Comments Off on Anarchy, Lockdown and Crypto-Eugenics: A critical response from some anarchists in Wales & England
Mar152021
Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info
“The Covid19 crisis has presented a challenge to anarchists and others who believe in a fully autonomous and liberated life” – so a recent submission to Montreal Counter-information declares. These words certainly resonate with our experiences. Anarchy in the UK is not just presented with a challenge; it is itself in crisis. Spycops, squatting ban, abusers, Corbynism, TERFs – the list is long, and the virus already found “the scene” in a sorry state. But Covid-19 represents something different, and on this we can agree with the analysis from Montreal. This is also where our agreement ends. In the following text we critique the analysis – we do so as its arguments are similar to those we have heard among friends and even comrades over the past months. Though the epidemic in the UK appears to be waning, its associated tendencies remain. The text calls for serious critiques, and so we offer the following in the spirit of antagonism against the present. We close with some suggested points of unity for anarchists in these times.
“Politicians”, their text begins, “lie”, and big pharma has exploited the pandemic. Maybe we can agree on a little more! In the UK, we were told that the virus was only a flu and to keep working as usual. (At the time of writing, the death count numbers over 125,000.) And we were told of Oxford’s vaccine, a people’s vaccine with no patent or borders (a mask that quickly slipped as the state reverted to vaccine nationalism). But these aren’t the lies they have in mind. Rather, they argue that politicians and the media have craftily overstated the virus’ threat, in a cunning plan to impose lockdowns and reap pharmaceutical profits. (Surely the hand-sanitiser corporations are behind this too..?) Anarchists, we are then told, have believed this powerful lie. Out of an “admirable [!] want to do well by the elderly and infirm”, the state has succeeded in “hacking our hearts and minds”.
This idea, appealing as it might be, is only a pale shadow of the reality. Covid-19’s threat is not a conspiracy, any more than Covid-19 itself. It is not the result of media hype any more than it is the product of Bill Gates’ brain or transmitted from 5G towers. It is the direct consequence of severe ecological destruction and capitalism’s toxic living conditions. Having brought it into existence, it is of course “exploited” by capital and state. As the critic notes, it is unlikely that capitalism will eradicate it, even if certain states claim this as their goal. Instead it is managed, incorporated, capitalised upon. This is at a far more fundamental level than creating profits for some pharmaceutical companies – we are seeing in the colonial core an historic restructure of work and class-composition. Our critic begins to scratch at this surface (they describe lockdowns as “classist”, as if a lack of lockdown would be classless!). Scratch a little deeper, and we see that capitalism faces a familiar contradiction: exploit workers, but ensure there are workers to be exploited tomorrow. Manage the virus, manage production. Like inflation, the death-graph must be regulated – kept just right. Everywhere this paradox is obvious: “stay at home” but “go to work”! Technocrats and managers debate the 2 metre rule just as the 19th century Factory Acts debated the relation of profits, health and cubic-feet per worker.[1]
We can call this capital’s “positive” side. Though each worker is cheap and replaceable, capital needs a body of workers. It can’t have everyone ill at once, and it can’t afford killing off too much of its working population. But it also finds and creates bodies superfluous to capitalist production: disposable bodies, bodies in the colonial margins, old bodies, less or unproductive bodies, bodies that cannot “work”. It’s here that we see capitalism’s eugenic and Malthusian tendency. This tendency, always present, has for the disabled been intensified in recent years, as the numerous lives lost due to benefit cuts demonstrate. Since the beginnings of “public health” in the 19th century, triage systems (a military invention) have ranked bodies in a hierarchy of value, rationing resources under conditions of artificial scarcity. In recent times, do-not-resuscitate notices imposed on Covid-19 patients with learning disabilities were the result of a care algorithm – tech meets “accidental” eugenics.[2] Capitalism itself could accurately be described as an algorithm of crypto-eugenics, always at risk of fascism outright. Like fascism, Covid-19 presents an existential threat to the lives of certain minorities – the proletarian disabled and the elderly in particular – and a slower death to others.[3] And like fascism, liberal democracies allow it to exist, manage it, keep their monster on the leash. At times this management fails: health-care systems collapse, production plummets. At other times, the far-right call for the monster to be set free.
Recognising the pandemic as an existential threat is where “our conversation should begin”. The critic talks of anarchists on the one hand, and the elderly and “infirm” on the other. It’s the anarchist that is agent-subject here, their freedom to act with or without them (the “vulnerable”) in mind. It erases from the beginning elderly anarchists, disability anarchism. Where are they and their freedoms in this imagined revolt? Our critic continues: as free anarchists, we also care for others, we co-operate with “consent” and without “force”. But who’s force, what consent? It’s a simple truth that your right to drink in the pub (that is, the right of the business to re-open) shits on the freedom of those at serious risk, those a few links down the chain of transmission. These chains of transmission are our chains. As anarchists we affirm the violence of liberation. Let us be clear: those that threaten the disabled cannot be consented with. We will find no freedom in frozen morgues.
The critic goes on to downplay the threat of Covid-19, a familiar refrain. Montreal Analysis come Barrington Deceleration – talk about technocrats! They cite statistics on average risks, masking the deadly risks to specific minorities (it won’t be bad for you!). They pit Covid-risks against cancer treatment (we can only afford one or the other!), despite the virus being far more deadly for those fighting cancer. Even were Covid-19 somewhat less risky (look, only 60,000 deaths!), the crypto-eugenic logic remains. In the UK, we must critically analyse recent events – particularly that certain assemblages of the state openly plotted course for “herd immunity” without a vaccine. It’s safe to assume that this Malthusian wet-dream would have led to health-system collapse and perhaps half a million deaths (“acceptable losses”).[4]
Where the critic calls on anarchists to question and critique the Covid-19 threat, we call on anarchists to reflect critically on eugenics as a logic of capital and state. We must also grapple seriously with its nasty history in the anarchist tradition, from Emma Goldman’s writings to sections of primitivist and anti-civ thought. As pandemics become more prevalent and eco-fascisms enter the mainstream, anarchists must fight to ensure nobody is “left behind”.
Finally, our friend attacks the tyranny of lockdown, claiming that as anarchists this should be our aim, and that in failing to do so we have cowardly ceded ground to the far-right. But their target is both abstract and confused. They use the terms curfew, lockdown and closures interchangeably (one of their cited articles even describes mandated mask wearing as “draconian”!) and argue that these measures must be attacked “in principle” as they are imposed without “consent”. We argue that as anarchists there is no state which can be consented to, and that the very notion of a social contract has nothing to do with anarchy. Rather than make vague statements for #freedom in the style of the Tea party right, we must locate and attack the instruments of power and control. “Lockdown” has come to mean a myriad of very contrasting measures – from asking people to stay at home to policed curfews, from enforcing meager workplace health and safety to the breaking of strikes, from closing businesses and schools to violent prison lockdowns (the term’s original meaning), from fining tourists and quarantine hotels to detaining migrants in military camps. It should be obvious which of these as anarchists we must attack, and which we can leave alone – or even fight for.
We must define our targets and recognise our enemies. Free business has nothing to do with our freedom. Simply opposing lockdown “edicts from on high” is as empty as supporting all protest. In the UK we have seen large, rowdy Covid-conspiracy demos led by celebrity anti-Semites, but we have also seen unpolitical gatherings fighting the police – as well as organised demonstrations for black lives. The US presents an even simpler dichotomy. Nothing could be clearer than the difference between the late-Spring business protests against Democratic governors and the Summer’s black uprising against the police. The first stood for the rights of small businesses and merged into the right-wing militia movement. The second exploded anger at the cops, expropriated goods and created temporary autonomous spaces. As anarchists we know where we stand.
Speculative points of unity:
Smash crypto-eugenics, of the right and of the left Obstruct Covid-conspiracy demos, recognising them as far-right mobs Resist the criminalisation of the pandemic, policing powers, curfews and intensified surveillance Target the reinforced border regime and “lifeboat fascism” Organise against the return to unsafe workplaces Fight the evictions of anarchist spaces and the mass-eviction wave Further networks of mutual aid and act with dangerous care Sabotage ecological destruction and animal exploitation, the cause of present and future pandemics Analyse the changing terrain, refuse the postponement of anarchy
Notes:
“It has been stated over and over again that the English doctors are unanimous in declaring that where the work is continuous, 500 cubic feet is the very least space that should be allowed for each person. … [but were this to happen] [t]he very root of the capitalist mode of production, i.e., the self-expansion of all capital, large or small, by means of the “free” purchase and consumption of labour-power, would be attacked. Factory legislation is therefore brought to a deadlock before these 500 cubic feet of breathing space. The sanitary officers, the industrial inquiry commissioners, the factory inspectors, all harp, over and over again, upon the necessity for those 500 cubic feet, and upon the impossibility of wringing them out of capital. They thus, in fact, declare that consumption [tuberculosis] and other lung diseases among the workpeople are necessary conditions to the existence of capital.” Karl Marx, Das Kapital (Chapter Fifteen: Machinery and Modern Industry, Section 9). If we assume a work-room height of 10 feet, 500 cubic feet would give a base of approximately 7 x 7 feet, 7 feet being a little more than 2 metres.
On the 26 June 2020, England revised its guidance from 2 meters to 1. Whilst “the evidence shows that relative risk may be 2-10 times higher”, “there are severe economic costs to maintaining 2 metre distancing. With a 2 metre rule in place, it is not financially viable for many businesses to operate.” https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/review-of-two-metre-social-distancing-guidance/review-of-two-metre-social-distancing-guidance
The linked Guardian article is from February 2021, but concerns regarding do-not-resuscitate forms were raised by medical establishment bodies at the beginning of the UK epidemic. https://www.cqc.org.uk/news/stories/joint-statement-advance-care-planning
“I just need you to recognize that this shit is killing you, too, however much more softly, you stupid motherfucker, you know?” Fred Moten on racism (interview, 2013). Vaccine nationalism is increasingly shifting this to the “postcolonial” elderly and disabled. Other groups of course include certain sections of the workforce (mostly low-paid) and people of colour, the urban poor, the incarcerated, migrants. (We would argue that the existential threat directly applies here to the elderly and disabled, whereas the Covid-regime intensifies existing threats against the latter groups.) A lot could also be said about the privatisation of Covid-risk to the household and the domestic abuse this has further enabled.
The UK’s Office for National Statistics estimates disabled people as making up 60% of all Covid-19 deaths (November 2020). Similar to “BAME” deaths, “raised risk is because disabled people are disproportionately exposed to a range of generally disadvantageous circumstances compared with non-disabled people.” https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/articles/coronaviruscovid19relateddeathsbydisabilitystatusenglandandwales/24januaryto20november2020#main-points
The ONS estimated that approximately 15% of the population had antibodies to Covid-19 on the 18th of January 2021 (the rate was lower for Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland). On this date the total UK deaths of people who had received a positive test result (a relatively low measure) was approximately 95,000. “Herd immunity” is estimated to require a threshold of at least 60% (the percentage Chief Scientific Advisor Patrick Vallance gave in his interview with Sky News on March the 13th, 2020) possibly more. That is, to reach herd immunity without a vaccine, more than four times as many people in the UK would need to have been infected than had in January 2021, making it reasonable to assume four times as many deaths (giving 380,000 as a conservative estimate). This is before considering reinfection, the lack of treatments at the beginning of the pandemic, likely health-system collapse, the higher chance of new variants etc. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/articles/coronaviruscovid19infectionsurveyantibodydatafortheuk/3february2021
More evidence has emerged of herd immunity without a vaccine being a pushed for strategy prior to March 23rd, 2020. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-54252272
By the Sex Work Autonomous Committee, an autonomous political organization of sex workers based in Montreal with the aim of demanding the decriminalization of sex work, and better working conditions in the sex industry more broadly.
Cari Mitchell is a former sex worker and a member of the English Collective of Prostitutes (ECP), a network of sex workers in the United Kingdom working both outdoors and indoors campaigning for decriminalisation and safety.1
In 2000, the ECP organized a sex workers’ strike that was part of the Global Women’s Strike on International Women’s Day. The Global Women’s Strike is an international network campaigning for recognition and payment for all caring work. A sex/work strike was organized again at that date in 2014 and 2019, on these occasions, with other sex workers’ organizations. We asked Cari Mitchell to share her experience as one of the organizers of the strike.
CATS: Your collective has existed for many years and used many political strategies to obtain rights for sex workers. How did the strike come up as a tactic to obtain decriminilization of sex work?
C.M.: Our collective which started in 1975 was founded by immigrant sex workers. From the beginning we demanded the abolition of the prostitution laws and for money in women’s hands from governments so we can get out of sex work if and when we want. It was and still is mostly women that are doing sex work, mostly mothers, mostly single mothers, doing our best to support our families. In the ECP we also fight legal cases against criminal charges such as loitering and soliciting and brothel keeping. Whatever people come to us with, we help them. We are an organisation of different nationalities, races, ages, sexualities and all genders.
We work closely with other organizations. We are part of the Global Women’s Strike and the campaign for a Care Income Now2. Like other women we want our work of giving birth and raising the next generation to be counted, valued and paid for. And as sex workers we know that if we had that money for the work we are already doing, most of us wouldn’t have gone into prostitution in the first place. We wish that those people who complain about the number of women who have to go into sex work because of poverty and lack of economic alternatives, would instead press the goverment for that money.
We are based at the Crossroads Women’s Centre in London and work closely with Women Against Rape, which is an anti racist, anti-violence against women organization. We also work with disability organizations – we have a number of women in our own network who have disabilities or who have children with disabilities, which is why they are working to get the money to cover the extra costs of dealing with a disability. Queer Strike which is part of the LGBTQ movement in the UK are also allies as is Support Not Separation which fights against children being taken from their mothers – which is happening here at frightening rates, the excuse being given that mothers are not protecting children against poverty or domestic violence. This is so outrageous. We know of sex workers who only started working to support their children and then have had them taken away by social services saying they are unfit mothers!
We have an international network so we learn from everyone’s experiences. Our sister organization in San Francisco is USPROS (The US PROStitutes Collective) and EMPOWER is our sister organisation in Thailand – who are involved at the moment in the massive struggle for justice in that country.
