaline junkies.” The arts and music website Les Inrocks conjures up the devilish mind of a sociology PhD, who glimpses in the rioter something like a “common DNA with the autonomes”.  Everywhere, the media and its helpful academics ask themselves the same question as the cops: “who are these rioters?” It is our turn to offer an answer: the rioter is the sage who descends into the city.

The Eloquent Silence of the Rioter

The one who smashes takes no great pleasure in speaking. She loathes microphones and flees cameras. This would seem a logical enough fact. Yet it would be too easy to explain the reluctance to talk and be seen by simply invoking the prudence of the masked person living in a state of emergency. We propose instead that the rioter is a sage, and as such is essentially mute. The crowbar, the hammer, and the baton are the instruments of her public speeches, her silent language. The rioter has many reservations about language and meaning that is aimed to render the ensemble of her gestures coherent. To remain silent displays a disdain for the intellectuals and others who still dare to defend an alleged “democracy” that demands dialogue, with its strategies of producing consensus. Her verbal silence is courageous. The truth that she carries with her has only a physical language. In the style of Heraclitus, the rioter is content to say, “if I smash things, it is because you chatter idly”. Foucault spoke of the sage in similar terms:

“The sage…keeps his wisdom in a state of essential withdrawal, or at least reserve. Basically, the sage is wise in and for himself, and does not need to speak. He is not forced to speak, nothing obliges him to share his wisdom, to teach it, or demonstrate it. This accounts for what might be termed his structural silence. And if he speaks, it is only because he is appealed to by someone’s questions, or by an urgent situation of the city”.[ii]

 The Mysteries of the Smash-Up

 An emergency situation that brings about the descent of the sage into the city: here we are in a strange proximity to the ancient Greek scenario described by Foucault, with the difference that in our day the sages are masked. Like the rioter, the sage appears in the city only rarely, and in an ephemeral way. She descends only briefly, just long enough to exhibit and uphold a truth. For the sage and the rioter alike, truth does not manifest itself through lengthy prevarications. It is not the job of the sage to be clear. Her words are full of opacity. The sage and the rioter are not rhetoricians. They do not seek to convince or persuade, for they speak only in riddles. The truth sparkles with the silence of sages. What explains such a fascination with the rioter, is precisely that her silence carries such a mystery within it. Since the beginning of the movement against the Labor Law, no fewer than 527 articles have attempted to discern who these “rioters” are. What fascinates is not the hammer hitting the ATM screen, nor the identity of the one doing it, it is the mystery that gesture carries with it. To understand the rioter, we must see that she offers us perfectly enigmatic answers. She leaves those to whom she speaks in a state of ignorance and uncertainty: “The sage speaks in enigmas”, Foucault said.

 Visibility and Truth

Like the sage, rioter appears to act only for himself. He speaks in no one else’s voice, and demands nothing. He is hardly even a person. The rioter advances more like an atmosphere. Bystanders don’t always understand what the rioters mean to say—"Why do that?“ "C’mon, stop that! There are other ways to express yourselves!” “It’s crazy to go off that way!” “They don’t care about the demands of the movement, they smash things just to smash things.“

They’re not likely to understand any better tomorrow. The smash-up is the mute explication of truth. It is an act of silence that enunciates the very being of things. Broken windows, tags and paint bombs are so many marks through which what is concealed - corruption, lies, theft – comes to appear in perceptual life. Through a tactile act, the rioter makes visible the truth. But those in the position of the bystander or third party cannot help but have a confused relationship to this truth, for it contains nothing resembling an easily-assimilable knowledge. The rioter is not seeking the best argument, for he neither possesses nor circulates any knowledge in which we are supposed to self-identify. This explains why the truth he produces generates so many misunderstandings, for people do not like relating to enigmas, and have little tolerance for opaque truths. An old lady picks up a piece of broken glass: she holds in her hand the entire statement, but she can have only an oblique relationship to the truth therein, because this shattering has nothing to teach. The freedom of the rioter lies in not being subjected to any obligation of speech. He returns truth to the terrain of sensation: the thermal sensation of burning dumpsters on the pavement, the olfactory sensation of paint splashing the wall, the auditory sensation of the sound of broken glass. The metamorphoses and the scars his journey leaves behind are the terms of his truth-telling. It matters not who smashes, for the truth-telling of the sage is impersonal.

