Our nights no longer need stars to shine
Imaginary parti – Li.Ke. Commando
« The hell of the living is not something that will be : if there is one, it is already here, the hell where we live everyday, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many : accept the hell and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and learning : seek and be able to recognize who and what, in the midst of the hell, are not hell, then make them endure, give them space. »
Italo Calvino
« You can love a city, you can recognize its houses and its streets in your remotest or dearest memories ; but only in the hour of revolt is the city really felt as your own city – your own, because it belongs to the I but at the same time to the „others“ ; your own because it is a battlefield that you have chosen and the collectivity too has chosen ; your own because it is a circumscribed space in which historical time is suspended and in which every act is valuable in and of itself, in its absolutely immediate consequences. One appropriates a city by fleeing or advancing, charging and being charged, much more than by playing as a child in its streets or strolling through it with a girl. In the hour of revolt, one is no longer alone in the city. »
Furio Jesi
The day will come where the fire-swallowers that we are shall begin to spit it out
and our most beautiful creation will be the flames we shall thus ignite. »
Romain Gary
Friday night
Heat of summer
Thousands of people in the streets
Thousands of cops too.
Baricades burning,
A local guy bangs out loud music from his appartment,
We dance below,
And we confront the police,
It lasts for hours.
Further out, we drink, discuss, calmly
Supermarkets and shops looted.
Some grandma or other and some masked youth, arms full
Chocolate and Mac Books for all.
A bank on fire
under the panoramic and powerless view of helicopters
Some shout at the masked manifesters, others defend and thank them.
Some neigbours argue and sometimes get violent.
An overexcited couple fuck on the third floor of a scaffolding.
Beneath, a liquor shop with starred glass, the shop owner offers wine to passers-by –
« I would have done the same twenty years ago ».
On the other side of ShanzenStrasse, a police van and its five occupants are chased by a dozen rioters.
Fear has swapped sides.
We’ll live in the memory of men who don’t have any…
It’s been a week. In all media, journalists, politicians and responsible militants speak only of that, with no fear of any semantic ignominy : the “German Aleppo”, the “leftist terror”, chaos. The unacceptability isn’t due to the tens of million euros of damage, the post-apocalyptic images, the thousands of pave-stones and bottles thrown at the police, but to the situation in itself : the simultaneous presence in the streets of thousands of Hamburg citizens, hardened or neophyte uprisers, young immigrants, spectators and protesters of all horizons. A moment on the verge of uprising in a German city in 2017 can only be condemned and strangled at all costs. It is not meaningless that certain German ministers compare us to Nazis and ISIS terrorists.
The media can spill stories people traumatised because their car was burnt, their shop-window smashed or their children were on one side or other of a barricade. But anyone who took part at that moment on any level knows what we went through; joy, fear, intensity, which made us more alive than on the normal course of existence under a capitalist regime. We spoke with many passers-by who, for the first time in their lives, were taking part in a political moment, and we felt their enthusiasm and their energy. All the catastrophe propaganda that the media work so hard to produce, aims precisely at warding off this widespread joy and power, and installs fear of the out-of-norm situation and makes the loss of state control undesirable. All the German journalists can tire at the task, nothing will stop the participants of the Hamburg days and nights in keeping the real memory, in their bodies.
There is an incandescent presence of the self and others in riots, a lucid fraternity that the state is incapable of engendering : living and irreversible connections.
Those who don’t get further than seeing images of violence, miss out on everything that is put at stake when together we take the risk of breaking, painting graffiti or confronting the cops. We experiment creation and affirmation of friendships, a frank configuration of the world, clear possibilities of action, means of easy access. The situation has a form and we can be moved by it. If riots are desirable, it’s particularly as a moment of truth.
The art of eluding, or how a police intervention produces more disorder than it re-establishes order…
Let’s not forget that the police didn’t intervene in the area of Schanzenviertel for almost six hours, only entering in the middle of the night, in a cloud of tear-gas and behind anti-terrorist units with machine-guns at hand. This was not merely due to the heavy handed fighting of a couple of hundred enraged militants, but mostly because of the presence of thousands of Hamburg inhabitants around them. How to distinguish the “good citizens”, some of whom didn’t fuss about casually slowing down police convoys or even throw a stone or other, from the uprisers who had just taken off their black clothes for the fifth time that day?