We campaign for decriminalisation along the lines of the law that was introduced in New Zealand in 2003 which has been shown to improve sex workers health and safety. The law removed consenting sex from the criminal law which means that the police now have to prioritise our safety rather than prosecute.
Women going on strike to demand recognition for their unwaged and low waged work has quite a long history. In 1975, all the women in Iceland went on strike and the whole country ground to a halt. It was fantastic! There are photos of thousands of women out in the streets. Newscasters had to have their children with them in the studio while they were reading the news about the women being out on strike!
People have always known that withdrawing our labour is a way of bringing attention to the issues we want to raise. On International Women’s Day in 2000, the Global Women’s Strike was organizing a women’s strike in many countries calling on governments to recognise and value all the unwaged work women are doing in the world. UN figures at the time showed that women are doing two thirds of the world’s work for just 5% of the income and 1% of the assets. We were already working with sex workers in Soho, London – one of the most well known red light areas in the country. Sex workers there had been part of our network for decades and we had fought a number of campaigns with them against the local Westminster Council trying to close down flats – trying to gentrify the area. Many of the women working in Soho are migrant women and the police targeted them in particular for raids, arrest and deportation but used as an excuse the claim that women were trafficked and needed saving. When we spoke with them, sex workers from Soho said they wanted to join the International Women’s Day strike. Women there work in walk-up flats – the clients come and knock on the door and wait. On the Strike day those doors were closed and Soho sex workers came together with others who worked in different places and ways. We all joined the Global Women’s Strike.
So that no-one could be identified, all the people on the march wore masks. No-one could tell who was a sex worker and who wasn’t, it was a fantastic success and there was a lot of publicity.
In the ECP we try to bring out the truth about sex work- about who we are and why we are doing it so people can have more of an understanding. We talk about the effects of criminalization on our safety and how we are workers just like any other workers, that most of us are supporting families both in the UK and in other countries as well. There are so many migrant sex workers sending money home to countries all over the world. These messages came across in our demands in the Strike in 2000 which was a great leap forward.
We continued to work with sex workers in Soho as Westminster Council continued to pursue them. Some flats were closed and women were driven out onto the streets. Tragically, one woman was murdered in 2000, shortly after the Strike. She was very well known within our network, we knew all about her. Her name was Lizzie and she was murdered while working on the street shortly after being forced out of a Soho flat. No sex worker has ever been murdered while working in a Soho flat. It is 10 times more dangerous to work outside than it is to work indoors with others.
The prostitution laws make it unlawful for sex workers to work together for safety, they drive the industry underground and so make us all vulnerable to violence. Under loitering and soliciting laws – just standing on the street and talking to a client, sex workers can be taken to court and convicted on the word of a single police offier. Once you have a conviction you have a criminal record under sexual offences and it’s pretty much impossible to get out and get another job. So you’re stuck. The police now often use civil orders which also force women to move out of areas they are familiar with and into darker side streets. If you work in a group for company and safety your colleagues can take your client’s car registration number when you get in the car and you can make sure he knows this. But that’s not possible if you have to work by yourself in a dark area to avoid coming to the attention of the police. Where police continue to crackdown, violence and murder of sex workers rises.
Indoors, it’s not illegal to exchange money for sexual services, but everything you have to do to work with others is against the law. More than one woman working from a premises is a brothel and arranging for people to work together, advertising, paying the rent is all unlawful under brothel keeping legislation. It is basically illegal to work safely in this country. Working together means people can look out for each other and learn from each other not only how to work more safely but also for instance to get the money first, how to deal with clients, how to do the job in the quickest time. One of the problems with continued police crackdowns is that most sex workers in this country are now having to work on their own.
Things have changed though – years ago sex workers used to be described in the press as vice girls, but that doesn’t happen anymore. The press is much more respectful and the public is much more aware of who sex workers are. They know that a lot of us are mothers, migrants, trans, women of color; they know that we are vulnerable women who have few alternatives to sex work. The strikes have been a really effective contribution towards this change. The more recent International Women’s Day strikes were organized by other sex workers organizations but we were very prominent in them, especially in the 2014 and 2019. We did a lot of organizing to get people out and we were very much out there and they were both a great success. It doesn’t always feel like it but things are moving along.
CATS: Your movement is in favor of decriminalisation and not legalisation. Can you explain why you think this model is the best option for sex workers?
C.M.: Decriminalisation which was won in New Zealand in 2003 has been a verifiable success. It was introduced under health and safety legislation and sex workers there say that they now have more legal and other rights and more protection from violence – they know they will not be prosecuted if they come forward and report violence to the police and under these circumstance violent men are more aware they will not get away with it. This makes an enormous difference to sex workers safety and is a standard we think should be everywhere.
Legalisation is completely different. It’s state-run prostitution. People have to register with the authorities to work legally and most people are unable to do that. Legalisation creates a two tier system where if you can afford to be known to be working you’re ok and you can work in the legalised areas or premises – but most of us can’t come out as sex workers. Who knows what might happen if your child’s school or a social worker or health authorities find out. It’s simply not something most people can do. In those countries where there is legalisation the prostitution stigma remains, most sex workers don’t register with the authorities and continue to work unlawfully. In the well known areas where people work outdoors, someone just walking into the area can be identified as a sex worker. Who can afford that? Internationally, sex workers are not campaigning for legalisation, we’re campaigning for decriminalisation. We want all consenting sex to be removed from the criminal law
CATS: Your strike was part of a broader women strike in the UK and internationally on International Women’s Day to bring attention to labor exploitation in all aspects of women’s lives. How do you think being a sex worker can compare to other feminised labour or unpaid work such as caregiving and cleaning?
C.M.: In lots of ways it’s similar work. Clients come to us not only because they want sex, but also because they want someone who is sympathetic to them, who will listen to them. Maybe it’s for fifteen minutes, maybe it’s for half an hour, maybe it’s an hour, maybe it’s for longer but they want the personal contact, that they are at the center of someone’s attention for that time.
In fact, one of the women in our network did sex work with a client but was also working with him as a care worker. She did both jobs with the same person and said it was much more work doing the caring work then it was doing the sex work.
In 2017, we did a survey which found there were many other jobs that women describe as exploitative and dangerous3. Sex work is one of the most dangerous jobs women do purely because violent man know that they can get away with being violent to us – they know we’re not going to report anything to the authorities because we don’t want to get prosecuted. That’s how it is.
That survey was really illuminating. We launched it in the House of Commons and it’s been very useful to show there are many other jobs that are described by women as being particularly exploitative and dangerous – that sex work is not uniquely exploitative.
In sex work, you can earn a bit more money in a bit less time and that’s very important especially if you’re a mother or you’re doing another job, maybe you’re working in a bank or working another way and you’re doing it to top up your low wages. A lot of people are doing that. Also, if you are a migrant, you don’t have access to jobs in this country in the same way at all. For instance if you’re an asylum seeker you don’t have the right to look for jobs. A lot of people are living in poverty and suffering discrimination – for instance trans people and women of color face racism and other disrimination all the time in the job market – that’s why so many people are driven into the sex industry.
CATS: How is a sex work strike organized concretely? How can you make sure everyone can participate, even the more precarious ones? The whorearchy (the hierarchisation of different types of sex work as some being more respectable such as stripping or camming then full-service sex work, particularly those who work outside) is one of the factors that affects the amount of criminalization someone will experience. Was this an issue while organizing the strike and how can you address this?
C.M.: We’ve been going for a long time and have a really big network around the country – as well as internationally. We’re in touch with people who work outdoors and indoors in many different places and we invited everyone to come to join the 2000 Strike. The organizing meetings were with people who were not only working in Soho but in other places as well. We sat down and made sure that everybody was able to put forward their suggestions. We were very careful to make sure everybody knew that they would not be public on the day, they would not be recognisable and would be able to take part without compromising their security in any way. That they were not going to be identified because everyone would be wearing masks.
People who worked in many different ways including strippers and people working online took part. We were really determined not to be divided. We are all affected by the laws in some way, however we work, but it was very important to us to make sure that people knew we start with the situation of people who work on the street who are most up against the law, are most stigmatised and therefore most vulnerable to the police and to other violence. So people knew we were not going to have any slagging off of anyone about the way they worked, that’s just not on the agenda. We are all doing it for the money because we need that money and we choose to work in different ways, whichever way fits our lives the best. I think that’s one of the reasons why we were successful in organizing the 2000 strike and the subsequent ones. Because people knew that we’re not going to be divided against each other.
CATS: Here in Montreal and Canada, most unions and mainstream feminist organizations are still in favor of the Nordic model. How was it organizing a sex work strike within a bigger feminist movement? How did you find alliance in the left and the feminist movement?
C.M.: Feminists who take a moral stand against prostitution have always been around, but back in 2000, they were not really interested in coming out against us and neither were the unions. Since then Nordic model has been more of an issue and we take every opportunity we can to address it – like going to trade union conferences, speaking out when we’re interviewed with feminists in the press. When you point out that criminalizing clients is going to increase the stigma and drive everybody underground so undermining safety, it’s obvious why we’re against it. Every country where the Nordic model has come in has shown an increase in violence against sex workers. Those women who call themselves feminists and are pressing for the Nordic model are in fact the biggest obstacle to getting decriminalization. If they would go to the government and say ‘Well, we don’t think women should be in prostitution, but we think that women should have money in their hands so they don’t have to do it’, that would be great ! But they don’t – they take a moral standpoint against prostitution and often make a career out of opposing it as politicians or journalists or academics. At the 2000 International Women’s Strike, there were thousands and thousands of women marching. There was the odd group of feminists standing on the edges with some odd placards, but they were never in a position to counter what sex workers were saying publicly.
Women’s safety is something that the government shouldn’t be able to argue about. We have here a prestigious government committee which spent a year doing an enormous piece of research into prostitution and in 2016 recommended that it be decriminalized, both outdoors and indoors. Also, crucially that prostitution records be wiped clean so that sex workers can get other jobs. It also recomended prostitution not be conflated with trafficking. But their recommendations were not taken up – the government saying it needed more research which just meant more money in academic’s hands. But even those academics who did do further research were not able to come up with the kind of counter report they had so wanted to produce.
The laws have to change and they will change. A divorcee used to be called a “scarlet woman” but not nowadays- things are changed, there has been a women’s movement and decriminalization will happen because sex workers are a key part of that international women’s movement.
CATS: The criticism of borders and the way they are almost always excluded in the trafficking discourse seems to be a big part of your campaign. Can you talk a little bit more about that?
C.M.: We have a lot of immigrant women in our network and a lot of them are seeking asylum, running from other countries and trying to survive. Under UK legislation, people making claims for asylum have to live off of 37 pounds a week4, a pittance! So in order to survive and maybe to send some money home, sex work is one of the options people have.
We also know from our experience not only in Soho but also in cities around the country that the police target migrant sex workers under the guise of saving women from traffickers. We have made it a priority to counter that. For instance, in Soho, women say ‘look we are not being forced, we are working here because we need to survive and to send money home to our family. Every penny we earn, we send it home to our family’. The only force sex workers are under is the force is not having enough money to survive without doing it.
The best research has shown that less than 6% of migrant sex workers are trafficked. So when we speak publicly we make sure that we counter the publicity that police get when they raid. And it’s clear that these raids don’t have anything to do with saving any women from trafficking but to aid the immigration agenda of the government – which is to deport as many migrant people as possible. Women who are picked up are often sent to immigration centers and deported against their will. Terrible.
CATS: Now what do you think are the next steps for the sex workers movement in the UK? How does COVID impact the way you mobilize?
C.M.: I’m sure it is the same in your country, but COVID has exacerbated everything. At first, everybody did try to stop working. People were and still are in this horrendous dilemma of either stopping working so you’re not making your family vulnerable to the virus – but then you’ve got no money to feed them. And you can’t pay your landlord if you work indoors. Or you can decide to continue working and have a bit of money but then you have to be very very careful with clients – and the police may come after you.
People who have continued working have taken very careful precautions with clients. During the lockdown, most people have basically stopped because they feared their neighbors or the police or other authorities are going to catch up with them in some way, they will get in trouble with the law and then you have another whole story to deal with.
Some sex worker organizations were doing a great job of raising money for sex workers who were unable to continue working, and we helped distribute that money around to people in our network who needed it. But we decided that as that good work was going on, we would focus on pressing the government to recognize sex workers as workers, to demand an amnesty from arrests, and to demand that sex workers are able to easily access emergency payments. But the government hasn’t done one single thing to enable sex workers to get that money. We made sure with our public campaigning that this point was very prominent and it did bring together some members of parliament. We asked everyone on our mailing list to write to their local MP and press them to raise these matters in parliament, and some MPs did do that. The government got back saying ‘Well people can access a benefit called Universal Credit’ which is a benefit that is very hard to access, takes ages to get to you, and isn’t enough to live on. People in general are much more aware about these very low benefits – so many people in this country are having to rely on them one way or another in order to survive right now.
The pandemic has clarified a lot of issues, starting with how much caring work women are doing, making sure people in communities have enough food, that they are okay. It also clarified the brutality of the government. For example in care homes, elderly people were not protected from the virus at all. They sent people who were positive with the virus from hospitals and into care homes so then of course, hundreds and thousands of elderly people died. But the government was happy – they haven’t got to pay their pension! The government recently announced that billions of pounds are going to the military, so we know that they have the money. They have had to organize a furlough system whereby people get 80% of their salaries if they are temporarily laid off. So we know that the money is there and we know that they have been lying to us when they say there is no money. It is very clear now they didn’t organize to make sure hospital and care home workers had all the protection they needed. It’s the same with sex workers, they don’t really care if we live or die. I think people have even more scepticism about the government than before.
Governments want to keep criminalisation of sex work because they want to keep us all divided, they want to divide us into good girls and bad girls. But we refuse that in the same way that we refuse to be divided as sex workers depending on the different ways we work. In New Zealand, decriminalization hasn’t resulted in an enormous increase of people doing sex work because that depends on the financial situation in the country. It’s just that you are not criminalized for earning money in that way. Governments have to contend with the international sex worker movement and based on safety and rights, we will win.