Smashing and Joy

Understood in this way, the rioter may come across as arrogant and irritatingly sober. Yet her act is generous. The sensory experience of the "beautiful” riot is always a moment of shared celebration. First, there is the beauty of the gesture: as she hurls herself towards her (normally quite carefully-chosen) targets, her gesture no longer retains its angry content. As the window resists her blows, she ratchets up the intensity with firm perseverance. Not far away, the audience awaits the felicity of the gesture. The window explodes. Everyone applauds, relieved and triumphant.

In this sense, the riot is joy. It is the joy of transforming a faceless power. And if this joy is won only through a largely symbolic act, this is because this power is accustomed to separating people from what they can do, that is to say, from their capacity [puissance]. Not satisfied with its privileges, power has for some time now prided itself on inhibiting our essential forces. Its greatest satisfaction is to make men impotent, that is to say, to act so as to ensure that they cannot act [faire en sorte qu’ils ne puissent pas faire], that they can not exercise their own capacities.

And it is in this way that the rioter confronts power. Clearly, her action does not make her powerful. It does not take control of the course of things. Instead, it expresses what we cannot do. It manifests this loss of control over the course of things. It expresses this lucid vision of what we cannot or can not do [ce que nous ne pouvons ou pouvons ne pas faire]. The consistency of the action of smashing resides here. These destructions carry in them a charge of reality. The usual course of events is interrupted. The eternal Sunday of our lives momentarily comes to an end. The landscape is transformed. In these streets, it is easy to identify the exact path of the rioter, and the sight of each fragment of power scratched or properly exploded communicates this desire to explore a world. Thus does the smashing of symbols of power communicate itself. It lays bare the fragility of power, despite itself, as an act we can and must engage in. Power is forced to board up its windows to prevent further smashings. It is here that power becomes naked; the images of such voluntary destruction present us with the disorientation of power [égaré], one vacant and empty, fighting in the mode of retreat. The institutions that became victims of this overflowing joy of the happy rioters even ended up abandoning their vain attempts at marketing, by which they had hoped to direct overwhelmed individuals to choose the right bank, insurance, or financial investments.

Here it is precisely the pride of power that is affected. Its loss is visible, and there is nothing it can do. Sometimes, it sends its workers down to passively oppose the friendly rioters. Such a situation is even more amusing. The collapse finds its passive and powerless witnesses, of which the rioter could only barely have dreamt. The next day, the landscape is lightened. With their ridiculous wooden boards, banks and insurance companies become interchangeable, indistinct and homogeneous. Only their dull logos survive, often crossed-out by the wisdom of the demonstrators. These institutions typically evade the public gaze. Hence, the first victory of the rioter is here: he has momentarily erased the haughty pride of the establishments that organize our dispossession and who have no fear of showing themselves in public space.

The Rioter Exhibits Existence

The riot tends also to kill boredom. It momentarily exhibits existence [elle dispose à l’existence], for it exhibits power’s defeat. We know it will resurface in all its radicality; the rioter knows it as well. She does not expect that her gesture durably transforms the course of things. Rather, she manifests energetically her passion for the real: to destroy the symbols of power, and thereby to reach the hard kernel of the real. The urge to smash is a political way by which reconquer a certain contact with reality, to rediscover the reality of the world. The latter is not destroyed. It is marked, scarred, damaged. Anger is anchored in the gutted windows. Here, perhaps, is a form of pure enjoyment, in which the incarnation of the negativity of the world is in motion. The lamentations of the prefects, mayors, and police contribute even more joy to the reversal of the balance of power.

