Long Live the Wildcat General Blockade

Strikes were the primary tactic of past centuries.

Blockades have little by little become the new tactic of our era: blocking colleges, high schools, freeways, offices, factories, warehouses, media, Internet, etc. — this is the solution, or at least the beginning of a solution.

Blockading Paris should be our next goal.

The real “vandals” are the capitalists in suit and tie.

The real “scum” are the bourgeois scum, their lies, their exploitation, their posh neighborhoods, their submission to profit and the market.

Real democracy is the direct democracy of general assemblies, not the democracy of parliament (which is in any case ignored by Villepin).

Real life is not receiving 10% or 50% or even 100% of the minimum wage. It is not sucking up to a boss so as not to be fired by ratting on your co-workers or carrying out imbecilic tasks. Nor is it voting for candidates who will invariably betray their promises.

It’s been a long time since we’ve been so close to a real breakthrough, a break with this system that seems so unshakable but that is in reality so fragile.

Just a little more effort and we can overthrow it.

LES AFFRANCHIS [The Liberated]
(Paris, 28 March 2006)

Break Through

Chaos for Our Children

Their “First Employment Contract” is one more proof: The capitalists will end up reducing wage workers to a condition of slavery if nothing is done to stop them.

Those who still have illusions that subservience will bring them comfort and shield them from dictatorship, war, famine, nuclear radiation and energy crises, are suicidal. Those who still believe in political organizations (“oppositional” or not) are naïve. It is pointless to try to reform capitalism, all the more so when the latter is terminally ill.

You will never succeed in “getting your life together” within this society, because this society is designed to fragment your life. It does everything possible to amputate your intelligence so that you become incapable of recognizing this otherwise obvious fact.

If you persist in conforming to this social order, your life will continue its rapid deterioration and your children will not survive. Soon you will no longer even be able to pretend to comfortably accommodate yourself to this existence — an increasingly boring and regimented existence geared to the production and consumption of mental and material pollution. You think that playing the loyal flunkey today will secure your future?

What future?

Your only solution is to rediscover the tradition of struggles waged by the working-class and avant-garde movements of the past.

Wake up! Drop your skepticism, your resignation, your petty self-obsessions, and fight for the survival of humanity — including your own humanity. Do it now.

Don’t wait till the cop in your head is replaced by a microchip implanted in your arm.

Don’t wait till you die of cancer, like increasing numbers of your friends and neighbors. Stop passively grumbling or philosophizing about pollution and start working to save what remains of the natural world.

Don’t wait till you have become such a serial consumer that you lose all human feelings. Open your eyes and start changing human relationships.

Don’t wait till you have become incapable of struggle. Tomorrow will be too late. Get back to the root of your self, starting now. Radicalize yourself. Our adversary has already radicalized itself.

The logic of capitalism is pushing the human species toward extinction. Each minute that goes by is one less minute that remains to save it.

Time is not on your side.

Attack Their Program of Extermination

The lunatics in power did not foresee that the youth revolt would attain such a massive scale.

The urgency with which they are implementing the multinationals’ program for the destruction of civilization leads them to confuse the mass media with the masses, to imagine that the champions of stupidity who monopolize the media reflect the state of mind of the general population. This strategic error is pushing the bourgeoisie to stick rigidly to its positions.

No longer capable of convincing anyone of anything, the regime is determined to suppress any opposition.

In these circumstances, unity between all the exploited must be strengthened and radicalized. To accomplish this, you must be aware of the fact that you are a proletarian, in an era when the educational system is basically nothing but a factory for programming zombies for the conditions of wage slavery.

Opposition must go beyond protests. It is crucial to maintain our distance from the labor unions, whose present role is to sabotage the potential proletarian counterattack called for by the catastrophic stakes of our time.

The present confrontational situation gives us a precious opportunity to reopen the practical and theoretical terrains that have been blocked for the last thirty years, enabling us once again to pose the possibility of a new world. Autonomous actions and open-ended debates have already begun.

Contacts between workers, students, unemployed and other oppressed people must be strengthened; autonomous action groups for defense must be formed.

The question of revolution should be at the center of debates, but we should avoid musty formulas inherited from the failures of the past. We have to recognize all the problematic aspects of revolutionary thought while exchanging experiences and ideas about how to fundamentally challenge and vanquish the present society. We need to discuss the values that we intend to substitute for those that prevail today, the principles that we intend to propose to people to replace the vicious laws of the market.

Groping for the lost thread, humanity will rediscover itself.

RAPACES [Raptors]
and FRANÇOIS LONCHAMPT
 (Paris, March 2006)

Anything Is Possible...