1 You can learn more about the ECP at https://prostitutescollective.net/
2 Care Income now is an international campaign led by the Global Women Strike that advocates for a care income for all those, of every gender, who care for people, the urban and rural environment, and the natural world. For more info: https://globalwomenstrike.net/open-letter-to-governments-a-care-income-now/
3 The report of the survey – What’s A Nice Girl Doing In A Job Like This: a comparison between sex work and other jobs commonly done by women, can be found on ECP’s website: https://prostitutescollective.net/
Stella, l’amie de Maimie: Fighting to end the criminalization of sex workers’ bodies since 1995
Sex working bodies are criminalized, surveilled, stigmatized, and discriminated against daily. Some people respect and revere our bodies, while others vilify and reduce us to the parts of bodies. Anti-sex work prohibitionists and law enforcement attempt to control us for using our bodies for pleasure, economic empowerment, and our advancement in society. Even though our bodies are only one of the many working tools we use in the context of our sex work, the stigma around sex work leads to social control and criminalization of our work and our lives. It results in discriminatory health, public, legal, and social services for sex workers, compromising our health and safety.
The criminalization – and ultimate prohibition of sex workers, clients, third parties, and advertising – introduced through The Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act (née Bill C-36) implemented in December 2014 impacts sex workers first and foremost – it displaces sex workers from habitual workplaces forcing sex workers to work in unknown areas and without safety mechanisms, it criminalizes communication necessary for consent in sex work, and fosters fear of arrest in clients whereby they do not share important information to sex workers. These “end demand” models are often described as “decriminalizing sex workers and criminalizing clients” – this is a lie. Limited understanding of “end demand” models means that their proponents are unaware of the ways in which this regime still criminalizes sex workers and put sex workers at risk.
Since 1995, sex workers in Montreal have been fighting for sex work law reform – the removal of criminal and immigration laws against sex work, as a first step to respecting sex workers’ rights. Decriminalizing sex workers, clients, and the people we live and work with is primordial to respecting sex workers Charter rights to safety and security. This echoes not only the Supreme Court decision in Bedford, but major international human rights research conducted by Amnesty International, UNAIDS, Human Rights Watch, and the World Health Organization, who all call for the total decriminalization of sex work. Decriminalization is only a first step: members of our community who occupy public space – particularly those who are Indigenous, Black, trans, who use drugs, who are living in homelessness — will continue to be harassed, surveilled, and policed. Ending unwanted and unsolicited visits from police in our lives is long overdue.
We continue our struggle to end the policing of our lives and our work, and we stand in solidarity with communities to defund police towards a police free society.
We invite sex workers working to contact us for non-judgemental advice and support, and ways to protect yourself during a time of increased surveillance, police repression, and general sentiments of prohibition.
The original French version of this text can be found here.
In early 2020, a truly awful text entitled “Re-attachments: Toward an ecology of presence” (or Rattachments: Pour une écologie de la présence, in the original French version) was published out of Quebec, signed by a collective called “Dispositions.” Anchored in appelist thought, this text combines out-of-context linguistic mysticism with certain thinly disguised conservative ideas and also defends tendentious neocolonial and capitalist positions – all with an altogether astonishing narcissism. Up until this point, we’ve kept our critiques of this text to the private sphere, as it did not seem worth the effort of critique on our part. Unfortunately, the fact that the text is circulating once again a year after its publication, and been translated into English, compels us to react. Though we developed our critique specifically in response to Rattachements, it could easily also apply to an American text that inspired it, Inhabit (itself now also translated into French and distributed in Quebec). Citations follow the order of the text, but are not precisely referenced, as the printed version of the text is not paginated.
After hurriedly presenting the current crisis, both human and ecological, Rattachements proposes that we transcend the paralyzing binary permeating the environmental movement: “activist environmentalism” and “individualist environmentalism.” One might expect a strategic proposal to replace this binary: to the contrary, the authors claim that to operate within the terrain of values, to determine the “orientation of [an] action,” falls within “activism” and that it is therefore of no interest. From the get-go, it seems that an esoteric immanence sprinkled with belief in the future (a hope counterbalanced later in the text) stands in for political strategy: for the authors, it would be sufficient, according to the authors, to “[know] that all the components for a magical life are already there waiting for us — understanding that we are acting in the long term.”
Who exactly the authors are addressing in this text is not specified, although it is indicated in the negative at the beginning of Section II. An assertion – reeking of class condescension – that poses the question of how one might “speak about ‘nature’ to the subjects formed by the metropolis.” The tone seems to connote genuine sorrow for the dispossessed urban poor, but nothing is said about how their dispossession should be overcome or how people so deprived might reconnect with nature, other than by buying land in the country. In effect, the authors insist on a reconnection to nature that is nothing but the privilege of the wealthy. So, to the poor dispossessed: so sad, but there is no ‘redemption through presence’ for you in Rattachements.
Elsewhere in the text, the authors correctly observe that the state seeks to capture the totality of struggles in defense of the earth and will pass off just about any green policy as progress towards our collective well-being, but they refrain from mentioning any of the myriad anticapitalist, radical ecological, and decolonial groups and collectives that struggle against the state without being captured by it. The authors render invisible the totality of existing radical movements in order to underscore the supposedly exceptional nature of their thinking and the inspired brilliance of their practices. In expressing regret at this supposed absence, this text intentionally obscures the practices of millions of people struggling around the world. As the real and existing radical movement is ignored by the authors, they propose the following in order to bring about change: “It is a question of defending forms of life from that which denies their possibility. It is about fighting and defeating the enemy (whose many forms lurk both within, and outside of us).” We do not know which forms of existence must be saved nor which enemies must be fought. An ellipsis would suffice, according to the authors. Capitalism? Colonialism? These terms are virtually absent from the text. A particular mention of settler colonialism (a few pages before the middle) is certainly relevant here, affirming that settler colonialism continues its policy of the extermination of Indigenous communities in Quebec and Canada, although the authoritative tone employed to express this (rare) interesting idea contrasts strangely with the subjectivism of the rest of the text.
While Rattachements claimed from the outset to break with traditional politics (indicated by their disdain for “activist environmentalism” as well as for strategy), a new perspective is put forward near the middle of the text that stands in direct contradiction with its presentist politics. Indeed, after having advocated a sort of mystical return to the self, encouraged a search for “the components for a magical life”, after having ignored social and collective problems, the authors contradict themselves in stressing that politics is the art of conflict, and that acting (politically) against “the economy” (why not capitalism?) implies “a real territoriality — a presence, a reattachment” … and thus “the possibility of concrete conflictuality.” Let’s be generous and assume ‘being present’ is a necessary prerequisite to ‘being in conflict.’ But beyond that, nowhere is it explained how a mystical presence in the world would become, by force of words, a real conflictual presence. Is it even possible to theorize political conflict without collective organizing (in the social and class sense), without strategy, without naming the (capitalist) enemy, etc? The presence that is advocated here is totally individualistic and devoid of political content. Note once again that only this signifier “presence” (in oneself, in nature) serves as political content from the beginning of the text to the place where we find ourselves. It is thus unfortunate to see that the authors, in attempting to integrate some bad Carl Schmitt as regurgitated by French appelistes, don’t even manage to pose a real political contradiction.
For sure, beyond mystical presence in and of itself, the whole notion of re-attachment ignores the question of the settler colonialism that founded the Americas. It seems a single mention of this colonization passes for serious reflection on the subject and, especially, suffices for drawing political consequences from it. Indeed, in the second part of the text, the authors incessantly speak of inhabiting, territories to inhabit, areas to (re)take, and so on: themes that are just new deployments of colonization, under a different name. Let’s say it plainly: if the authors of the text are claiming that territories are ‘rightfully due to them,’ it is because they have totally internalized the values of the white colonial bourgeoisie, the only social class that speaks of its right to vast open spaces and various territories, and for whom a simple affirmation of their existence constitutes politics.
The authors insolently take advantage of this to reject the collective responsibility that descendants of settlers bear. Recognizing this collective responsibility is necessary if we want to think through a real decolonial politics, but this is of no importance to the authors: they fear that such a recognition leads only to a “sacrificial politics.” The chain from cause to effect – from the acceptance of our collective responsibility in the genocidal colonial process to the issue of sacrifice – is not made explicit in the text. Rather, it seems that by refusing to carry this shared responsibility, they are trying to make their desires in unceded territories more palatable: to reappropriate territories, to build houses there, to cultivate the land, to be able to own property, to celebrate freely with friends, to be “present” and to place themselves beyond reproach. And to prevent others from discovering their secret: that such practices are nothing other than a new coloniality and a vague hedonism. This neo-colonial mentality at work was showcased at length in the excellent text Another Word for Settle: A Response to Rattachements and Inhabit. This text shows clearly the profound flaws of these two appelist texts.
For the Dispositions collective, not wanting to talk about collective crimes Western societies and individuals have perpetuated right up until the present day is just another way of absolving themselves of their political responsibilities. After having (very poorly) discussed political conflict near the middle of the text, the authors quickly circled back to their personalist leitmotif. Under the pretext of not wanting to guilt individuals (because guilt paralyzes political action), they refuse to name systemic problems. The simple solution would be to take aim at capitalism, the state, and its structures – this would also designate a clear enemy and create political conflict. In refusing to do so, the authors are instead unilaterally wagering that their self-absolution leads to inaction, or even to compulsory inaction. As a result, the authors fall into a wilfully naive relativism about responsibility, according to which there are neither ‘guilty nor victims.’ Starting from immanentism and personalism as politics, the text struggled with the issue of politics before reaching a conclusion that is liberal, apolitical, individualistic and contrary to any social revolutionary spirit.
Is pessimism the fundamental affect of the times? For the authors, perhaps. Although one wonders if this affirmation is not simply serving to justify anew the duty of inaction, the right to avoid struggle, the refusal of strategy. Another way of justifying that in these difficult times, it is better to be in love with oneself, which is truly in step with the times. But now the situation is reversed: never short of contradictions, the authors affirm now that we must “[become] responsible.” Nice words from those who are not ‘guilty’ but rather ‘pessimists.’ Is this really a contradiction? Not totally, since the responsibility posited by the authors is individual (towards oneself and one’s friends) and concerns the relations the individual maintains with others and with nature. Historical, political, and economic responsibility are cast aside. What is needed is to be responsible towards yourself and your neighbours. Doesn’t that just remind you of the “individualist environmentalism” decried at the beginning of the text! Or simply liberal individualism. Of course, for those who are not crushed by social and economic structures, it is easy to take on responsibility ‘towards’ oneself, with an aura of stoic saintliness. It is different for peoples and individuals who organize themselves and fight against colonialism, imperialism and capitalism; but it has long since been understood that Rattachements was not going to speak of the wretched of the earth, obsessed as it is with the spiritual reconnection of the white colonial petty-bourgeoisie to the world that surrounds them.
How do the authors propose getting past the initial dichotomy of the text? How should we conceptualize political conflict? “To make ecology truly political, we must ask the following question: what makes it possible for this or that community to live a fulfilling life, to increase its happiness?” Fairly weak as a grand political statement for the current era. Fighting capitalism? Organizing a new, self-managed world? Absolutely not: it seems that developing happiness and well-being in one’s own little corner of the world is enough to change the world and make revolution. This promise of happiness ‘in one’s own surroundings’ is the same as that of liberalism and capitalism, and is in no way in contradiction with social structures. Most members of the middle and upper classes can aspire to such happiness, without ever challenging the system of production and consumption that destroys millions of lives.
What is really at work here is the willingness to tend to your own garden and come to believe there is something inherently revolutionary about that. If you need more proof that the so-called politics invoked by the author are nothing more than the most banal ideas of our time: we should care for our relations, our collective apartments, our shared houses and our political meetings. Apart from the distasteful touch of ‘ownership,’ there is only a desire to get along well with your friends. No politics. Just: ‘I want things to go well with my housemates and with my crew.’ As in the whole text, no political, social or collective problems are raised. The authors admit that it is because they feel “so dreadfully inert” that they wish to reconnect with presence. Their condition seems to stem from simple depression, not a political call.
Some dubious references are brought up at the beginning of Part III: a mythical peasant life is invoked in a gesture that is both backward-looking and confused, experiences of the Zapatista struggling for self-determination are referenced (even though these experiences stand in direct contradiction to the reoccupation of territories by the descendants of colonizers, at the heart of the authors’ project), and finally they emphasize the autonomy of the Kanienʼkehá꞉ka, as if indigenous peoples were not specifically subjected to a colonial regime of non-autonomy in so-called Canada. It’s clear that these figures serve only to give the text a decolonial veneer, although the veneer is cracking due to the ‘back to the land and good rural life’ aspects of the text – an approach that is quite simply conservative and colonial. The authors again feel the need to insult those who engage in activism: they are making a “lazy self-sacrifice.” Why? Because they do not adhere to the bourgeois presentism and individualism of the authors? Coming from those who prefer to drop out and party on stolen territories with their clique, the insult is a particularly low blow.
In critiquing the pacifist strategies and tactics employed by certain environmental groups, the authors don’t hesitate to lump all activists together in the same boat. They counterpose to activism “the need for ecstatic forms of life,” the only form of “real organization” according to the authors. This is absurd nonsense: the text asks its readers to not only spit on activists, but also to favour the murky (and once again, mystical) idea of ecstasy over collective struggle, organization, and, yes, even sometimes sacrifice. On one hand, it should be noted that throughout the text the authors conflate activism, reformism, sacrifice and “absence from the world,” concealing various radical and social practices of struggle and proposing no solution other than their presentism and their retreat in “the commune” (a term that is out of place in this text). On the other hand, the authors seem unperturbed by the idea that “ecstasy” can be reserved for those whose class conditions – notably, economic – allow them to treat themselves to such a good “ecstatic” time. Would the authors dare to demand that night-shift warehouse workers in the Saint-Laurent industrial park not struggle against their employer, but ‘choose’ ecstatic life instead? Would they dare to submit their ‘ideas about ecstasy’ to those incarcerated in Leclerc? The narcissism and classism of the text peak right around here. How could you think for one second that for the truly oppressed, a choice exists between struggle (a bad sacrificial choice according to Dispositions) and the life of ecstasy (which one can choose deliberately if we wish to). This is how 200 years of revolutionary materialist reflections and practices go up in smoke.