Finally, what the rioter has also won, is the impossibility of the use of instruments of capitalism: the ATMs are out of service, bank branches closed sometimes for weeks at a time. Whereas we are accustomed to being worldly spectators, to understanding little to nothing about the world that surrounds us, the rioter clears a space of possibilities. In the place of an illegible world, she offers us an uncluttered version of it. Public space is finally rid of the arrogance of those institutions which had proudly displayed their power, and now offers other perspectives, such as those spoken through tags. These last few days, a stroll through the streets of Rennes was infinitely more delicious. It is possible to stop, pause, to rest, to wander, to contemplate and meditate on the consistency of the world that protesters sketched out with the points of their bombs.

The Phobia of Wisdom

Still, in spite of his generosity and his great virtues, many people experience a violent fright at the sight of rioters. More dramatic and more numerous are those who, having never had the sensible experience of a demonstration, are averse even to the simple mention of the word “rioter”. Just to raise the topic in a conversation means risking an anxiety attack in your interlocutor. Such knee-jerk reactions can’t help but remind one of the symptoms of phobia. There are dozens of names by which to designate the phobia of spiders, butterflies, water, forests, birds, etc. But it would be wrong to reduce  this affect of dread to a story of forms. Phobia is also and above all a story of schemas, i.e. of spatiotemporal dynamisms. Having a phobia of butterflies, for example, is to be frightened by their erratic flight. It’s to be unable to stand the entirely singular way they have of twirling about. Butterflies have no regularity in their movements, they seem to go in all directions, we can neither predict their curves nor anticipate their resting places. Nothing is more hazardous[iv] than the orientation of a butterfly.

As there is the concept of the butterfly, there is the concept of the sage. And the sage is also determined by a set of dynamisms, she is a silent being, who shows her face only in emergency situations and thus appears only rarely in the city, who descends to tell the truth, and to say what is only by means of riddles, her public appearance is always the result of a courage in which she places herself in danger. To the long classification phobias today we must today add a new nomenclature, the phobia of wisdom, or “sophiaphobia”. For people do not have a phobia of rioters, they have the phobia of wisdom, and rioter exudes the schema of the sage. The rioter is an example of wisdom that takes place outside of the traditional figure of the sage. Sophiaphobia is the real name of those who experience a repulsive shudder at the sight of rioters.

“Solon, for example, who, at risk and danger to himself, intervened in the city to tell the truth, but who intervened only occasionally, the rest of the time remaining silent in his wisdom. The sage intervenes only when his intervention is called for as a matter of urgency.”[v]

[i] The term “casseur”, which literally means “smasher”, is used in the media and by the state to refer to rioters in a derogatory way, implying valences of “hooligan”, “thug”. In the Anglophone context, it would be associated with “the black bloc”. We have translated the term throughout as “rioter”, and its cognate, “le casse”, as “smash-up” or “ransack”. Thanks also to RH and La Onda for their suggestions. –Trans.

[ii] Foucault, The Courage of Truth, 17

[iii] The French reads: “Elle s’offre au regard, à la fois ce qui rend visible ce qui peut, et doit, à tout prix, traduire cette fragilité « malgré tout » du pouvoir». This sentence is tricky. -Trans

[iv] The French term hasardeux comes from the term “hasard”, meaning “chance”. -Trans

[v] Foucault, The Courage of Truth, 85.

BONUS:

Build the Hacienda, Burn Down the Palaces

The following text appeared on Lundi Matin, and was translated from the French by Edicioneschafa.wordpress.com, with revisions by Ill Will Editions. The text was circulated prior to a national day of action on April 28th, during which comrades in Paris attempted to construct a large fortified structure in place de la Republique, the site where the nightly occupation and assembly movement Nuit debout has been ongoing since March 31, 2016. The structure, as well as its destruction during the eviction of the square that evening, are visible in the first video below. We strongly recommend checking out the other recent videos on this website for a vivid and inspiring glimpse into the recent insurgency across France. -IWE

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Build the Hacienda, Burn Down the Palaces

