excerpts: sorbonne occupation committee in exile—final communiqué

excerpts:
SORBONNE OCCUPATION COMMITTEE IN EXILE FINAL COMMUNIQUÉ
Translated in August 2006 by JML • "Live Free or Buy Trying?" • http://situationist.gq.nu

"...
1.
A slogan overheard in Rennes: "We are not pacifists. We are making war on capitalism." The whole crowd took up the chant. Later, we saw pacifists defending a row of cops with paradoxical punches and kicks. In the end they were chased away from the protest. A banner reading: "We are all window-breakers," voted on by the assembly at Rennes 2, became the watchword of a savage demonstration where Socialist Party offices, newspaper offices, banks, and employment agencies were all quite equitably trashed.

2.
It's not a question of "violence;" there's only sides to be chosen in a war that is already underway. The question, rather, is what the adequate means are for securing a victory.

3.
During the whole life of the movement there was a constant police operation going on, aiming to distinguish "good" demonstrators from "bad" window-breakers. During those weeks in Paris, "window-breaker" was a general term used to indicate, variously, the "anarcho-autonomists fighting police in front of the Sorbonne," then "uncontrolled elements at odds with the forces of order in the National Plaza," and finally "the youths from the slums, beating up demonstrators and looting in the Pensioners' Plaza." Semantically speaking, the term "window-breakers" had gone from one meaning to another: they weren't even smashing anything anymore; now they were lynching demonstrators. The term then appeared in its true colors: it was just a meaningless word only being used by the cops. The police have the monopoly on making up an image to attribute to the threat. By designating as elements foreign to the movement those people who were in fact the most dedicated participants in it, the cops made them foreign to their own offensive capacity, to their own seriousness. The image attributed to the threat, these days, is that it's the criminal immigrants doing this, that it's just those "barbarians from the slums." By alleging that every "foreigner" could potentially be a subversive, the forces of order insinuate that a good Frenchman would supposedly have no reason at all to become a subversive himself, when in reality there have never been so many Frenchmen who feel themselves no longer at home in the dismal decor of the capitalist metropolis.

4.
To paint on a banner "we are all window-breakers" isn't to say that you affirm yourself as a subject, to say you smash windows and cars, but rather is only a way to try to confuse the police and hinder the police operation going on. To see destruction as a political practice all you have to do is understand that the everyday existence of banks, shop-front windows, or franchise stores is actually just a moment in the course of a silent war. At the same time as the enemy destroys things, it also destroys all the evidence that they ever existed. And so there it breaks with the democratic management of conflicts, which accommodates ever so well all the little demonstrations against this or that thing, as long as no taking of positions is ever followed up by real effects.

5.
We are talking about a police operation. A distinction between gendarmes, unionists, journalists, bureaucrats and politicians would be a superfluous distinction, since their collusion is absolute. They all fit under the general heading of "police." The journalists' clichés have served the police inquests; when the union "order-keepers" beat up our comrades and handed them over to the riot cops the next day's morning papers made them look like heroes. They all collaborated to achieve one principal aim: to make sure that a consistent distinction was made between "window-breakers" and "demonstrators." And they only succeeded once -- March 23rd, in Paris. Everywhere else, the lack of a distinction so feared by the minister of the Interior (..."If there were a connection between the students and the slum kids, anything would be possible. Even, possibly, a general explosion, and a dreadful end for this five-year administration") worked wonders. Strasbourg, Nantes, Grenoble, Toulouse, Rennes, Lille, Drancy, Caen, Rouen -- never in the recent history of France have the downtown areas had such a regular succession of nights of rioting.

...

7.
Here's two ways to move in the streets, when they become a hostile space belonging to the pigs, the cars, and the cameras: the march and the small band. The march: you arrive individually, get together for a few hours with your "comrades," throw around a few slogans you hardly even believe anymore, and on enthusiastic days sing a few songs which would probably send chills down a few spines if they still meant anything, like the Internationale. A few loudspeakers conveniently cover up the silence of the assembly, and the emptiness of relations. Manu Chao, Zebda, La Brigada, etc. Then everyone, one by one, starts to feel at home again, and at leisure to think about things a little less. A digestive promenade for the unionized herd, a parade of solitudes guaranteed by the forces of order. The small band: you leave together. You take some equipment along with you. You have at least an inkling about what you're going to be doing once you're there. Fight the pigs, burn Paris, liberate the Sorbonne, loot some stores, steal some cellphones, have at it with some journalists or demonstrators, whatever. The group moves like a single person, a fifty-person individual. If one runs, everyone else runs too, if one gets in a fight they all do, and if one gets hit it's an injury to all. Mob reflexes. Common jargon. A disposition to foolishness, to blind following, to lynching. An extreme mobility. Hostility to the unknown and to the immobile. These two kinds of movements have been seen in Paris over and over again in the past years. On March 8th of 2005, in particular, and then in the Pensioners' Plaza. Every time, the confrontation has ended up to the small groups' advantage. And every time, those individuals who've gotten separated from the mass march, with their freedom of expression and their right to be themselves, with all their right to have a cell phone, to have a bank account and dreadlocks, have still just ended up getting beaten up and traumatized. Traumatized by fifteen year old kids. And traumatized by having to make a cruel choice -- either to organize into small groups of their own, or else to end up laid out on the pavement. Because otherwise they have to face up to a heady fact -- only the police provide the conditions for the existence of the liberal individual. This is the obvious fact that the forces of order try to deny, after every confrontation, with their brutal attacks, in such bad faith.
..."