And this ecstatic life, what does it look like? One must fight, steal, travel. And most importantly, “[find] money, [acquire] buildings and land to put in common. [Watch] life flourish.” In sum, fun pursuits for having a good time in the present, and capitalist pursuits for real life, for the future. We can’t help but observe that this ‘strategic’ paragraph of the text (the authors are clearly ignorant of the meaning of this word) only deals with festive and individual activities, as well as investments and classically economic activities (liberal and capitalist). If buying land and forming a cooperative on it is deemed to be revolutionary (or a strategy!), the authors will need to learn that it is not: buying a parcel of land and forming a cooperative on it is an economic action belonging to the capitalist regime and made possible by it, accessible only to the global middle and upper classes due to the costs of investment. It is also, in the context of North America’s foundational settler colonialism, an action that generally serves to perpetuate colonialism. Obviously, it can be useful for revolutionary movements to possess infrastructures, spaces, etc. But this possession, legal and capitalistic, is never revolutionary in itself, and even less so when it is used personally or for one’s small group.
The only concrete proposal in the text is therefore to abandon political struggles in favour of the self (family or nucleus of friends), and then to adopt capitalist life practices that allow individual enjoyment for those who can afford it. We find here the melting-pot that we named at the beginning of the text: the conservatism of bourgeois values, neocolonialism, capitalism, individualism and hedonism; we are entitled to assume that this is what is meant by finding “all the components of a magical life.”
Neocolonialism and conservatism are taken yet a little further, in the very fashionable vein of ‘back to the land.’ It thus becomes important to gather “what our aunt taught us about plum trees, how to sharpen our wood carving knives, how to can ten bushels of tomatoes.” We must find ourselves in “the commune” (again, a term out of place in this text), meaning in the country house bought with our friends, to perform these highly symbolic actions. The authors teach us that such actions are even capable of “definitively suspending the progress of the catastrophe.” It’s heavy with retrograde values as well as totally apolitical actions that are simply a matter of daily life. In short, nothing very ecstatic. Finally, we don’t need to judge the ecstasy of others: rather, we can judge that living with a few people in the countryside, while unburdening ourselves of our political responsibilities, does not in any way augur well for a revolutionary organization or political triumph. It is hard to see how such a project would distinguish itself from the myriad individual and apolitical initiatives trying to establish rural settlements (increasingly popular due to anxieties provoked by the ecological crisis) or worse, from green entrepreneurship (the famous organic permaculture farm). If these “autonomous” initiatives were really able to bring about the overthrow of current capitalist and colonial structures, Val-David would long since be a commune liberated from the market and from all oppression.
The last two pages condense various hallmarks of Rattachements: no structural analysis, no material analysis, the domination of our times considered primarily subjectively, a call to mystical presentism (return to oneself, to real life, to the world), a so-called politics that ignores all actual living conditions, etc. The climax of this colonial, capitalist, narcissistic and mystical text: “To make oneself both perceptible and open to perceiving. Affect and power, orientation and magnitude. It is not a question of fighting on ‘two fronts’, but of the practical elaboration of the double meaning of “presence” and “sensible.” The text thus closes its long litany of contradictions with a sentence that means absolutely nothing.
***
This long critique may seem repetitive and sometimes confusing. It nevertheless simply follows the thread of a long text called Rattachements, itself confused, full of contradictions, not fulfilling its promises. The text is meant to be a reflection on the present time and a proposal for revolutionary action, but in our opinion it is nothing more than a long display of neo-colonial, bourgeois, capitalist and narcissistic values. There are many absurdities, many contradictions, a vulgar personalism and nothing useful for current revolutionaries. Those who don’t think the text is so terrible should take the trouble to reread it carefully: it is terrible, it is an enemy. We know that the people behind this text are not enemies, but we cannot be complacent in the face of what they have written and distributed.
In the end, their text proposes yet another enviro-capitalist and individualist ‘alternative’: the very type of practice that diverts the vital force of political action and that contributes to the catastrophe under the pretext of ‘personal action.’ The lines of argument of Rattachements are contrary to the social and political understanding we need, contrary to the collective organization necessary to fight against the capitalist system. We believe that a different analysis and politics are needed: a politics made by and for activists and the oppressed which must lead us towards a self-managed world; not a politics of little narcissists living their best life in the countryside. Individualistic desertion will not save us and cannot guide our actions in the times to come. As long as Rattachements circulates, it is our duty to criticize it harshly.
Comments Off on Don’t Kill Yourself – A Letter to an Anarchist Friend
Mar012021
Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info
(This piece, by U.K. anarchist Paul Cudenec, is posted here in memory of those we have lost to suicide, and to encourage people who are suicidal to find within themselves the desire to keep living and fighting for a better word. May we mourn Hugo, Dave, Jean, Charles, and all the others, but may we also honour their memories by continuing the struggles that gave their lives meaning. We are in midst of a suicide epidemic, and, since the age of COVID began, many amongst us contemplate suicide on a daily basis. If you would like to contribute to a zine which deals with the subject of suicide, please write nevermorezine@riseup.net)
I was deeply shocked by what you told me last night in the café.
I know I didn’t say much at the time, almost brushed it aside with a few empathetic mumblings.
But this morning I’ve been struck by the immense sadness behind your words and feel the need for a somewhat delayed reaction. You said, as I am sure you recall, that the world we live in is so bad, so far beyond redemption, that you feel like killing yourself to escape from it.
I never would have imagined that you could feel like that – feel like I do, in fact, though I’ll come back to that later.
You are, after all, young (from my point of view at least), perfectly healthy, in a stable and loving relationship, financially secure thanks to a job you don’t seem to mind too much, actively involved in trying to make the world a better place…
I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that this is not enough. Why should it be? But you’ve always seemed to me like someone blessed with an inner force of positivity, propelling you forward with such momentum as to leave doubt and despair trailing helplessly along behind.
Maybe if your life had stopped in some way, then I would have accepted that all this debris had caught you up and entangled you in its confusion.
But then it’s not really about you at all, is it? Any more than my own unease and anxiety are about me and my little life.
You’ve had your eyes open long enough to see the whole picture, the picture that most people around us have to blank out of their consciousnesses in order to remain ‘sane’ – which means to carry on living out their phoney existences in a phoney manner without being troubled by the inconvenience of thought.
You’ve seen all that. You’ve seen the layers upon layers of lies that smother us and stop us from growing tall and strong inside as nature intended.
You’ve clambered up on the shoulders of the people you’ve met, the writers you’ve read, the dreams you’ve dreamt, and you’ve seen that beyond the wall that surrounds our everyday lives is another wall, and then another, in concentric circles marking out the limits of our identity, our freedom, our imagination, our potential.
We are all prisoners of a society, a civilization, so life-destroying, so corrupt, so ruthless, so brutal, so all encompassing, that all who see its hideous face revealed are in danger of being turned to stone – immobilized by the sickening dread of complete powerlessness.
How can we destroy this monstrous machine that is pulping into mincemeat so many tender, hopeful, human beings like you?
How can we even start the task of destroying it? Or think about starting to do so?
Whose life is long enough, whose energy and courage sufficient, whose patience and perseverence so divine that they could embark upon such a mission with any kind of confidence?
How can you free someone who doesn’t even know they are a slave?
How can you inspire people to win back something they don’t even realise they’ve lost?
How can you urge them on to fight an enemy that they can’t see, that they can’t distinguish from the wobbly stage scenery and cardboard props of what they have been taught to think of as reality?
After generation upon generation in cages, do birds lose the urge to fly? Or do they just accept that a feeble fluttering from perch to perch is the nearest they are ever going to get?
No, it’s not enough, this half-life we are condemned to lead, with chains and blinkers on our souls as we trudge on and on, turning the treadmill of profit for the greedy, loathsome few, sometimes holding hands or singing together to make us feel less worthless.
It’s not enough even to have tried to escape, to have smashed your head against the wall time and time again, the blood mixing with your tears as you scream that you WILL be free.
And it’s not enough to find some quiet corner of the global prison where you can pretend you are at liberty, to crouch in some sheltered spot, behind a bush maybe, and hum sweet songs to yourself with fingers firmly planted in both ears to stop the sound of humanity’s wailing from disturbing your reverie.
It’s not enough, I know, and I have also often thought that suicide was the only way out – a comforting emergency exit in case it all does finally become unbearable.
My own contemplation of self-murder does not shock or thrill me any more, though. It bores me. It’s been aired so often over the years, the decades in fact, that it’s become stale and indigestible. But when you come out with same idea, it makes we want to weep.
Don’t do it! Don’t kill yourself!
I don’t know how serious you were, but don’t even talk about it, let alone think about it!
I wouldn’t say this if you were already dead, if you had sunk into a way of being so superficial that there really was no point in you staying alive, if you were compromised, polluted or stymied to such an extent that the earthly form we know as ‘you’ had nothing left to offer.
I have nothing against suicide in some, nay many, circumstances.
But to kill ourselves because of our despair at finding ourselves born and trapped in this prison-world is to miss out on an amazing opportunity.
When I was much younger, I had a vision of myself on the top floor of a multi-storey car park in the suburban town where I grew up.
I could no longer bear living in the realm of the plastic undead and I stood on the edge of the wall, the sun in my hair and the breeze making me squint, ready to step into the void.
At the very moment that I stepped out, an old man appeared from nowhere and pulled me back. I didn’t know who he was at the time, but I suspect now that he was maybe the concept of my older self.
He told me that, instead of jumping from the car park, I should simply close my eyes and imagine I was doing so, imagine the fast falling, the impact, the end.
I should think about everything that was now gone. My memories, my connections, my fears, my hopes, my perceived obligations.
And then, he said in this vision of mine, I should open my eyes again and find, to my astonishment, that I was still alive, still there, still real.
But all the rest of me had really gone. All those things I should or would have done would now never be accomplished. All that life I should or would have led would now never unfold. Nothing was expected of me. Nothing was demanded of me. I simply was.
Think now, he said, how and who you want to be, all freed from the burdens you have been persuaded to take upon yourself.
Think now of what potential you possess as a raw human being with the power of moving, talking, interacting with the world around you.
You are an angel fallen from the sky, he said, still draped in the afterbirth of the celestial mother. You have been sent here to do what you can, do what you must, to help bring about the great insurrection of the enslaved and dispossessed, to help crack open the crust of earthly power and deceit and unleash the tide of cleansing fire that swells beneath.
Imagine if all the would-be suicides in the world did the same – pulled back from the brink and became what they knew deep down they needed to be! What an army that would make, taking on the life-deniers with nothing left to lose!
He saw that I had understood and he said: “Just think – if you had really stepped over that edge, you would have died. Instead, you’ve been born.”
I’ve always remembered this whenever I contemplate suicide, even though it only ever took place in my imagination. I like to think I have lived by it to some extent – but, I’m afraid, not as deeply as I would have liked.
It wasn’t a one-off, though, and from time to time I leap again in my imagination, eyes tightly closed, and open them to find myself wrapped in a fresh skin, pulsating with new determination to leave my constructed self behind and throw my earthly presence, all clean and unencumbered, up against the scaly flesh of the Beast.
So don’t kill yourself – just offer yourself up, time and time again to be used as they see fit by the forces of good, of life, of resistance to evil.
We are all lonely sparks of light, separated from the Whole and homesick for reunion.
That day will come soon enough, but while we still have our own separate form, we have work to do, a destiny to fulfil.
“Let’s set healing fires for our dead. Let’s light up authority and domination so it burns as brightly as our friends immense heart. Let’s never forgive the world that took him from us, and never forget the ways he touched us. Ai Ferri Corti.” – a card distributed at the funeral of our accomplice Vlad
Vlad would have turned 26 today if he was still with us. For those who weren’t fortunate enough to have met him, know that he was fucking solid.
In an effort to feed the flames of his contributions to our shared struggles, we’d like to refocus on a text that we know was deeply inspiring to him, initially published in Avalanche: a journal of anarchist correspondence.
I cut through time as if with a knife. We’re hanging out in a park, watching friends play basketball. Vlad is vividly recounting how impacted he was by this text from Sweden, between fiddling with his pants and drags on a cigarette. Only a complicit grin is needed to communicate its obvious relevance to our context.
As the years pass, we invite you to contribute to a tradition of combative memory – a gift of rebellion and refusal every February 22nd, for yourself and for Vlad. Without falling into the authoritarian trappings of martyrdom, we can bring the memory of our dead into the present through attack.
You are alongside us in every act against authority, my friend.
Let the fire spread, is a text written under significant circumstances, concerning the late summer and early fall unrest in Sweden and Denmark this year (2016). We, the authors, are comrades who grew up and lived most of our lives in different Scandinavian countries but who were not there as the events unfolded. As has already been shown in the text Social tension and anarchist intervention in Sweden in Avalanche issue 2, the social tensions in Scandinavia and most of all in Sweden are not something new. And sadly enough, the lack of initiative and even ability to analyse and imagine something else and new among many comrades in the Nordic countries, also is not something new. When the fires once again started to spread between cities and neighbourhoods and even countries, we all agreed that we just could not let this pass without a single anarchist attempt to intervene. This time, the most commonly used method of attack used by the rebelling individuals was to set cars ablaze, which in comparison with the rioting and group attacks of the past years, is something very easily reproducible for a small group and even for an individual, which in itself presented a good opportunity to reintroduce other perspectives and terms but most of all, an imagination of a different way of fighting than the ruling one. The ruling one being very society-friendly and humble; rude and uncompromising only when it is sanctioned by the state. In the end this text is, besides a deficient analysis and a proposal, an attempt to spread another imagination and ideas of what it means to fight authorities, to fight this society, which in its obvious absence left comrades to a defeatist retreat during recent years. We decided to translate the text from the originals in Swedish and Danish to English, on the one hand to let international comrades know that what UpprorsBladet wrote in 2014, still is an ongoing reality in Scandinavia, and on the other, to let our ideas and way of intervening be debated or criticized by comrades closer to our ideas. As this introduction text is written, beginning of November, the text has been widely spread – from hand to hand as well as online – but with the coming of colder winds and snow, this wave of unrest must be considered as over or at least cooled down. However, we hope that our text might provoke another mindset and other discussions for the next wave to come.
