Mtlcounter-Info

A few reflections on the GAMMA squad Word on the street is, there’s a new police squad in Montreal called GAMMA - short for “Guet des activités et des mouvements marginaux et anarchistes” – whose goal is to investigate and repress anarchist and marginal movements. The following is a series of reflections on this development from a few anarchists. Needless to say, it’s not meant to be representative, but is rather our own analysis of this situation, and can hopefully stimulate some discussion amongst our various circles. ...

On Friday, May 18, 2012, two new laws came into effect in Montréal. Their purpose is to stifle the anti-capitalist revolt that has grown from the more-than 100-day-old provincial student strike. The first is the municipal by-law that forbids the wearing of masks during any demonstration with the penalty of a $1000 -$5000 fine (additionally, if the Federal government’s proposed law comes into effect, wearing a mask in a ‘riot’ could result in up to 10 years of prison). The second is the provincial government’s Special Law (Loi 78) that requires any public demonstration to submit itself to meticulous control by the police to avoid being declared ‘illegal’. Any leader, spokesperson, or rank-holding member of a student association that blocks access to classes or counsels others to do so will be subjected to a fine ranging between $7000 and $35,000. ...

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“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread.” Anatole France “Violence was the law, and with the cannons in the hands of the whites, the law was white.” Sunera Thobani The social struggle in Quebec, grown out of a student movement against tuition, has inspired many. But perhaps the central issue causing people to take the streets with pots and pans across the country is Bill 78, known as the ‘special law.’ It criminalizes demonstrations not approved by police and imposes heavy fines for political activity on school campuses. It has been accompanied by a crackdown that has seen more mass arrests than the FLQ Crisis of 1970, at last count over 2,500. ...

WORK IS WAGE SLAVERY PROPERTY IS THEFT The history of the economy is the history of theft. Look at the piece of land you’re standing on. It was once tended by people who knew how to provide for themselves and their communities without destroying the environment. The possibility of dignified life and work was killed by the governments and land owners who organized colonizing armies and brought over labour gangs of indebted European immigrants and kidnapped African slaves. ...

Social War A war is already being waged against us daily by the state and capital , by the miserable roles of submission imposed on us, by the police and their prisons. A rotten social peace is enforced to conceal that people fight back against exploitation and domination. Social war means making this war two-sided. Social war means us against the state. The existence of this war is the best-kept secret of our civilization. Naming it is the first act of rebellion, the first step towards claiming control over our own lives. ...

FIRE TO THE PRISONS AND THE WORLD THAT NEEDS THEM Prison is nothing more than a reflection of the society in which we live. Our society resembles a great open-air prison; with the threat of starvation if you don’t spend your energy on meaningless work for capitalism, with cameras on every corner, with the police intimidating and murdering in the streets like the jailers do to those locked in cages, and with borders drawn by our rulers serving as walls. The inside and outside of prison only differ in their degree of intensity, but both are based on domination, alienation, and control. ...

COPS, PIGS, MURDERERS The police claim their purpose is to “serve and protect”, but the 60 people who the SPVM have murdered since 1987 remind us that it is not us who the police serve and protect. We are told that we need the police, that their actions are excusable and necessary for our protection, that without them we’d all be killing each other. The truth is that we don’t need them at all. We know well enough who the killers are. ...

AGAINST THE LAW, POLICE, PRISONS, AND THE ‘GOOD CITIZEN’ The police, judges, the rich, and their prisons defend the present world of work and misery, and only through conflict with them will we create a world where these systems of domination don’t exist: where we are free to pursue our needs in common with others in the absence of the scarcity imposed by capitalism and the police who occupy our streets, caging the threat of freedom wherever it begins to bloom. We will always find ourselves on the other side of the laws they maintain; there is no way to destroy the state and capital legally. We know that equality before the law is a myth, constructed by the powerful in order to disguise that these laws apply to a reality of deep-seated inequality. The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread. ...