1. What we’ve been living through is new. It is certainly not just another “social movement.” “Social movements” have a frame, so that everything escaping it is defined as a boiling-over or a break-away [débordement]. Yet what we’ve experienced since March 9th has been an uninterrupted series of such breakaway moments, with the old forms of politics trailing after them from behind. The call to demonstrate on March 9th was an breakaway from the unions by the Youtubers. The demonstrations since then have seen constant breakaway marches led by the “youths”, while the traditional image of union marches headed up by the various union bosses has been systematically replaced by groups of hooded youths defying the police. Nuit debout overflows every recognized political frame, while the “wild marches” that leave from its site at place de la République are themselves a breakaway from Nuit debout. We must continue to begin—or in other words, continue to break-away, to remain on the move, to surprise.
   


2. Attempts to assimilate the new into the already-known are part of the arsenal of neutralization. Just as the demonstrations against this new labor law have little to do with the struggle against the CPE, Nuit debout bears very little relation to the Indignados of Puerta del Sol [Madrid, Spain]. Whereas [the occupation at] Puerta del Sol declared itself pacifist, [the occupation at] Place de la République had, last Friday, hours-long clashes with the police. “Everyone hates the police” has become a noted chant hit. Whereas [the occupation at] Puerta del Sol called itself “apolitical,” we have lost count of the calls by unions and the speeches by unionists at place de la République. However, Puerta del Sol was was really occupied, which is not the case with place de la République. At Puerta del Sol food was made for thousands, people stayed day and night, the police were not making daily evictions, nor ordered to takedown this or that, or to stop folks from cooking. This last difference indicates a path to follow: if we want to make place de la République more than just an interminable general assembly where curious on-lookers are giving a first-hand look at its powerlessness and the inconsistency of its “decisions,” then we must really occupy it; this means building real spaces and defending them from the police.


3. What place de la République really constitutes is a public counter-space. Since the public, political and media space that exists has become an integral lie, we have no choice but to desert it. Not by falling back into silence, but to positively desert it by constructing another. And speech is like freedom: when you first take hold of it you start to say or do some dumb shit, but that’s not what’s important. What matters is to not to dwell on that first fuck-up. We must instead say that we have a long way to go, that these past weeks comprise our first few breaths. It’s been years now that a coalition of forces have made the situation unbreathable, between the “threat of the National Front,” “war on terrorism,” “crises”of all kinds, the state of emergency laws, climate apocalypse and the permanent campaign for the next presidency. What characterizes the reigning public space is that it offers a space for nothing but contemplation: what we witness, what we hear, what we learn never becomes an act or bears any consequence because we face it all alone. As was made evident in exemplary fashion the evening of the ‘nightcap at Valls’ place’, what is vibrant and powerful about a counter-space is the capacity for acts to follow speech. Consciousness and the capacity to act are not disjointed. This is the way that a counter-space can positively destitute the existing public space. Hence the great curiosity and jealousy of the media.


4. The conflict around the El Khomri law is not just a conflict around the “work” law, it’s a conflict around the possibility–or not–of governing, which is to say, a political conflict in the true sense of the term. No one can stand to be governed any more by the puppets in the [National] assembly, which is why, in our point of view, the law cannot pass; yet the government itself cannot afford not to pass this law—this means, it has been factually destituted [destitué de fait], and can no longer govern. This refusal is even seen in a union like the CGT, whose rank-and-file can no longer can bear to be governed as it had previously been by its management. If one listens to the speeches people give at place de la République, most fall into either one of two camps regarding this question of destitution: some wish the moment of destitution to be followed by a constitutive moment where they a new constitution could be written and a new society founded, where as others think the destitution should be without a conclusion because it is first of all a process of construction, and that  for fiction of a single society we must substitute the reality that there exists a plurality of worlds, each of which express and incarnate their own idea of life and of happiness. Those of us writing here share the latter position.