***
Let the fire spread – an analysis of the last months car burnings in Sweden and Denmark and a proposal for intervention
The last months, something which belongs to the everyday life of the Swedish suburbs, has sprawled like a weed in the garden of social peace and has come to take the shape of a nameless and apolitical revolt. The simple act of setting fire to a car has, precisely for the reason of its simpleness, let itself be reproduced in small towns as well as bigger cities, on both sides of the Öresund, in segregated areas as well as in central, rich and well-integrated ones. Everything from single incidents to (what seems to have been) co-ordinated actions throughout the city. From society the response came from police, fire departments, media, politicians and random experts, who made statements and promised or proposed a serious amount of actions; actions which do not only serve to stop the car burnings but more generally increase the repression against those who do not want to toe the line. With this text we aim to create a modest analysis, followed by a more determined proposal for an intervention in this conflict between anonymous individuals and society. An anarchist intervention without any place for politics or negotiation. The way we see it, all we have got to lose in this, is the comfort that kept us from burning the first car.
Chronology and the problem with media
It has been hard to keep up with these events as they have developed. As soon as one has tried to put together a chronology for a better overview, new events have unfolded – on the part of society as well as its antagonists. For us, it is also clear that the greatest source of information that we have and have had, has been official media reports, as other ways of communication have lacked. So with the words of some comrades in mind: “The millions of words and images that fill the screens and (toilet)papers are not an echo or reflection of reality, they form an integral part of the creation of that reality, of the imposition of the morals, rules and logics that permit the existence of the State,” (*1) it is not without self-critique that we use this information. This information has obviously already come in handy for politicians and good citizens, according to the quote above. So even if this information serves our enemies, we will use this information with the aim of overthrowing those who created it. We do not know what has been going on in the sphere of social media but take it for granted, that these so called tools have not been used to analyze and spread these actions, with the aim of expanding the situation to a social revolt. If it is only the case that the media would have hyped and sensationalized these events, which allegedly happen all the time, with the same intensity(*2), this does not change the fact that these actions – the car burnings as well as the numerous attacks on cops and other uniforms – in themselves carry with them revolt and the potential for social revolt. Therefore, it is hard to know where to draw the line between what belongs to this specific escalation and what belongs to a more broad and constant social tension. We do not want to hijack the actions of different individuals, just to confirm our ideas; to project our longing for an expanded revolt on individuals and actions, that carry their own reason, meaning and will. So even if it is hard not to involve events like the organized attacks on cops and other officials in Kronogården, Trollhättan, or the ones that unfolded in Södertälje or Örebro, we will stay with the car burnings. In part because of their intense sprawl during the last months and in part because they do entail a very simple and reproducible method for attacking normality. In the first two weeks of August, the news sites and magazines were filled with headlines like “16 cars were burned in 5 hours,” “Minister of Justice: ‘damned fed up’ with the hooligans,” “20 cars burned last night,” “The government calls for heavier punishment for the car burners,” followed by a daily repeated: “More car burnings last night.” In connection to this, experts in sociology, firefighters, cops and people who got their cars burned were interviewed. The cops desperately promised to and did engage with a more intensified presence in the affected neighbourhoods – without any greater success. In Ronneby, however, the cops were a bit more realistic as the chief inspector on duty made the following statement: “We are short on officers right now, it’s vacation times and all, so I cant promise any additional patrols in the area,” in connection to cars being burned three nights in a row in the small town. In reaction to this, the municipality decided to hire security guards to patrol the streets instead. Between the 1st of July and the 17th of August this year, the fire brigades in each city reported 134 car burnings in Stockholm, 108 in Malmö and 43 in Göteborg. Throughout 2016, up until the middle of August, 154 cases of car burnings were reported in Malmö alone, where in several cases it concerned more than one vehicle. In the first week of August it was estimated to have burned seven cars per night in the city area of Malmö. In the first weekend of August a cop car was set ablaze, as the patrol was responding to some reported disturbances in an apartment. With its epicentre in Malmö, according to media coverage, the car burnings spread to several other cities. In the night between the 16th and the 17th of August a car fire in Norrköping led to the complete destruction of twelve cars and additionally at least seven cars were damaged. Meanwhile there were continuous reports of car burnings in smaller cities like the aforementioned Ronneby but also in Skara, Varberg and Borås as well as in bigger cities like Stockholm, Linköping, Göteborg, Västerås and Södertälje. In the middle of August the car burnings spread to Denmark, where cars were burning several nights in a row. In the night of the 20th of August ten cars were set aflame. Since then it has continued with varying intensity, in different areas of the Danish capital like Christianshavn, Amager, Nørrebro, Valby and Vestegnen. According to media, there has been at least 50 cars burned in the area of Copenhagen, between the middle of August and the middle of September. The cops did not hide their suspicion, that the fires might have been inspired by the situation in Sweden and immediately started investigations to catch the agitators and calm down the situation. In the media they called out for witnesses and the cops went through an extensive amount of video material from CCTV in the affected areas. Pictures and description of a suspect was made public and after several anonymous tips, a person was arrested and locked up the 24th of August, suspected of having burned ten cars and of havingattempted to burn another 23. This, however, did not stop the fires, that continued in different places around the city. Also the stinking wannabe-cops, the SSP:s (a co-operation between school, social services and the cops, that has as its aim to keep an eye on and prevent kids from committing crimes), increased their activities because of the car burnings and reinforced their numbers in the streets in certain neighbourhoods, as to prevent the youth to be inspired by the fires. Every night in the first week of August, the Malmö cops engaged with a helicopter in the hunt for the car burners. The 11th of August, obviously not for the first time, this helicopter was being pointed at with a green laser and for this two youngsters were arrested later that night. The cops interrogated them, with the hope of a connection to the car burnings but the two detainees were released the next morning and apparently leaving the cops without any leads. The 15th of August, according to the press, a 21 year old person was arrested at a traffic control in Rosengård. The cops claimed the car to be full of gasoline canisters and a hammer for breaking windows. The person was released on the 18th of August, as there were no legal grounds for incarceration but the suspicions remained. The same day the cops presented a new action to be taken in their struggle against the car burnings. For the first time in Sweden, drones would now be used by cops, primarily to hunt down the car burners. The drones will, according to the cops, guide the reinforced MC-patrols and plain clothes officers on the ground. The proposal came from and will be carried out by the NOA, the cops National Operative Unit, and the equipment will be supplied by SAAB (a company whose production for the military market most likely will find additional “civil” uses, other than just drones for hunting car burners).
The response from society
To increase our understanding of the whole situation but also to see where one can find possibilities to extend these acts of revolt towards insurrection, we want to have a closer look at the circus that society kicked off as a reaction to the unrest. It is interesting at a first glance, to see how the burning of cars continues to spread in silence, while the media, politicians, cops, experts of all sorts and active citizens compete to be the loudest and most condemning one concerning these events. In the silence the actions speak for themselves and would they be left in their silence, all you hear is the fire crackling, no more explaining would be needed. But the silence is dangerous and brooding for the ruling order. The best remedy against silence is of course to make noise, talk and distract, to take over the power of definition. In Sweden they talked about failed integration and vandalism, while in Denmark they initially talked about pyromania, i.e. the burning of cars was declared as a disease. An assumption that was soon abandoned, as the “suspected pyromaniac” was detained and the car burnings still continued to spread. The discussion then went into a direction more similar to the Swedish one, with focus on juveniles. In the first case the act (of burning a car) is isolated and said to be an act limited to poor youth with a migrant background, which makes it harder for others not fitting into these categories to identify with the actions. In the other case the act is pathologized. I.e. if you identify with these actions, you ought to consider yourself sick, a pyromaniac, which, with the power of social shame, causes a distancing in most people. The same actions, the same silence, confronted with a lot of noise from society. In Sweden these discussions have had time to develop further than in Denmark and the ruling politicians have proposed harder punishments, not just for the car burners but to hit two birds with one stone, for the whole social category of juveniles. The proposal would, when carried out, mean that on-call courts are established, that the ankle monitor is allowed to be used in younger ages and that the surveillance measures in probation convictions against juveniles would be intensified. The political opposition calls for more cops and for a return to the former, recently changed, police organization. Sociologists are warning about the negative consequences of harder punishment and propose instead to increase the presence of the cops in the streets, as this allegedly was the reason for the de-escalation in the similar situation in Sweden some ten years ago. Circling around the rotting carcass of these discussions, we find the silent vultures. They who, with their businesses, profits from the car burning and foremost from the societal circus surrounding it. The drones of SAAB has already been mentioned but we also have the insurance and security companies. In several articles in for example the Swedish Radio, the public is informed about how the “traffic insurance” is not enough on its own, to cover the cost in case of a car fire but the car must be at least “half insured” to cover the damages. One does not have to have studied at a business school to understand the economic value for the insurance companies, in such a well-meant and informative article. Especially when it is followed up by articles where spokespersons from insurance companies are reassuring that the insurance for the people living in the affected neighbourhoods will not be raised or different than in less affected neighbourhoods. In places like Ronneby, where the cops left their uniforms in the closet and are chilling somewhere else, the municipality decided to hire a security company, to instead have security guards patrolling the streets.
In connection to riots or mass actions like the ones in Örebro and Södertälje
In two Södertälje suburbs, two nights in a row, youngsters were building burning barricades and attacking buses as to lure the cops to them. When the cops arrived, they attacked them with stones and fireworks. One of the nights, a stone broke the front window of a cop car, sending a cop with a damaged eye to the hospital. In the Örebro neighbourhood, a bigger amount of masked individuals gathered and moved around in the area. Setting a laundry-facility on fire, also to lure the cops to them, and then greeting the cops with molotov cocktails, rocks, fireworks and golf sticks. Extra guard patrols from different companies are called in as foot soldiers next to the cop cavalry. Security companies that, through the last years so called “refugee crisis”, has experienced a new Klondike-era for their businesses. Companies that, enriched with experiences of beating up people of colour, gladly continues with this – the Department of Migration now substituted with the cops, for the guards to step in for, and the refugees substituted with car burners, in their role as moving targets. These vultures remain vultures, only as long as they are allowed to work undisturbed, as long as they can keep a distance between themselves and the dramatic centre of these events. Just like in an ecosystem, they fulfil an important role in the maintenance of the societal system and contribute to choke the brooding revolt. In the social peace, every break means a possibility for revolt and insurrection; the break is in itself not seldom a conscious act of rebellion, however limited to one unique individual and one unique situation. The break uncovers the conflicts that the social peace otherwise covers. What we in our everyday lives choose to swallow, in terms of submission, is spit out and all the words about us living in “the best of bad worlds,” about “that’s just how it is,” etiolates in the face of the obvious discontent with the lives we are forced to live in this society. A burned out car might not feel like the starting signal for a social revolt but at the same time that is exactly what it can be. What it can become. It can at the same time be a single individuals attack on the social peace, on the social order, as it can be a sabotage of another individuals function in the maintenance of the same. This we see as factors, independent of the fact that it goes down with intention and with a wish for revolt or if it happens out of boredom, for some cash or for a personal vendetta. The social peace, where the state claims the exclusive right of mediation and population control, does nonetheless, with or without the intention of the assailant to overthrow the society, get attacked when a car is burned. In the normality that we are all expected to reproduce, there is (still…) no space for burning cars. Even less for burnings car without a clear and graspable reason, that almost freely spreads over great distances and regions. When this spreads as it has done during the past months, it is impossible, even for the people in power, to ignore the existence of a social conflict. What they instead try to do, is to isolate the conflict to belong only to a small discontent and untamed group – with whom the majority, as already mentioned, should not have something in common. It becomes a matter for the police, for the politicians and the sociologists. The state tries to make the matter intelligible and manageable in its role as mediator. It tries to make it into a matter and a conflict between the authorities, with its loyal specialists, and a group of “badly integrated youth”. Thus not what it actually is: individuals like you and me in conflict with the life we are forced to sustain under these circumstances.
From anonymous revolt to apolitical insurrection
“This crime is very hard to investigate. We don’t see any patterns and we don’t have any suspects. We need all the help we can get,” – Malmö cop Lars Forstell. We are not only interested in the car fires that are sweeping across Sweden and Denmark because they carry the spark of rebellion, but also because they offer us another way of understanding insurrection, because their apolitical character gives us a hint about a different tactic. The car fires are an uncontrollable attack on society, because they are spread all over the territory which the state controls and are not focused on specific symbolic targets. They are simple to reproduce anywhere and any time, and it is impossible for the police to be everywhere at the same time. Political movements are fixed on the idea of gathering a movement or a certain category of the exploited in front of a symbolic aim in the belief that if enough people are gathered, power will be forced to change. In reality, these methods are easy for the state to control, because it is not so difficult to gather the repressive forces in specific places with a predetermined date. Even anarchists who actually criticize this perception of struggle continue to reproduce this logic. Why all the demonstrations to symbolic targets surrounded by heavily equipped police? Why always be a step behind the state and the police? The car burners show the way to a different form of conflict with the state. Constant, uncontrollable, flexible and destructive. Here it is the police who are lagging behind. Sure, car fires will not be enough to overthrow the existent. But they do open up, in the Scandinavian context, a new way of understanding insurrection, and gives inspiration for different tactics for our struggles. They give us a springboard that we can use in our individual revolt in the leap towards a social insurrection, and that is, one must say, more than political movements have created in Scandinavia for a very long time. Speaking of political movements, the struggle around the partly occupied house Rigaer 94 during the past half a year showed how the car fires can be used as a method, but also showed their limits, which might be interesting to shortly consider. (*3) In the struggle around Rigaer 94 it was, in our opinion, the same factor which caused the rapid and intensive diffusion, that also became the reason why the conflict was not expanded beyond concerning only anarchists and autonomists. This factor was the limiting of the struggle to the house and local area. Compared to Scandinavia, Germany is full of autonomists and anarchists, of whom many joined in on the promise made by comrades to cause 10 million euro of damage – some because they identify with Rigaer and act in solidarity, others because they are constantly looking for new events to react to, and found one in this. Which leads us once again to have a conflict between a small group of easily categorized individuals (anarchists and autonomists) and the state, with the rest of society as spectators and commentators. The conflict thus came to circle around a symbolic target, which gave the state at least a hint about where to send its repressive forces, and made it easier to handle and predict. Most other people who could have an interest in burning cars or otherwise revolt against society, do not have an obvious point of reference in Rigaer, or in the subculture in which it is based. Presumably even less when people start saying that they are political, or that burning cars is a political act. As long as the point of departure is something which only a few can refer to, then it remains a duel between these few and the state.