After the revolt of the youth in the suburban ghettos, which represented a breakthrough against the real social violence of the ruling order that has effectively destroyed everything (conviviality, kindness, neighborhoods, jobs, public services, social protection, health, climate, natural resources, living species, agriculture, countryside...), the movement of student youth against the CPE-CNE and against the (Un-)“Equal Opportunity” law has created a new situation and brought about the possibility of a collective awakening of millions of people.

When the machine grinds to a halt, the cogs themselves begin wondering about their function. People become much more open to new perspectives, readier to question previous assumptions, quicker to see through the usual cons.

Individuals dare to break out of their habits and live. Bosses, leaders, hierarchies are seen as useless. Orders are ignored. Separations are broken down. Personal problems are transformed into public issues, while public issues that seemed distant and abstract become immediate practical matters. The old order is analyzed, criticized, satirized. People start talking to each other again. As wage labor comes to a halt, frenetic time pressures collapse. No one pays any attention to ads or politicians or media brainwashing. Passive consumption is replaced by encounters, confrontations, dialogues. As the struggle expands and strives to overthrow the structures of domination, solidarity dissipates the fearsome power of money.

Long-repressed experiences like the Paris Commune, the collectives during the Spanish revolution, self-management, workers councils, direct democracy, are revived in sovereign general assemblies. Everything seems possible — and much more is possible. People learn more about society in a week than in years of academic “social studies” or leftist “consciousness raising.”

Beyond the essential preliminary of the rejection of the CPE, young people are posing the question of their future, which is also the collective future of everyone. But the dictatorship of the capitalist economy has already responded: increased productivity, competition, commodification of all human activities, military-industrial power, increasing inequality, unemployment, poverty and barbarism. Proletarianized youth are today forcefully declaring that this system is insane and that they want none of it. Confronting the politicians’ inevitable attempts to present false alternatives, the poor are once again becoming a threat to all the established powers, and through direct collective action they are discovering their own capacities of thought, initiative, solidarity and self-organization.

CNT (freely adapted from “Effervescence of Radical Situations”)*
(Rhône, 18 March 2006)

[*Several passages from La Joie de la Révolution (the French translation of The Joy of Revolution) were widely circulated during the movement — posted on the Web, forwarded to email lists, or adapted in graffiti or leaflets, in some cases by people who did not know the source and who presumed that they were French texts commenting on the situation in France. The present leaflet, produced by members of the Rhône section of the CNT (Confédération Nationale du Travail, the anarcho-syndicalist labor union), incorporates or adapts a number of passages from a section about radical situations in Chapter 3.]

Hard Blocking

(excerpts)

The present movement is not a movement of demands. Like that of last November, it is, strictly speaking, not demanding anything, nor proposing anything. Rather, it is expressing a rejection of the situation reflected in the “Equal Opportunity” law, and particularly the CPE. Several points demonstrate this fact:

— Its rejection tends to encompass all forms of precaritization (the rejection of the CNE is clearly stated);

— Its symbol “Rêve Général” [Collective or All-Embracing Dream], which includes the idea of “Grève Générale” [General Strike] while simultaneously detourning it [putting it in a different and broader perspective];

— Its slogan “Neither CPE nor CDI” [i.e. “Neither insecure work nor secure work.” CDI (Contrat à durée indéterminée) = the standard, relatively secure type of employment] or banners like “Contrat Premier Esclavage” [First Slavery Contract], which reflect the influence of, and then linkups with, the associations of jobless people and with the radical critiques of work. As the movement deepens, these linkups are being increasingly sought.

It is also this absence of demands that pushes it to refuse any negotiation. The movement is sticking to its original pivot, and from there it is seeking to establish a position of leverage. This is its truly radical aspect, not this or that political position belatedly tacked onto it. It is not obsessed by the idea of taking public opinion into account precisely because the position of leverage that it is constructing is what is producing the empathy necessary to its popularization without its needing to prostitute itself to the media. We should not forget that the polls originally were favorable to the CPE, as were all the newspapers except L’Humanité. But since that time, despite all the habitual spin of the professionals of communication, the movement has succeeded in bringing the media, and particularly the press, over to its own terrain by making them view the events on the bases favored by the movement. The polls were then reversed. [...]

The present means of action of revolt or rejection are extremely varied (blockage of colleges and high schools, occupation or even destruction of employment agencies, blocking of sports and cultural events, interventions on television broadcasts, resistance to, or attacks on, police, destruction of goods or of symbolic places, trashing of political party headquarters, strikes), but what matters is not that everyone is acting on their own terrains in their own particular ways, but that there are exchanges, bridges, passageways enabling individuals in struggle to partially free themselves from their origins; that in transforming present conditions they are at the same time transforming themselves.