5. Let’s be pragmatic: no one’s going to be able to write a constitution until this regime has been overthrown. And being that you do not overthrow a democratic regime democratically, i.e. that it will defend itself against any fundamental challenge until its very last riot cop, the only path leading to a new constitution is an insurrectional path. However to lead a successful insurrection, like that of Maidan for example, place de la République must be really occupied, barricaded, guarded, etc.; also, all political and existential sensibilities favorable to insurrection must be able to find each other; to this end, for the desperate search for a consensus never to be found in the middle of Paris, a consensus of a more or less frightened metropolitan petty bourgeoisie, we must substitute the material existence of a plurality of spaces, of “houses,” where each of the sensibilities of the insurrection could come aggregate themselves and enter into a fusion. Those who are passionate about writing a constitution are welcome to build their own house where they can write up as many drafts as they like. And as for those who want to to put the constitution into place, well we’ll discuss this when Valls and Hollande will have already taken their jet to take refuge in the USA, Africa or in Algeria.


6. A poster in the Parisian metro a few years ago declared, “Who organizes spaces, rules over them”; it was decorated with a majestic lion supposedly representing the sovereignty of the RATP Group [management of Parisian state-owned transport]. What is the power to be found in place de la République? It resides the management of the place itself, and the forces of order who impose respect thereby. Power is thus this grand empty esplanade; the flux of cars and their din; and the anti-police vans posted on all sides. How can an assembly seriously claim to be sovereign which then debases itself by respecting the real sovereignty that dictates its every move? Impossible to take it seriously. But we would not have gathered together, nor been as numerous and determined as we’ve been, if we weren’t very serious. By serious, here we mean that we have taken it upon ourselves to manage this place, to  express our intention to hold out by constructing the means for doing so, to refuse to be added to the list of mediatic flashes in the pan that let themselves be swept away at the first attack. We we are going to be able to welcome comrades from all over, we have to escape the precarity that imposed on us by the current forces of management, and to arrange things as we see fit – we have to be constructive, in other words.


7. We are in the middle of a ford, at the heart of peril: there are too many of us to simply return home and not enough of us to throw ourselves into an insurrectional assault. We must “shift into second gear” as some say. To hold out till the end of April is already not bad. We cannot count on the union bosses, because even if a few strikes that can be re-directed spring up here and there, by nature these strikes will be against their will. However we know the danger that awaits us if this situation closes up again, a danger we already struggle against even now: that of the electoral system, the democratic blackmail of having to choose between the plague and cholera, between Alain Juppé and Marine Le Pen. Those who are apt to join us are precisely those whom are disgusted by such a reality, those who cannot bear for politics to be reduced to the insignificant process of voting. Politics is in what we plan, in what we build, in what we attack and in what we destroy. Shifting into second gear means: build the hacienda, burn down the palaces.

The Construction Commission

Paris /  April 2016

…and earlier that same day:

3.31: Call to Blockade Everything — Against the El Khomri Labor Law and its World

Preface (Ill Will Editions):

For weeks now, riots, barricades, and blockades of institutions have swept across France. The impetus for this wave of struggle is a new series of proposed neo-liberal labor reforms that would slacken restrictions on mass firings of workers, introduce more short-term contracts, lengthen the working day, circumvent industry-wide labor protections by introducing case-by-case agreements, and make it easier to cut wages, among other things. Being the hardest hit by such a rollback, students and other youths have engaged in fierce revolt, burning cars, blockading hundreds of high schools and university campuses and spilling into the streets, where their demonstrations have turned into wild, confrontational battles with police. Paris saw major days of action on the 17th and the 24th, with intense unrest in dozens of other cities, including Rennes, Toulouse, Nantes, Lyon, Marseilles, and elsewhere. Videos of the brutal police eviction of the occupied Tolbiac high school in Paris on the 24th, as well as the gratuitous beating of a student from Bergson high school, both went viral online. Students took swift revenge a day later, with high school students rioting in front of police stations.

The banners, communiqués, and slogans that have issued from this wave of actions give indications of a rupture whose potential consequences are far more serious than a single labor law. In a particularly inspiring communiqué (translated here in English), entitled “The World or Nothing,” the young insurgents remind us that buried within the question of “work” was always a more fundamental form of submission, that of a “life” reduced to nothing but pure survival:

“Ultimately, if we take to the streets against the labor law, it’s […] because the question of work is the question of how we use our lives; and as we see it work is the negation of life, life made into shit.”