This escalation which have taken place in Sweden and Denmark will probably die out as repression hardens and advances. It will probably reignite in a couple of months, or in a year? And then die out again. Provided that we do not attempt to expand and strengthen it with our own acts, ideas of and longing for freedom. It is neither guaranteed to succeed nor doomed to fail. Only one thing is certain, and that is that as long as we remain passive spectators or commentators, we are guaranteed the existence which we so intensely despise. If we have criticisms towards how some have acted during this escalation of car fires, then let us act in accordance with our ideas, and in that way show what we propose and what it means in practice. Especially if we wish something else from other rebels. A car belonging to a proletarian was burned and it disturbed you? What keeps you from going at a SAAB office, security cars or insurance company? If you think that one cop car was too little, see to it that more will go up in flames. It is not through passive nagging that our ideas can spread and their consequences be multiplied, but through action and consistent honesty towards ourselves. If we want to realize our ideas and dreams, then we have to take them and ourselves serious. By questioning traditions of struggle which have not moved us closer to our dreams, but rather to society. By searching for inspiration wherever we see revolt, and not just where we see people following political manuals. If we share ideas, it means a constant hostility towards this society. It means exposing oneself to uncomfortable social situations. It means risks. Such as the risk of losing the privileges granted to you by the order you claim to despise. It means embracing and being embraced by the unknown and all the fears that come with it. It means trusting yourself and your ability to meet that which awaits beyond the break with normality. What is it exactly that have kept you from burning a car or from building barricades in the streets and attacking the cops when they arrive? Whatever your answer may be, it is not a obstacle for you to find your own way to act in this conflict.
Into the Unknown
We want freedom, and the way we see it this is incompatible with this society, well, with every society that deprives the individual of its power and self-determination. Thus is the destruction of this society, with its inherent authoritarian mechanisms, essential for us to be able to usurp what we want. As our point of departure is the everlasting now – neither deadlocked in a Marxist determinism nor consumed by a capitalist future investment of our energy and our dreams – and we want to live in anarchy now, not tomorrow or in a year, but now, our ends are closely interwoven with our actions. In other words: in anarchy we do not want to negotiate with authorities of all kinds, but attack them and in the worst case defend ourselves against them. So why would we negotiate with them now? In anarchy we do not want to organize ourselves in masses and pursue politics. So why would we do this now? Especially since history taught us that this serves the survival of society rather than the struggling individuals… We want to see the revolt spread without leaders and stagnating aims. We want to spread our revolts and see them become an insurrection together with other individuals athirst for freedom. To, at all, be able to get there, an expansion of the conflict that lies before us is clearly needed. So, how can a conscious expansion of this conflict take shape? Our goal is not to be able to count as many members as possible, in some sort of organization or movement, neither is it to put forth some demands for change or to be “strong enough” to be able to negotiate with or about the power. Our goals are, as has already been stated, as easy as they are hard to realize – freedom through revolt against those who deprive us of it. Thus can neither success nor expansion be measured in the number of participants in an uprising or if “normal people” sympathize with us or not, but in the quality of our own experiences, how our lives changes and where they take us. If a million people takes to the streets but in essence are only seeking a new leadership, a new shepherd, this is in every way a defeat. But if I in the right moment attack the right object, publish the right text – where right is a relative term, which can be underpinned by clear analyses of situations – or I enter new comradeships or meet new accomplices, and thereby new possibilities open up for me and others to prolong, deepen, strengthen and enlarge the extent of the personal and the shared revolt, then I can talk about a success – with myself and my surroundings as a benchmark. So, in this case the most obvious way to enter into the conflict, is first and foremost to take to the streets ourselves. For who are we to talk about all this, without having our own practical complicity? But to broaden the space for us, for our ideas and revolts, we should also identify the most active counterinsurgents and profiteers of this situation, as well as transforming them into obvious targets. The cops are already obvious in their role but not SAAB who supply them with drones and other equipment, neither are the insurance companies, the security companies and the politicians, using the situation to strengthen their power. Depending on the area in which you live, you for sure have your local authoritarian structures to identify and fight, whether it be a group of salafists, a racist hunting team, a neighbourhood watch or democracy loving social workers. It can be worth keeping them in mind, before running into them in the heat of the moment. All of the mentioned companies have nationwide offices in every bigger urban area and do have, just like the politicians, “names and addresses”. To point these out, to attack and to, with our own words, explain why this happens, is also to point out the structures of society and their relation to our existence in submission. Which could contribute to a more libertarian character of the revolt. More or less every enemy you can imagine in this society has a car. Nazis, politicians, CEO’s, cops, judges, screws and so on. Not everyone but most have cars and as we already have said: if someone’s choice of a car to burn has disturbed you, it is not hard to reproduce this act of revolt, but with an outcome that enriches your life.
This is all just scratching the surface, a hint of the possibilities that obviously has been neglected by comrades. Nevertheless, it is here we see the possibility for ourselves and those we consider to share our ideas with, to act and to expand this conflict. We have written this text to call for, that the revolt and the own ability to act is taken seriously. The insurrection and the social landscape is filled with contradictions and there are no simple recipes to fight a successful struggle against the world of authorities; we just simply have to try. But the first step must be to realize that there are already rebels that have set the torch of revolt ablaze, that have created a social tension where we can find thousands of ways to act if we want to. Not as followers or leaders that are to show the way to the real anarchist insurrection, but as accomplices in the destruction of the existent, with our own ideas, aims and actions. In this leap into the unknown, we have no guarantees for defeat or success, but we do at least have the possibility of that, which today is impossible: a world without authorities and rulers… so let the fire spread.
“We will destroy laughing, we will set fires laughing…”
Some insurrectionaries
Notes: (*1): Text, A few notes on media and repression, published on solidariteit.noblogs.org, on the 23rd of August 2016
(*2):https://sverigesradio.se/sida/avsnitt/786141?programid=2795 (Media was in this specific radio show criticized for having created a false picture and that the sprawl of car burn-ings should have been exaggerated and even somehow fuelled by media reports. This critique is just like the actual media reports based on statistics and full of contradictions.)
(*3): In order to not lose focus, we leave a deeper analysis for another moment, but there is plenty of information on e.g. contrainfo.espiv.net for anyone on wants to dig in.
At this very moment, on Wednesday Feb 17, 2021, a pastor is in jail for holding worship services. This is a milestone in Canada’s slide into authoritarianism. Canada is now jailing dissidents. Christians are now a persecuted religious minority. So are Jews. Multiple gatherings of orthodox Jews have been broken up by police in Montreal over the last month. Not only is a clear example of oppression against a historically oppressed group, it is always telling about the times that we are living in. I don’t think that most people realize what this means. It means that we don’t have rights anymore.
Religious freedom is very clearly featured in the Charter of Rights and Freedom, which is supposedly the highest law in the land. Yet, at this very moment, a Christian pastor is sitting in jail because he continued to hold worship services when the state ordered him to stop. If this doesn’t concern you, it should. If Christians don’t have the right to assemble, it means neither do you. It means you don’t have a right to go to pow wows, or punk shows, or wherever it is that you find your community. If you are not free to do what you want to do if you had the choice, it means that you are not free. And, clearly, Canada is not a free country.
The state has now made it clear that it means business. Civil disobedience, even when very clearly protected by constitutional rights, will not be tolerated. What happens next depends on how people react to this. Will people realize that our rights are being trampled upon and stand up against this injustice, or are have people been too lulled into complacency to care?
If you have a heart in your chest that beats, and lungs that breathe and blood that pulses through you, you should realize now that you’ve got do something to stand up to this insanity. The existence of a virus does not justify prohibiting basic human activities like coming together to sing, to pray, and to affirm and cultivate community bonds. Whether or not you’re a Christian, whether or not you like Christians, it should consider you deeply when people are being prevented from practicing their religion. Need I even draw the parallels to the persecution of religious minorities in every totalitarian regime?
If you are not sympathetic to Christians for political reasons, please consider the following: this past Summer there was a Sun Dance which the police tried to break up. The Sun Dance Chief refused to back down, and the police left. Then Trudeau specifically said that indigenous ceremonies would be allowed to continue. Of course, indigenous ceremonies were outlawed for much of Canada’s history as part of a deliberate campaign of cultural genocide. That is a line that should not be crossed. To do so would to make absolutely clear that the Canadian colonial project is still genocidal. If the state is jailing Christians, historically privileged in Canada, from gathering, are we to trust they won’t also jail indigenous ceremonial leaders for refusing to cancel ceremonies?
If this is happening to Christians, it can happen to other religious groups as well. Would the injustice be more obvious if it was happening to people of colour instead of white people? Well, it may not be long before it that occurs, because there are certainly devoutly religious people of colour who feel very strongly that they have the right to worship, and will continue to hold services.
We as anarchists must stand against the forceful imposition of a police state upon us. True, anarchists have often been at odds with Christians, but there is also a strong tradition of Christian anarchists, such as Leo Tolstoy, Jacques Ellul, Dorothy Day and Ammon Hennessy.
I think that we would also do well to remember the words of Amon Hennessey said: You’re born free. Then you wait for someone to take that freedom away from you. The degree to which you resist are the degree to which you are free.
It is time for us to prove exactly how free we are. We must resist, we must raise our spirits up out of this damned lethargy and express our solidarity with our fellow people. Just think; what if the shoe were on the other foot, and it was anarchists who were being jailed for their organizing activities?
One thing that the system seems to have done really well is divide people into Left and Right, terms that no longer possess the descriptive power they once did. If most liberals are now for universal restriction of movement, then the term liberal has come to mean the exact opposite of its original meaning, and the word is useless. The new political divide is really between people who are pro-totalitarianism, and people that are contra. If this is the divide, then anarchists are on the same side as the Christians and Jews who are asserting their right to gather. If we are looking to build a revolutionary movement across cultural lines, it will involve respect for the spiritual beliefs and practices of other peoples. If we want a powerful movement to emerge, we must practice solidarity with other people.
So far, most Leftists have remained silent on the matter of religious freedom. Across the country, churches have been fighting for their rights to hold worship services. Yet anarchists have remained silent on this issue. Are people not able to see this injustice?
It is important that the Left see this as what it is. It is a fundamental human right violation to jail people just for practicing their religion. I worry that many Leftists have ceased to believe in the universal principles that classical liberalism is based upon, but to those true liberals, you cannot stay true to your beliefs and tolerate this. This is persecution. Please understand that Christians deserve the same freedom to practice their cultural practices that Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, and everyone else does. The pandemic is no excuse for this, and we must make a stand for what we believe in, if we are to say that we believe in basic human rights. And may we never have to lament a variation on the following:
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out — Because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out — Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out — Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
Comments Off on Our Dignity in Quarantine: Greek Anarchists Against Lock-Down
Feb192021
Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info
(This piece is from April 22. I submit it because I think that it is some of the compelling anarchist writing that I have found that captures the feeling of the great confusion of 2020. I think that this piece has tremendous literary value and I would love to see it translated into French.)
This flyer was distributed in different neighborhoods of Athens. Published April 22 on actforfree.nostate.org
It all happened without anyone really realizing it. And now we find ourselves locked up in our houses, waiting for next day’s news which we all know will contain more and more restrictions. Society is in crisis, they say, because of a virus spreading. The government is pressing that it is of most importance that we all do exactly what it says, and that by this we take our responsibility and act in solidarity. It stresses that the state of emergency is of course temporary, but necessary to win the war against what is seriously threatening our well being.But wait a minute…
Which virus? Actually, we cannot know. All the information, numbers and statistics that are at the base of the imposed confinement are in the hands of the government and the specialists that work for them. It is not a matter of denying the actual existence of a virus going around, but to realize that the knowledge of its characteristics, how it spreads, how it can be tackled, but also the data concerning its impact, is in the hands of scientists around the globe, which often don’t agree even among themselves about how to interpret them or which practical conclusions they would entail. The conclusion of the authorities on the other hand is simple; they know, we don’t. And because of this we owe them complete obedience. The mass media is playing its classic role of servant of the system magnificently. Deciding what exists by only showing and endlessly repeating the story by the authorities, not giving a millimeter of space to deviant voices of any kind. Their job consists of fully preparing the grounds for the next even more totalitarian decisions.And isn’t a virus the perfect enemy? Invisible and possibly everywhere, with everyone not complying to whatever rule is invented becoming an accomplice of that enemy. Justified to be oppressed with fines and prison sentences. A perfect context is created in which the state can shine as the ultimate savior.
Which responsibility?
And so we cannot open a newspaper or put on television without being told we should ‘take our responsibility’. But what does this mean then?They are asking us to blindly follow the orders of some politicians. But aren’t they the same bureaucrats we were distrusting before? Didn’t they prove so many times to be greedy and corrupt because they are driven much more by personal interest than by care for others? Didn’t it show again and again that their hunger for power is bigger than any sense of justice or reason? And now again, maybe the thousands of euros making sure helicopters are in the air controlling if we are staying in our houses could better be used in mmm… health care for example? These are the kind of people that are asking us to trust them, no questions asked, and call it ‘taking our responsibility’. Would we not be doing the opposite then? What we are really asked to do is to give up any conscience, critical thought, and autonomy, to welcome extreme government control in every aspect of our lives.
Our dIgnIty In quarantIne?
The misleading spectacle continues. We should obey the extreme measures being taken out of a sense of ‘solidarity’. Isn’t it cynical to hear these words from the mouths of the representatives of a system that is based on the exact opposite of solidarity? The whole year through we should run around like chicken without heads to keep up with the constant game of competition, to be exploited, to be hunted by cops for whatever reason they feel like that day, and be robbed by statesmen which made their profession out of it, and now they come to us and dare to speak about solidarity?