Not all the inhabitants of Hamburg approved the confrontation with the cops, the looting and the burning of vehicles, but they all felt the exceptional character of the situation. A situation that levelled the state of exception which was imposed upon them for weeks, and particularly the last few days :
19,000 cops mobilised, thirty water cannons and gun-proof vehicles ; the permanent noise, day and night, of helicopters and sirens ; at the borders, the Schengen space agreement suspended…
Nevertheless, how can it be that the German police, so organised and efficient, lost control to that extent? We can pinpoint the labyrinthian urbanism of Hamburg, the massive presence of locals on the streets, the determination of the militant. Strategically, one can assume that the German police can brutally destroy an organised black block of 1,500 people in ten minutes (“Welcome to Hell”), as long as they chose the place and time of the attack. However, if we step out of the planned and well-known scheme, if thousands of people begin to disperse themselves on the streets and act spontaneously, or if we simply step out of the urban context (as seen in the actions against the transport of nuclear waste in Wendland), the beautiful machine gets blocked and runs around in circles like a headless chicken.
In Hamburg, the police’s zero tolerance failed on two levels. Firstly, by not allowing a big camp in the periphery, thousands of activists were propagated in the heart of the city, in multiple small campsites that were impossible to watch over. Secondly, by attacking the demonstration on Thursday right away, instead of letting it be and canalizing it, they pushed thousands of militants in disorder into the city, thus opening up a new playground. From the first day onwards, they gave a taste of the violence the state was ready to assume.
In Hamburg, we witnessed a forced and rare transformation of German police tactics : from close-up confrontations, kettles of thousands of people, saturation of public space, to long distance combats, fixed points, use of tear-gas, charges that were no longer aimed at arresting, but only beating and harming. These situations recall the “management of order” in use in the south of Europe or other parts of the world. The honour of the German police, its world-wide reputation of discipline and efficiency has undeniably passed its sell-by date.
We are not talking about the Berlin police scandal where 200 completely hammered cops were fucking and pissing everywhere and playing around with their guns, to the point where their chiefs had to send them home before the first manifestation even began (see you next time guys!). Nor about their frustration in holding absurd positions for hours and hours, sweating under their armour, getting lost at each crossing, running in and out of their vans, and by the time they realised that once again they weren’t at the right place at the right time.
We are speaking about the biggest concentration of repressive forces in a German city for the past thirty years, and its flagrant failure. We’re talking about an unnameable chaos, a sky blackened by fires and an unmanageable human tide, where there should have only been space for photos of politicians, smiling and confident with the philharmonic orchestra playing the background. More than anything, we have the perfect example of the art of eluding, a generalised capacity of avoiding the omnipresent control and moving into the offensive. We’re faced with a collective intelligence, which showed to the eyes of the world that the empire can be defeated, on its own ground.
Of an oceanic presence…
Friday 7:30 am, for the past half an hour the blockades, more or less peaceful, started all around the city, attracting police brigades like flies.
South of Altona, two hundred black blocks, equipped, masked and determined, come out of the bushes.
An upsurge…
Bus stops, estate agencies, offices, banks, town hall and shopping mall…
The beauty of the movement of a whole body, prolonged by metal, projecting itself through a window
Garbage bins, construction material, cafe terraces, are thrown on the streets
Smoke bombs on the tire, or launched through a broken windscreen…
1, 2, 3, 10, 15, 25 cars set on fire.
The first cop car drives back before it even gets close.
A couple of parked police vans in front of the station are lit up by Molotovs, banished in flames
Fifteen minutes, everyone disappears…
Only ashes and broken glass left behind
Locals staring, locked and numbed…
The police disposition closes in onto emptiness.
While elsewhere actions continue…
Molotovs and wild riots can weaken a movement as much as they can create possibilities. In Hamburg, this morning’s run-up assumed the level of conflict, which seemed legitimate and necessary to many, as was shown by the hours and the night that followed : a grade of offense taken on and shared with thousands of anonymous people.
A necessary and legitimate violence in reaction to the militarisation of the city, and to welcome with dignity the twenty assholes that got together here as masters of the world, as masters of this world…
Austerity is the norm, billions for the banks, crumbs for the rest.