This helps explain the clear unwillingness of these rebels to let themselves be routed and pacified by socialist, trade union, and other leftist forces of recuperation:

“We are no longer in the 60s…No one among us believes we will reach ‘self-realization’ at some job. That which we defend ourselves against is the that the bit of life we have after work, outside of work, does not get reduced to nothing. The little games of the unions and parties to limit the terrain of conflict to a question of the labor law, or negotiation with the government, is just a way to contain our desire to live, to lock up all that escapes their stifling sphere of scheming”

On the heels of this rolling insurgency of proletarians and youth, a callout has been made for a total blockade of French society this Thursday, March 31. We have translated it below. The tactic of autonomously organized and decentralized blockades has obvious resonance with North American struggles against oil pipelines, fracking, and Indigenous land expropriations. On the other hand, the link made by this callout between attacking neo-liberal austerity and the indefinite blockage of the economy has important implications for struggles in North America. What will it take to transform the instinct of indignation and protest into a habit of blockade and obstruction?

3.31: A Call to Blockade Everything

Three weeks of blockades. For the past three weeks the number of mobilized schools has continually grown, in Paris, in the suburbs, and across the whole of France. Universities have been occupied, blocked and put to new forms of use by students and workers. The youth have understood that there is more than simply a law that at stake here, as labor laws like this affect the daily life of the majority of people in France. That’s why we are not just against this law, we’re against everything that has led to the current situation. To us, victory would no longer mean simply the withdrawal of the law, but a change of society, a change in the conditions of our lives.

Cops prevent us from manifesting and don’t hesitate to beat us in front of our schools and within our demonstrations. To take to the street means to organize ourselves to hold the street. That’s why we blockade.

We are calling for a total blockade of all institutions on Thursday 31 March. We hope that everyone can make use of this date to think up actions, and launch a strike able to prolong itself and hold out, since a single day of blockades is far from sufficient. Let’s organize ourselves into autonomous committees wherever we can. Let’s fight the union bureaucracies, let’s remain truly independent of structures of classical politics, let’s critique this law for what it is: a historical regression of our social rights and an affront to the dignity of all the people it intends to subject to increased pressure and new forms of suffering.

What does this new law hold in store for us?

→ Increased work hours for apprentices (10 hours per day and 40 hours per week)

→ Overtime pay can be decreased by 5 times through a simple agreement.

→ New possibilities for arbitrary dismissals.

→ 10 to 12 hour workdays are now possible provided there is a contract for it.

→ No more paid leave in cases of a death in the family (mother, father, sister, etc.)

→ An increase in the number of weeks where we can be made to work 44 or 46 hours, provided there is an agreement.

→No more minimum claims for unjustified dismissals.

If we do not want our lives to be reduced to nothing but waking, working and sleeping, condemned to nothing but survival, it is urgent we spread this mobilization. We are the first to be hit by this law, so it’s up to us to respond to it, and to reclaim the conditions of our lives.

We call again on the youth to rally from now until Thursday, March 31 in every way imaginable. Let’s block the factories, roads, schools, universities, let’s block the economy, and demand the withdrawal of this regressive legislation.

Meet at 11 am at Place de la Nation (Paris) for a joyful and determined demonstration!

ALL THIS BURNING EARTH - SELECTED WRITINGS OF SEAN BONNEY

A selection of explosively partisan poems, letters, and essays exploring themes of austerity, revolt, captivity, disaffection, and civil war, from Blanqui’s imprisonment during the Paris commune to the riots in London and Greece, by way of George Jackson and Jean Genet.

Bonney’s writing is almost single-handedly responsible for reawakening in us a belief in poetry’s unique potential for fashioning weapons. 