They dare to act as if they care about our well-being? What about the millions of people living in poverty so people like those in the government can be rich? What about all the people dying at their crappy jobs feeding the relentless economical machine? What about those being tortured in the police stations by the uniformed executioners of the state? What about the thousands of migrants dying at the borders every year? Where is the government with its big speeches about solidarity then?
While they are trying to feed us their hypocrite tales about solidarity in reality we see that the lockdown is locking loads of people up in unbearable circumstances. Children in their homes under the uninterrupted rule of violent parents for example. Or partners, husbands and wives stuck in abusive relationships. Thousands of migrants being trapped in camps, in even worse conditions than usual. In prisons all visits stopped, as did all access of prisoners to material, food and clothes coming from the outside. Empty spaces in prisons are being used to isolate prisoners with symptoms of the corona-virus, these spaces being empty in most cases because they are in not fit to host prisoners.
One can only imagine the effect this will have on the health of the prisoners being dumped there… In the prisons in Italy massive revolts broke out after general restrictions on all levels were introduced. Probably the only way for the prisoners to save their dignity seeing the conditions they are forced in. Also in Spain and France prisoners are standing up and fighting back, as other prisoners around the world.The state doesn’t know what solidarity means and has never been concerned about our well-being. As always, it will be up to us to take care of each other, and make sure that those that need it get support. When the government uses the word solidarity, it is only to give a feeling of guilt to those who don’t obey their orders, and to push people to internalize its authority.
Which crisis?
So they tell us we are in crisis. Maybe somebody can tell us when the moment comes that we are not in crisis? From the financial crisis to the climate crisis, through the migrant crisis to the corona crisis. It seems the system has a lot of different names for what always turn out to be periods which are used to restructure its power, to enlarge and intensify its oppression. In this case, especially in this case, it will not be different. The idea of a condition of crisis has always been used to contextualize a further totalitarian evolution of power. The rhythm on which this evolution is forced is not always the same of course. The bigger and more urgent they can make the crisis look like, the bigger and faster the change can be. It goes without saying that the current ‘crisis’ is giving the government (all the governments) the perfect context in which to take giant steps in the development of their mechanisms of control and oppression.
Which exceptional state of emergency?
It is always repeated that whatever steps that are taken are ‘temporary’, but this is a lie. Many occasions in the past showed us that at least a part of the measures from ‘states of emergency’ were kept afterward and were embedded in laws never to be taken back. From big examples like 9/11 that changed forever the abilities of states to track, trace and record everyone, to more recent times in which terrorist attacks were used as a pretext to introduce many new ways to bring to court whoever disagrees with the state, to get the army (in a lot of places permanently) on the streets, to boost the general collection of data etc. And here, didn’t the new government launch a general state of emergency in the capital aimed at the total repression of the unwanted (homeless, anarchists, drug users, squatters etc.) since last year? We all know they are working non-stop on creating an image of ‘crisis’ (in this case some kind of ‘security crisis’) to justify its absolute thirst for power, implying that its fascist behavior and totalitarian policies would be of ‘necessary but temporary’ nature… And now, what is massively happening? People turn toward the internet for their needs, for all their needs.From communicating to consuming, from working to relaxing. In the blink of an eye a big part of life has deliberately been transferred to cyberspace. By this it becomes even more easy for the state to follow, register and surveil the daily activity of whoever. But especially, it is our own will and creativity to ‘solve’ a lot of the problems being caused by our mass imprisonment, that help normalizing it and finally push its acceptance. The managing of the current situation will bring forth an unimaginable set of experiences, tools and know-how that can and will continue to be used whenever estimated necessary by those in power.
Which war?
But all objections or criticisms are undesirable or even dangerous, because after all ‘we are at war’. At war against a biological event, against nature actually. Isn’t this indicative for these modern times? We forget more and more how to live with or in nature, but multiply and intensify our wars against it. Our whole way of living is built on the exploitation of nature and, if this reality is not overthrown soon, its total destruction. Maybe it is the western arrogance culturally believing we are above all things, and so always extending our ways to control them. Always looking at nature in terms of its practical value to ‘civilized’ society. And when we are confronted with something that causes discomfort everything will be put in place to tame it, to manipulate or eradicate it. So a constant war is being waged, against nature, against life and against death. It became an unimaginable thought that we would not own nature but be a part of it, and by this can be subjected to some of its conditions…Of course nobody wants to die, or see its loved ones die or suffer. We want to live! But is merely surviving at a certain point the same as living? Is it possible to live in a cage, or can we at best survive in one? Are we ready to take away all risk of living to have a better chance of survival? One could say these are philosophical questions, good to pass the time but nothing to do with real life. Well, at this very moment all life is being taken away from us because we are told that this is the only way to survive. Every day in isolation is an attack on our autonomy, on our ability to think and act for ourselves, to live, love and fight.
The quarantine has to be refused, because our dignity cannot survive in it!
The lockdown has to be broken, because our desire for freedom will not!
For obvious reasons we’ve been paying attention to the tiny neo-Nazi/NSBM milieu for quite a while,[i] if only because it is close to the RAC (Rock Against Communism) scene, the band Légitime Violence, and the Québec Stompersbonehead gang, the incubator for the neo-fascist groupuscule Atalante. Our previous articles about Atalante and its sympathizers have clearly established the roots of Atalante’s key militants and their entourage in the “white power” and neo-Nazi subculture in the Québec City region, the pitiful denials of the key parties notwithstanding; they, of course, prefer to present themselves as “revolutionary nationalists” or sanitized fascists of the allegedly more presentable Italian variety.
While the Canadian Anti-Hate Network article served to shed some light on the key role of Steve Labrecque in this tiny milieu, it overlooked other key people who have been responsible for the distribution of Nazi clothing and accessories in far-right subcultural circles in Québec for many years now. It also passed too quickly over Misanthropic Division, an important network whose “Vinland” section[ii] is closely tied to the La Barricade label and acts as a link between this little band of local neo-Nazis and the Ukrainian Azov Battalion, which is broadly understood to be a key element in the militant and military vanguard of the international neo-Nazi movement.
This article, which was already in the works when the Canadian Anti-Hate Network published theirs, could be thought of as a “another step” beyond what they have written, which we do encourage you to read.
Warning: this article reproduces posts from social media accounts that are explicitly racist, antisemitic, and homophobic and celebrate Adolf Hitler, the Nazi regime, and the Holocaust.
///
As the Canadian Anti-Hate Network article indicates, Steve Labrecque (alias “Chtev,” a member or former member of the black metal bands Hollentur, Neurasthene, and Holocauste) seems to be the most recent addition to the group Légitime Violence, joining his friend and colleague Félix Latraverse (alias “Fix”; Neurasthene and Hollentur), alongside Raphaël Lévesque and Benjamin Bastien (Québec Stompers, Atalante), and the band’s new drummer, William Tanguay-Leblanc (about whom our comrades in Québec Antifasciste posted in November 2019).
Légitime Violence, 2020: (left to right) William Tanguay-Leblanc, Steve Labrecque, Raphaël Lévesque, Félix Latraverse, Benjamin Bastien
The direct link between La Barricade, Labrecque, and Légitime Violence is confirmed by, among other things, the release of a “tenth anniversary” Légitime Violence cassette in 2019.
Légitime Violence tenth anniversary cassette, distributed by La Barricade in 2019.
A quick look at the La Barricade[v]Instagram[iii] and Facebook[iv] accounts reveals that Hollentur[vi], Steve Labrecque’s[vii] main project, is the label’s flagship band, which suggests a hypothesis we share with the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, that Labreque is the label’s main manager. Research at the registraire des entreprises indicates that in 2013 Steve Labrecque, now residing in the Beauport borough in Québec City, registered a “commercial printing” company that remains active today.
Logo of the La Barricade label on the Encyclopaedia Metallum website: NSBM, propaganda.
Profile of the La Barricade label on the Encyclopaedia Metallum website.
Profile of the band Hollentur on the Encyclopaedia Metallum website.
Steve Labrecque, alias “Chtev”; Félix Latraverse, alias “Fix”
Steve Labrecque in the La Barricade studio.
Félix Latraverse’s band Neurasthene is distributed by La Barricade.
A t-shirt designed and distributed by La Barricade: “NSBM Against Antifa—Misanthropic Division Vinland—La Barricade—Label & Tradition”
Kevin Cloutier (left) and Steve Labrecque (right): note the “1488” tattoo on the latter’s knuckles.
La Barricade, apparently under Steve Labrecque’s tutelage, also operates a basement studio in the Québec City region, where, among other decorative touches, we find the Misanthropic Division flag bearing the slogan “Töten für Wotan” (Kill for Odin).
The Misanthropic Division is a world-wide neo-Nazi network, which in 2014 emerged in Ukraine, some of whose members fought as mercenaries against pro-Russian separatists in the war in Donbass. The Misanthropic division is closely linked to the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, now part of Ukraine’s National Guard. It fights for the independence of Ukraine—both from Russia and the European Union—with the goal of establishing a Nazi state.
Amnesty International accuses them of serious human rights violations. The division maintains networks in Europe, USA, Canada, South America and Australia, which are also used to train and recruit fighters. (our italics)
Its members are considered racist and prone to violence. Among other things, they glorify National Socialism and the Waffen-SS. The Misanthropic Division is using a logo that is inspired by the Totenkopf(death’s head) symbol that was one of the most readily recognized symbols of the Nazi Schutzstaffel (SS).
. . .
According to research by Belltower News, the Misanthropic Division recruits members from the international national-socialist-black metal (NSBM) scene. Liaison persons are the neo-Nazi Hendrik Möbus, convicted of murder, Alexei Levkin, singer of the band M8l8th and organizer of the NSBM festival Åsgårdsrei, and Famine, singer of the French black metal band Peste Noire. There are further connections to the Identitarian Movement and to the extreme right-wing party Der III. Weg.
Reading this article makes clear that the local partisans of the NSBM scene connected to the La Barricade label, who circulate around Légitime Violence and Atalante, of which Steve Labrecque is a key figure, are connected by the Misanthropic Division to an international neo-Nazi network and to the Azov Battalion, a white supremacist paramilitary formation that recruits members from everywhere in the Western world, with the goal of establishing a Nazi state.
Note that “Vinland,” historically related to Newfoundland, where the Vikings landed in the eleventh century, is a term applied by Odinists and others who fetishize Viking culture to North America, or, at least, to the northeast section of Canada and the US, and, as such, to the territory of Québec.
Phil David, alias « Affreux Crapaud »
Another individual close to the La Barricade project, who the Canadian Anti-Hate Network does not mention in its article, is Philippe David , alias “Affreux Crapaud,” “Block_Onze” on Instagram, and “Phil Block Onze” on Twitter, one of the most uninhibited neo-Nazis of the entire Québec fachosphere! For a start, the pseudonym “Block Onze” is a direct reference to the building at the Auschwitz concentration camp where the Nazis tortured and shot thousands of detainees during World War II.
Steve Labrecque (left) and Phil David.
Phil David wearing an Azov Battalion t-shirt.
It is difficult to determine with any certainty exactly what role Philippe David plays as the La Barricade label or in the maintenance of the Misanthropic Division Vinland project[viii], but his Twitter[ix] and Instagram accounts make it clear that he has been a fervent promoter of the project since 2015, and that he has actively encouraged people to buy the crap distributed by Misanthropic Division and La Barricade, and did so until at least 2019.
Phil David représente Misanthropic Division Vinland.
Phil David promoting merchandise distributed by La Barricade and Misanthropic Division Vinland on his personal Twitter account.
Phil David promoting the Hollentur record distributed by La Barricade on his personal Instagram account.
Phil David’s social network includes a fair number of known members of Québec’s neo-Nazi circles, going all the way back to the bonehead gangs the Ste-Foy Krew (Québec City; an outgrowth of the Fédération des Québécois de souche) and Strike Force (Montréal), active in the early 2000s.
Pool party on Phil David’s Instagram: (left to right) Pascal Giroux, Sébastien Moreau, Steve Labrecque, Mikaël Delauney, and Ian Alarie.
We can also see Steve Labrecque (kneeling in the back), Sébastien Moreau (centre), Ian Alarie (bottom right), Pascal Giroux (crouching on the left), and Mikaël Delauney (in the black t-shirt).
Alarie (right), Phil David (centre, wearing a Misanthropic Division t-shirt), and Étienne Chartrand (second from the left; a former member of Strike Force, the Fraction Nationaliste, and the Ste-Foy Krew).
Ian Alarie (left) and Phil David (right).
Who’s the biggest Nazi?
Ian Alarie wearing a Misanthropic Division Vinland/La Barricade t-shirt, on May 12, 2018.
Pascal Giroux wearing a Misanthropic Division Vinland/La Barricade t-shirt.
Mikaël Delauney was the subject of an article in Vice, in 2018, based on his close relationship with Atalante and his role in a company specializing in “historical re-enactments” for young audiences. There is certainly room for concern about the kind of history that neo-Nazis would favour re-enacting.
Mikaël Delauney is running out of fingers he can use to show off his favourite Nazi symbols.
Mikaël Delauney training with Atalante militants (Photo: Vice)
Fred Pelletier, an extremely hotheaded individual who also never bothers to hide his neo-Nazi sympathies, is another close friend of Phil David.
Fred Pelletier with Phil David
Fred Pelletier proudly sporting a Blood & Honour t-shirt. Blood & Honour is a neo-Nazi organization listed as a terrorist organization under the Canadian Criminal Code.
Fred Pelletier wearing a Misanthropic Division t-shirt.
And here’s Phil David with Francis Hamelin, another regular around the neo-Nazi scene since the early 2000s.
Francis Hamelin and Phil David
Francis Hamelin poses in front of a rag.
A special shout-out to Sarah Miller, who recently became Jonathan Payeur of Atalante’s fiancée.
Phil David and Sarah Miller
One day, Sarah Miller had the bright idea of tattooing “1488” across her chest in three-inch letters.