The end of the archaisms such as social security, healthcare and pensions, progress is on its way !
It has already reached the southern countries in the blessed times of the colonies.
The south now rises further north every year…
Barbed wire, uniforms and camps of the fortress-Europe track and trail, humiliate and assassinate hundreds of thousands of men, women and children.
Racism is no longer hidden, it’s a profitable and respectful business, sometimes even a national sport.
For the “nationals”, existential and affective misery,
Work and psychotropics as an escape route,
Routine as antidote.
To life.
In the distance, wars get bogged down, military industries agglutinate and fatten up
Economic growth on the basis of foreign corpses.
Police and army on the streets, armed, carrying cameras, followed by drones and helicopters.
Unbridled violence and assumed blunders
Control is everywhere, in the ID card chip or in a DNA file for the privileged.
Terrorist laws organise and legitimise repression. Resistance cannot be deployed in any case.
The media hold down the lid of the cauldron : games, shows, dreams, and more games.
Marketing agencies do their best to increase the level of consummation, while we fight to make ends meet.
The snake eats its own tail.
Thousands of tons of petrol wasted in the oceans, millions of plastic bags decorate the landscape, Ibiza in the North Pole and Fukushima mon amour.
Species on the brink of extinction pave the way for our future children.
°
To cry over the tens of burnt cars, hundreds of broken windows, the poor, injured police officers.
Are you serious?
Imprison demonstrators, evict Rote Flora, bring down St Pauli…
Forget…
And continue as if nothing had happened…
The indecency of a mortifying civilisation, on its last breath.
Or the violence of a system that refuses to be confronted for its crimes.
What the fuck did they expect?
To meet in a city, five hundred meters away from one of the rare areas that claim a political identity and history… Arrogance with no limits, too tempting a provocation not to try to ruin their party by any means possible.
“By all means possible”, we don’t limit ourselves to one truth and unique modality : we were enthusiastic towards the thousands of pupils demonstrating (relatively) calmly ; we meddled with the pacifists who blocked the convoys of the official limousines ; we laughed with the mothers of St Pauli insulting the police who were fucking everything up in their area ; and we danced till the break of dawn on Reeperbahn with hundreds of strangers, many of whom didn’t even know they were taking part in a blockade action. It simply happens that we also know how to burn cars, break shop windows and confront the cops, and that’s exactly what we did. We wanted the lasting image of the G20 not to be the handshake between the assholes Trump and Putin. And we achieved it!
Light creates the people, night gives birth to the plebe
So we are the “terrorists” who burnt cars and looted supermarkets. We are the “potential murderers” who confronted the cops during two days and two nights. We are part time employees, workers and job-seekers. We are children of immigrants and of the middle class, who will never reach the quality of life their parents knew. We are illiterate and we are poets, graffiti writers and street cleaners. We are students in schools and in universities, with or without money. We are the youth fed on consumerist codes of this world and the women who oppose the sexist behaviours they are faced with. We are the generation who knows what this civilisation has in store for us. We don’t have a future, but we have dreams, which emerge from the smoke of our joints or of our burning barricades.
We are the plebe, dispossessed beings who get together and organise ourselves to confront the causes of our dispossession, beyond any law, to fight against what weakens us, beyond any legitimacy, infinite attempt to allow other worlds to emerge…
We’re sorry but you’re going to have to get used to it…
Certain responsible militants accuse us of the the crime of silence, incoherence, breach of moral order, of being infiltrated and used, to legitimise liberticidal laws. One has to be deaf and blind in this day and age, in history to give us such importance. We’re merely the left-overs of this world, the refuted, the reserve army, but we’re countless.
Our mode of uprising is simply the adequate response to a world which asphyxiates us, poisons us and imprisons us. We don’t deny the fact that we are ungovernable and unmanageable, when the occasion arises. What do you expect?
To want a revolution that is absolutely vegan, antisexist, ecological, respectful of all the weak and all minorities, with no excesses at all. In other words, to want a revolution kept inside the box, disciplined and controlled, is not wanting a revolution whatsoever. We don’t deny the fact that there were sadly some misbehaviours during the course those days and nights, but we don’t support them as such : to the point where we even confronted each other physically just as we had finished pushing back a police charge together. But by focusing on these outbreaks to differentiate the good and bad demonstrators, or even to use them to distance oneself from the events that took place in Hamburg, is to accept a dogmatic or media logic. It is, above anything, taking the position of the other side of the barricades.