Self-organization and “starling flight” tactics

If the practice of general assemblies and direct democracy persists, this mode of action is now considered as simply a provisionally useful common base, no longer as an absolute principle. It is notable that references to “self-management” have virtually disappeared from the language of the movement, whereas self-organization of debates and interventions remains the dominant model. This supersession of the ideology of self-management  and of its factory trappings make more and more people aware that a new cycle of struggles has opened, one that will have to confront the despotism of value in all human activities. Self-organization appears as the horizon of the movement; it is no longer seen as a criterion of the movement’s success, but as something to be surpassed. The collective takeover of everyday life in the occupied university buildings no longer is the subject of interminable debates on the possible repetition of the norms of the dominant system. The respect for the autonomy of each person in their initiatives and words is limited only by the recognition it manifests for the development of the movement. If the exchange of ideas and strategical proposals are often developed in the process of action, they don’t confine the actions within a straitjacket. The urban “starling flight” movements, splitting up and heading in different directions to evade the police and then regrouping to strike or disrupt, combine collective effectiveness with individual creativity.

The general question of power and domination is being posed . . . in immediate practice

The movement is not posing this question in terms of a seizure of power, nor even in the clearly anticapitalist terms typical of the “vanguard” currents of the past, but in terms of an unveiling of oppression by a force in action. The national coordination’s call for the “resignation of the government” does not propose any political alternative, but one could say that the movement is developing an eminently political action by way of its critique in acts of the ideology of the economy. The movement thus has no need to be politicized from outside. Groups who still imagine that they are doing this with their obsolete, out-of-touch slogans are only revealing their own inability to perceive the new contents that are emerging with this movement.

Because it is objectively outside the production process, the movement can directly attack only the institutions of reproduction and the networks of the circulation of value, of the flow. Flow of information, flow of commodities, flow of individuals, flow of powers, flow of images, etc. This limit is real, but it is less of a problem in a time when reproduction has replaced production as the central pivot. Conversely, the advantage is that the movement is perfectly suited to the terrain on which it acts. It does not have to pose the question of its greater or lesser dependence on a movement of wage workers necessary to block production. By definition, anybody and everybody can take part in a direct blocking of the flow. (Which is what the rebellious students of Rennes just realized effectively when they invaded the postal distribution center Saturday morning, April 8, with the aid of the postal workers there, demonstrating at the same time the current meaning of worker-student collaboration.)

TEMPS CRITIQUES
(Montpellier, ca. 10 April 2006)

Conned by “Credibility”

(excerpts)

The most frequently heard statement during the beautiful and tumultuous weeks of anti-CPE struggle has been “You’re undermining the movement’s credibility.” This anxious exclamation, this reproving sigh, this unpronounceable slogan has reverberated through all the occupied amphitheaters and all the demonstrations, in Grenoble as in many other cities. Graffiti on a university wall undermines the movement’s credibility; attacking a temp agency undermines the movement’s credibility; a trash can in the middle of a street undermines the movement’s credibility. Pointing the finger at any initiative that seems a bit too “daring,” a bit too violent, a bit too strange, this theme has led to dissensions between “responsible” and “irresponsible” demonstrators, with the former tending to echo the discourse of the authorities, thereby setting the stage for the division and repression of the movement. [...]

When someone says, “You are undermining the movement’s credibility,” they don’t usually mean “I don’t agree with you,” but rather “I don’t think that public opinion will agree with you.” These judges of credibility are not personally engaging in an ethical debate or even in a strategic one (which is unfortunate); they are imagining what “people” will think and speaking in their place. They are echoing and representing an abstract and threatening collective entity: public opinion.

This public opinion is a phantom. [...] In our struggles, “public opinion” resembles a good father who sets limits, who tells us to be “reasonable,” who insists on a certain tone and vocabulary. But what if we ignored it? What do we care about this anonymous spiritless sum of all the average opinions of our mediatized democracy? Why should we pay attention to this specter with such a suspicious resemblance to the dominant thought? Why should we play its game, rooting for one caricature against another, one vacuous spokesman against another? Why not desert the miserable rules of this media-imposed dialogue? [...]

The media’s treatment of our social struggles is always a letdown. The short, entertaining format of the articles or “news items” is always dramatically distant from the complexity of our projects. Seeking a catchy image or lively personality, the journalists turn our battles into a spasmodic spectacle, then invariably abandon us when the conflict drags on. In their accounts, our revolts are systematically presented as eccentric, or cute, or immature, contrasted with the carefully phrased commentaries of their talking heads. [...]

Some will say that by turning our back on the media we will cut ourselves off from a mass of people and fail to communicate our ideas. I reply: On the contrary! We will be opening ourselves up to new reflections and new experiences. Like political power, communication is constantly being delegated to specialists — in this case, journalists. But when a few dozen friends and I block some intersection and I exchange glances with a passerby, I am in no way convinced that the main form of communication between that person and myself — so intensely present, just a few feet apart from each other — will be the TV commentator’s remarks on the evening news. [...]