A5 (Euro) formatting:  READ  / PRINT

Letter (USA) formatting: READ /  PRINT

NO SELVES TO ABOLISH - AFROPESSIMISM, ANTI-POLITICS, & THE END OF THE WORLD - K. Aarons

This text attempts to show that afropessimist theory is not simply at odds with, but in fact hostile to identity and privilege politics, whether Black or non-Black. Having extracted the afropessimist position from the politics of symbolic valorization or integration, the author argues that its deeper affinity is with those tendencies of anarchist, communist, and queer thought in which revolutionary practice tends to be understood as the immediate self-abolition of the existing conditions that produce our identities. It concludes with a series of preliminary practical proposals placing what has so far gone by the name “solidarity” on a different footing.

From the text:

”We must call into question the entire framework of expropriation in the widest sense of the term: the expropriation of once-possessed land, of culture, of relational capacity and of labor from the hands of the State and the capitalist, patriarchal class. We must no longer envision the remedy for suffering as entailing the recovery of a lost wholeness, entitlement or plenitude of which one is presently deprived.”

the author may be reached at everythingmustgo [at] riseup [dot] net

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EDIT (2/27/2016): The links above now point to a revised version of the text, which corrects a few important typos, rephrases some potentially ambivalent formulations, and adds a few new footnotes clarifying the position taken here.  

From: Berlin ZAD Support Committee

CALLOUT FOR A WEEKEND OF ACTIONS AGAINST POLICE WEAPONRY 

Oct. 25th, 2015, Pont-de-Buis, Finistère, France

Anyone who can go to this, should. Please circulate widely.

“How do the police function? Where are their weaknesses, and how can we circulate a knowledge of them? Where do they resupply themselves? How do they move? Who arms them, and how? These are the sorts of questions that we must ask ourselves in order to envision new ways of acting. We must know their weaknesses if we are to be able—at the opportune moment—to be able to reduce their industry’s capacity for disruption.
The idea of gathering at Pont de Buis has its origins in the demonstrations last December following Rémi Fraisse’s death. At that time, two hundred of us found ourselves in front of the Nobelsport gates without really understanding the exact nature of what lay behind them. However, this experience taught us something, which is that in order to halt their production, it suffices to gather only this many people in front of their gates. Sites that produce explosives have extremely strict regulations, which place limits upon them. It turns out that simply being a hostile presence is enough to interrupt their production. Presently, we wish to go further in our experiments with tactics for blocking such an industry. How do the production units function? What roads do their transports follow? Where do they stock such goods? In short, we aim to drag into the light the secret little economy that constitutes police armament, and thereby to develop the means to disrupt it.”

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a NO BORDERS manifesto (2012)

This text first appeared on the No Borders UK website in 2012 (http://noborders.org.uk). We have no relation with this organization, or any other for that matter. Still, we see a value in circulating this statement, as we find much to agree with here. For instance, given how widespread a certain moralistic approach to migrant solidarity is these days…the importance of the authors’ statement that “we are drawn to this struggle for our own reasons, and out of our own passions and histories” cannot be overemphasized. Equally relevant is their refusal of victimhood frameworks, of rights discourse, of media fetishism, and of ‘stunt activism’, in favor of a strategic emphasis on growing force relations between co-conspirators.

from the text: “Resistance and struggle are not separate from the rest of life – these networks and communities are the same ones in which we live, learn, play, work, invent and build alternative social and political structures. As a movement’s strength grows, and as crises expose weaknesses in its enemies, these networks become the infrastructure for open rebellion. So the 19th century underground railroad was the basis for slave revolts during the US civil war. The underground railroad of the 1940s broke out into partisan uprisings. What new forms might struggle take in the 21st century? We don’t know, but let’s find out.“

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MALEVOLENT EUROPE - REGARDING REFUGEE OPPRESSION & RESISTANCE AT THE BORDERS (2015)

A vivid reportback on refugee struggles against the state apparatus at the Serbo-Croatian border, written anonymously by a friend of ours doing solidarity / accomplice work there.

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TAKING A STEP

Poster, A3 size

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MAKE IT HAPPEN 

poster, A3 size

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