To clarify once and for all: Power cannot exist without us. We can live without it (and even better). Power drains us of our essence; it pillages life.
[Excerpt from: ‘Manifesto of Rebellion – Signpost to a Different Future’; December 2008]
The imposition of domination knows no national boundaries or state divisions, nor is it concentrated in the hands of a minority elite headquartered in a specific part of the world. Power pervades every part of this world’s metropolises, every human relationship structured according to the capitalist standards.
The era we live in has all the characteristics of a contemporary war; a war triggered by domination and counting victims – its only way to perpetuate its existence. For almost four months the unrest continues in Paris and other cities of the French territory over a proposed new labour law, despite the intensifying control and repression in response to the recent ISIS attacks and in view of the Euro tournament. The struggle is manifested by all means, from occupations of squares, theatres, factories, to attacks against banks, stores, and large-scale clashes with cops.
Without deluding ourselves, we’re able to realise that the future of demand-centred struggles is doomed and the subjects of social struggles may be carriers of authoritarian logics. However, the reality of social unrest is the field amid which minorities can develop effective solidarity and equality relations, where they may find themselves overcoming fear through clashes with cops and developing the consciousness that the voting of a bill is nothing compared to the existence of laws, is nothing compared to the existence of every Power.
Let the upheavals in the French territory be another occasion for the encounter and organisation of our action. The only stance which befits us is the strengthening of combative confrontation, the reversal of fear, the socialisation of this reality, and the only way to achieve all this is none other than diversion from normalcy in every part of daily life. Let the broken windows in Besançon, the sabotage of ATMs, the burning of a police car in Paris, the Molotov cocktails against Toulouse’s police station become the trigger for realising that revolutionary prospects are widened within insurrectionary events and through social destabilisation, which is neither self-existent, nor a parthenogenesis. On the contrary, it’s the goal of polymorphous anarchic struggle, that’s also responsible for its preparation, for transferring the war to the here and now, away from delegation logics, away from logics of waiting for ripe social conditions; for promoting the system’s destabilisation, for making visible the two opposite camps that exist: either with the present world, or its deniers.
In the early hours of Thursday June 23rd 2016, we set fire to exhibits of the French car dealership Peugeot-Citroën on Vasilissis Olgas Avenue in Thessaloniki as a minimum gesture of solidarity with the rebels in the streets of Paris, Toulouse, Lyon and everywhere else.
PS. We dedicate our action not only to rebels across the French territory but also to the anarchist comrades Yannis Naxakis and Grigoris Sarafoudis [both incarcerated in Greece], who stand second-instance trial for the bank robbery in Pyrgetos on July 5th 2016 [in the court of appeals on Loukareos Street, Athens]. Anarchist prisoners are never alone; solidarity that takes the offensive will break the bars of isolation imposed by domination.