There are a thousand and one forms of direct communication to discover and rediscover. Beginning with talking. We can reinvent living conversation in our neighborhoods or indoors — speaking to strangers, daring to take the time to exchange a humorous or political remark. [...] We can express ourselves without mediation. Writing texts, accounts, analyses, appeals, pasting them directly on walls, posting them directly on the Internet, slipping them directly onto supermarket shelves (“shelf giving: a practice of pirating the commodity system by surreptitiously placing free objects on commercial shelves”), or handing them out in printed form. We can draw, sing, paint posters, publish pamphlets and newsletters, record our most incisive conversations, photocopy the writings that have most influenced us, put together short films. Taking seriously what we have to say; extending the underground culture of the oppressed and the rebellious, disseminating it all around us. [...]

Let’s stop being afraid: the ball is always in our court. In communication as in many other domains, we are already capable of astonishing revolutionary inventions, precisely because we bear within us values and questionings that are infinitely alive. All we need is to become aware of them, to build up our confidence, our audacity, our pleasure, our strength. Let’s come together and take the offensive.

Confronted with the established order, let’s not worry about being credible. Let’s be threatening.

ANONYMOUS
(Grenoble, 10 April 2006)

Victory!

The MEDEF [Mouvement des Entreprises de France — French Confederation of Business Enterprises] would like to express its thorough satisfaction with the latest developments.

The withdrawal of the CPE has perfectly played its role as a bone tossed to the labor unions, with the complicity of the mass media. This maneuver has enabled the safeguarding of what was essential for us in the Equal Opportunity law and similar previous measures (CNE, apprenticeship for 14-year-olds, night work for 15-year-olds, night work for women, RMZ, CIVIS, etc.).

The essential elements of our goal of increased flexibility and social insecurity have thus been safeguarded!

What makes our victory all the sweeter is that direct and indirect benefits to employers (reduction of social costs, subsidies and grants for hires) are going to be increased. Considering this net result, we call for the prompt opening of new negociations!

Such success would not have been possible without the persistent and assiduous support of the labor unions, which have done everything in their power to smother this social movement. We hope they will be rewarded with a substantial increase in their subsidies.

The great danger for us was the possibility that the general contestation that emerged from this movement might have spread and intensified, bypassing the unions and political organizations, organizing itself in decentralized general assemblies and practicing the direct action of mobile blockages.

Fortunately, a general strike has been avoided. All’s well that ends well.

We know that we can count on all the political parties, left or right, to prevent any revival of this movement by encouraging people to wait for next year’s elections.

Long live France. Long live the Republic.

Long live flexibility and growth.

And above all, long live money!

P.S. We would also like to thank the Minister of the Interior for having clubbed, arrested and put on file all those young rebels who in any case would never have been docile and obedient workers.
 

EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE OF THE MEDEF
10 April 2006

cc: Collectif Libertaire du Val d’Oise

LINKS

This is a rather eclectic assortment of texts and websites that I have found of some interest. Needless to say, I do not fully agree with all of the analyses. I plan to update this list as new material appears online.

 

TEXTS IN ENGLISH

http://www.libcom.org/blog/  This “Unrest in France” section of a British anarchist site is by far the best single source for non-French readers. It includes over 100 articles and analyses, some introductory material, and a large gallery of photos.

http://libcom.org/blog/thursday-28th-blockades-across-france/03/30/2006  “Blockades Throughout France” (March 28)

http://www.endangeredphoenix.com/FRANCE%20MAR%2006%20OpenOffice.org%201.1.html  “All Quiet on the French Front” (article by an Englishman living in France)

http://www.richardgreeman.org/  Click “English” > “This Month’s Editorials” > “Social Struggles in France” (article by an American living in France)

http://libcom.org/blog/henri-simon-from-the-suburbs-riots-to-the-student-movement/04/03/2006  “From the Suburb Riots to the Student Movement” (Henri Simon)

http://internationalist-perspective.org/IP/ip-archive/ip_45_lets-speak-out.html  “Let’s Speak Out!” (Some Internationalists)

http://libcom.org/blog/statement-from-an-occupier-of-ehess/03/26/2006  “Statement from an Occupier of EHESS”

http://libcom.org/blog/virtual-sit-in-protest-organised/03/16/2006  “Virtual Sit-in Protest Planned”

http://www.325collective.com/social-control_anti_cpe.html  “Breaking Out of the Ghetto: Lessons from the CPE Struggle” (325 Magazine)

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2855  “Fight for Your Right to Be Fired” (FAIR’s review of American media’s putdown of the French movement)