We’d rather hold onto the attentions in all this fury, attentions that tend to opportunities of destruction, looting, confronting the police, but also attentions between strangers : to stand together, to help anyone who falls to the ground, to share knowledge and skills, to talk, to listen.
Many moralists and struggle managers criticise the blind and a-political violence of the Hamburg days. First of all, we are meant to have destroyed one of “our” areas. It’s true that the fact that we held on for so long, is thanks to the implicit and explicit support from a number of inhabitants; supplying projectiles or simply being present on the streets. We were in a less hostile territory than elsewhere. But let’s not be naive, who can still afford the current rent rate in Schanzenviertel or Kreuzberg or Friedrichshain? Are these areas liberated from state control, commercial domination and police presence? In reality, it’s a battleground like anywhere else, just a little more favourable ; the supermarkets and Apple shops don’t vary their nature according to their geographic location… Moving on, we have heard many condemnations of the burning of “cheap” cars. The German state was also shocked by the awful actions that jeopardize the fundamental rights of its citizens, the right to own a car. Forty million euros were assigned as compensation for the victims of the “terrorist” violence in Hamburg, compared to the nine hundred thousand euros of compensation given to the families of the nine victims of the NSU… We would rather target luxury cars with our actions, but we won’t get into a dissociation logic and condemn those who do not target at all. This partially random violence is inherent at all political moments, such as during the London riots, the counter-summit in Strasbourg and Vichy or the French or Swedish suburbs rebellions.
Evidently, we didn’t manage to undo the repression, to hold onto a territory, to establish a free-zone, longterm. In the same manner as we failed in December 2008 and the following years in Greece, during the commune of Oaxaca or in the sequence of oppositions to the work reform in France. As many bright tentatives as aborted ones… We have no regrets, we don’t follow a general plan or a militant agenda or calendar. The possibilities opened up by these moments depend on the collective intelligence that takes place, we can only feed them with intentions, determination and experience.
Force open the door of the present.
Try. Fail. Try again. Fail better.
Pursue. Attack. Build.
Win, maybe.
In any case, overcome.
The future is unwritten…
From the necropolis to the vertigo of life
Hamburg, Paris, Cairo, Frankfurt, Milan, Tunis, London, Athens, Thessaloníki, Rome, Istanbul, Nantes, Teheran, Barcelona… For the past ten years, all these standardised cities, neutralised and often militarised for the occasion, have been faced with out-of-control situations for hours or days. Which metropolis can confirm itself out of reach from this type of event?
None.
Experiment these exceptional situations over and over again, link them to our lives, to our beings. Make it possible for these intensities to gush out of our daily lives, to move us, to split us open and multipy us. Project our dreams, our joys and our madness into them. Learn in consequence, to heal each other, to move and to feel together. To organise ourselves, so that returning to normality is more complicated every time, until it becomes impossible.
The Paris terrorist attacks and the state of exception put in place as a consequence were directly followed by the longest and most antagonistic political situation of the past forty years. No one can forecast an uprising, an insurrection or a revolution. We don’t know where or when it will happen, but we know we will be there, and that we will be thousands.
“- I propose a dangerous world, uncomfortable and mad! A world with no rules apart from those we will forge! A multiple world, exploded, mixed, without government because it’s made of masters! A world of pioneers, of seekers, of adventurers! A world of inventors of new ways of obtaining pleasure, of feeling and seeing, that won’t be scared of tying and failing! A world where we will have to learn to breathe in the void, where you have to know how to put a brick on top of another and how to grow tomatoes in the sand!
– A world where the couple won’t be the ultimate and untouchable form of the social tile. Where love will come out of prison! Where it will no longer be property, a right or a due, but just an offer, a present…
– A world with no judge, no police, no informers!
-A world where children can shout in silent streets because there won’t be any silent streets!
– A world that is linked and weaved, direct, without media, without publicity but with public space, agoras wherever possible.
-This world will be what you make of it. Nothing more nor less. But I know it will be beautiful because it will be hand-made, and will feel the vertigo of life…”