Congratulations to the lovebirds.
Jonathan Payeur with Gabriel Marcon Drapeau and Fred Pelletier.
Gabriel Marcon Drapeau and “Vinland Striker” Distribution
Finally, let’s take a look at Gabriel Marcon Drapeau’s role, which is touched upon in the Canadian Anti-Hate Network article. This guy, who Fascist Finder comically portrays as a rabid dog, seems to have updated his Linkedin account, which until very recently indicated his employer to be the “the Barricade NSBM label.”
Gabriel Marcon Drapeau poses for his Facebook profile photo in front of a Misanthropic Division Vinland flag.
Gabriel Marcon Drapeau—Label NSBM-La Barricade (still available in the Google cache).
Gabriel Marcon Drapeau’s Linkedin page before a very recent update.
Gabriel Marcon Drapeau
Marcon Drapeau’s current Linkedin page indicates that he is now working for “Vinland Striker,” where he continues his career in sales of clothing and accessories of a Nazi character, including flags bearing the image of Adolf Hitler. See below a sample of the merchandise he promotes on his personal Facebook page and on the distributor website[x]. We have no idea why Marcon Drapeau no longer operates his distribution under the Misanthropic Division Vinland/La Barricade banner, but it seems that he has maintained his privileged relationship with the French distributor of neo-Nazi clothing 2YT4U.
November 27, 2020: Gabriel Marcon Drapeau starts working for Vinland Striker.
Gabriel Marcon Drapeau’s recently updated Linkedin account.
A sample of the Nazi trinkets and paraphernalia sold by Gabriel Marcon Drapeau under the “Vinland Striker” banner.
Note in passing the curious fact that Atalante militants and sympathizers tend to wear the t-shirts Marcon Drapeau distributes.
Montréal-based Atalante militant “Jean Brunaldo” wearing a KKK-inspired t-shirt distributed by Gabriel Marcon Drapeau.
Atalante sympathizers Heïdy Prévost and Vivianne St-Amant wearing an ecofascist t-shirt distributed by Gabriel Marcon Drapeau.
Atalante militant Jonathan Payeur wearing a t-shirt distributed by Gabriel Marcon Drapeau.
Atalante militant Sarah Miller wearing an ecofascist-inspired t-shirt distributed by Gabriel Marcon Drapeau.
Well then… Jonathan Payeur sports ANOTHER ridiculous t-shirt distributed by Gabriel Marcon Drapeau. You certainly would be well advised to remain hidden
Vigilance Remains the Watchword
Nothing indicates that the Misanthropic Division Vinland project that is connected to the NSBM label La Barricade is anything more than a group of neo-Nazi buddies in the grip of romantic adventurism, but there is also nothing to indicate that this project couldn’t serve as a recruiting centre for the international neo-Nazi network or a fundraising operation for the Azov Battalion. It is evident that at a minimum these neo-Nazi music and merchandise distribution projects play a substantial role in the micro-economy of the tiny neo-Nazi milieu in Québec and in increasing the reach of this revolting subculture.
We also can’t ignore the role these projects can play in turning young fans of black metal who are susceptible to the pull of Nazi alarmism into fanatics, with the programme always completely focussed on the extermination of millions of people who fail to meet the sickening bar these losers have set as their ideal of Aryan purity.
These detestable racists will live among us, be part of our society’s collective spaces, and continue their tawdry little activities with impunity as long as we continue to allow them to do so without raising any real resistance. It falls to our communities to flush them out and neutralize their toxicity.
As with any invasive and dangerous species, to uproot it you first have to recognize it.
///
If you have any information you’d like to share about the La Barricade label, the Misanthropic Division, or any of the individuals mentioned in this article, please write us at alerta-mtl@riseup.net.
[i] It is important that we acknowledge the work done before we existed by Anti-Racist Action Montréal, the webzine Dure Réalité, and Québec Facho-Watch.
[ii] Note that “Vinland,” historically related to Newfoundland, where the Vikings landed in the eleventh century, is a term applied by Odinists and others who fetishize Viking culture to North America, or, at least, to the northeast section of Canada and the US, and, as such, to the territory of Québec.
It was winter 2020 and in the aftermath of the most inspiring anti-colonial uprising of my lifetime, I read Rattachements[1] (Re-attachments in English) and Inhabit[2]. The trains had started up again across the country, and COVID-19 was starting to reorder our lives mere weeks after we had been doing our small part to help shut down Canada. In and around Tio’tia:ke (Montreal) where I live, there were many Indigenous-led initiatives, including solidarity rounddances that blocked traffic downtown, and of course the month-long blockade of the railway tracks that run through Kahnawá:ke. On and around the island, the engagement of settlers in #ShutDownCanada took a number of forms including clandestine sabotage of rail infrastructure, demos and vandalism of RCMP property, and multiple rail blockades, one of which lasted a few days.
Coming down off of these events, it was especially jarring to read the proposals in Inhabit and Rattachements. Both texts are representations of political thought coming out of communities in the US and Quebec that are heavily influenced by the writings of the Invisible Committee in France and European Autonomist movements. This political tendency is sometimes labelled tiqqunist, appelist, or autonomist. It is a political orientation that has a significant amount of sway among a segment of those who were engaged in the settler-initiated[3] portions of the organizing in Montreal last winter, and these two texts seem to be important reference points for these people. Unfortunately, the onset of COVID-19 stifled what could have been an opportunity for deeper analysis of some of the political differences between those of us who organized together that winter. I would like to clarify my disagreement with the anti-colonial strategy, or lack thereof, put forth by Inhabit and Rattachements. I hope that in future broad coalitional moments of solidarity like last winter, we might be able to better understand where our potential for collaboration could break down. I also hope that critical engagement with the analysis proposed by these texts will limit the extent to which it influences the contours of settler-initiated anti-colonial solidarity in years to come.
Rattachements
Taking issue with dominant currents of environmentalist action (on the one hand activists who ask the government to take action to save the environment, and on the other individuals changing their consumption practices to do the same) the writers of Rattachements propose a new approach to dealing with the ecological crisis and colonial capitalism. This new approach is one of building an “ecology of presence” through the construction of communes[4]. The writers see the project of reconnecting to that which “has been torn from them” as both material and spiritual. They wish to truly inhabit land from which to attack the machinery of capitalism while also building new forms of life there. Foundational to their understanding of the problem is an assertion that they did not choose to be thrown into a world bent on its own destruction, a world structured by colonial capitalism[5], wherein their “affects are captured” and their connection to the land has been severed.
The writers forward that “[d]efending the land necessarily means learning to inhabit it, truly inhabiting it necessitates defending it.” In doing so they assert that their reconnection to the land is a precursor and integral part of anti-colonial struggle. An “ecology of presence,” they write, can be found in the connections between Indigenous peoples and their territories, including the Zapatistas’ resistance against the Mexican government and the material and territorial autonomy of the Kanienʼkehá꞉ka. However, the writers are rejecting an analysis of social position from jump. They appear to not think that the position of subjects within systems of domination is relevant to their analysis or strategies of resistance to those systems. But the writers are nonetheless settlers speaking to (mostly) other settlers. The abstraction they employ is thus dangerous, as they go on to say that “it is when communities affirm that they themselves are part of the territory, of this forest, of this river, of this piece of the neighbourhood, and that they are ready to fight, that the political possibility of ecology appears clearly”. This statement can easily be seen as a call for settlers to understand themselves as belonging to the land in order to defend it, or at the very least, on a level playing field with Indigenous people when it comes to assertions of what the future of land in this place should resemble. Whether or not this is the intention, this opens the door to settler self-indigenization being understood as a decolonial strategy. In a settler colonial society like Quebec or Canada, the state exists in large part to secure settler access to land, and Indigenous people are always threats to that access. This is both the history and present of all settler societies. We need not look far to find examples where settlers relating to the land in a way that resembles Rattachements’ “ecology of presence” has already been put into practice effectively against Indigenous people.
Take, for example, the story of the white hunters in Mi’kma’ki (the Chic Choc Mountains in Gaspésie, specifically) who in 2004 had already grown frustrated about the incursion of logging in the area and who, having hunted on the land for quite some time and feeling rather connected to (even “of”) the territory, were faced with a new threat: the establishment of a “Mi’kmaq-controlled area which would offer outdoor activities for a fee” (a “pourvoirie”). This new project threatened their ability to hunt for free. In response to this, while meeting in a “communal tent” on the territory, the white hunters concocted a plan to identify as Indigenous in order to help add legitimacy to their claims of connection to the land. They founded an organization which would come to be named the Metis Nation of the Rising Sun, and successfully prevented the establishment of the pourvoirie. This story is not an outlier in our area, rather merely one example of a widespread phenomenon wherein settlers, feeling very attached to the land they are living on (and maybe even having some communal inclinations) feel moved to defend their control of it from threats that include Indigenous people who have their own pre-existing claims and relations to the same land. Often, this involves claiming an Indigenous identity, but it need not necessarily. What continues to be crucial for the advancement of settlement is the ongoing procurement of land by settlers and the entrenchment of the idea that this is our land, whether the possession is property based (I have the deed and so this is mine) or spiritual (I know the land, I feel connected to the land, and so I belong here).
Looking to other settler colonial contexts, we can see more examples of the risks of communal settlement undertaken with radical political aims. The Kibbutz movement in Palestine, for example, is a story of self-organized communes set up from the early 1900s onward, beginning with the second wave of Jewish settlers fleeing pogroms from Eastern Europe. The settlers of the first Kibbutz had anarchist ideals of egalitarianism, rejected the “exploitative socio-economic structure[6]” of the farms established by the first wave of settlement, and hoped to undermine the developing capitalist economy with their communes. They sought to establish “a cooperative community without exploiters or exploited[7]“, and did so in 1910 after gaining access to land “which had recently been bought by the Palestine Land Development Company from the Jewish National Fund.[8]” This first farm was such a success that “before long, kvutzot were being set up wherever land could be bought.[9]” These communes, while viewing themselves as a viable alternative and considerable threat to the capitalist mode of production, were also serving the Zionist settlement of Palestine. Today they are commonly understood as an important part of Israel’s national story, and approximately 270 settlements still exist (despite their internal organization and anarchist character having shifted significantly) in occupied territory. It is clear that while the anarchist and anti-capitalist ideals of such projects may be inspiring, the settler colonial context calls for attention to the impacts of settlement on Indigenous peoples, not merely the ideals or internal politics of communes[10].
Land Back vs. Back to the land
Rattachements emerges from and endorses an understanding that settlers too have been dispossessed – of connection to land, of spirituality and knowledge. It leans hard on this claim to try to get other settlers to feel moved to action. The zine, written within and circulating among social circles dominated by white settlers with varying radical politics, posits that a solution to the ecological crisis lies in these (again, primarily settler) milieus’ ability to create communes. These communes will then be able to establish material and political autonomy by rendering spaces (land, wastelands, buildings, churches, houses and parks) “liveable”[11]. In other words, they propose to settle and squat, communally, the land, whether it has already been built on by other settlers or not, asserting that this is a strategic necessity rather than merely a lifestyle choice.
I too believe that capitalism is a system which alienates us from each other and the living beings we depend upon. And yet I believe that we must be more specific: colonial capitalism has created a country wherein, by and large, settlers own land, and have the resources and relative freedom to build a variety of relationships with it. This comes at the expense of Indigenous peoples, who have been dispossessed of their land, and the languages, cultures, and spiritualities that emerge from and inform their relationships with that land. Rattachements suggests that a crucial part of the anti-capitalist/anti-colonial ecological struggle is shifting settlers’ affective and spiritual relationships with the land in a context where our material relationship with the land – one of ownership of that which has been stolen — remains unchanged and fundamentally colonial. A group of settlers buying a communal house together outside the city as part of a strategy of revolutionary ecology has little to nothing in common with Indigenous peoples reoccupying their traditional territories. The latter is a direct disruption of colonial development projects and environmental destruction and is recognizable as part of a lineage of Indigenous resistance to displacement and genocide.[12] The former misrecognizes itself as somehow sharing something with that lineage, when in fact it is possible because of, and shares much more with, generations of encroachment and expansion by settlers.
Absent from the program of ecological struggle proposed by Rattachements is an explicit call for the return of land to Indigenous communities. Instead, they call implicitly for an increased presence of their (settler) milieus on that land, in part in order to potentially support Indigenous struggles. Despite the acknowledgment that land has been stolen (and the lauding of Indigenous relationships to land as ones to look to as examples for the readers of the zine) what is missing is the proposition that “Land Back” in the literal, material sense, is an important piece of the ecological struggle, and one to prioritize leaps and bounds above settlers going back to the land. In the Land Back Red Paper released in 2019 by the Yellowhead Institute, the writers tell us that “the matter of Land Back is not merely a matter of justice, rights or ‘reconciliation’; Indigenous jurisdiction can indeed help mitigate the loss of biodiversity and climate crisis. […] Long-term stewardship of the land allows for constant reassessment, planning, and adaptation.” This leads to an efficacy of protection of biodiversity and hope against climate change thanks to the culturally specific world views passed intergenerationally through a presence with and in defense of the land.[13]
It must not be seen as a necessary precondition for decolonization that settlers develop relationships (spiritual or affective) with land that we occupy. Settlers deciding to prioritize building these new relationships with the land does not bring us closer to decolonization. Focusing on settlers’ spiritual or affective relationships to the land as an important part of anti-colonial struggles sidetracks and warps our ability to focus on the much more central problems of settler colonial Canada. The dispossession of Indigenous peoples’ lands is a partial but crucial piece of struggling against settler colonialism and climate change. Regardless of the politics of the settlers, our relationships with land are most often built through a tactic of land ownership, due to the relative ease of access to the financial means or social connections that allow for this. I am thinking, for example, about the many collective land projects that have been initiated by radical settlers in so-called Quebec, which all involve owning the land. To think of building a land-based spirituality on a foundation of land ownership does not make sense, these relationships would be colonial, not revolutionary. In other words, the relationship between settlers and land must change primarily on a material basis, not a spiritual or affective one. Indigenous peoples have articulated that “Land Back” will give them the power to rebuild knowledge, languages, culture, and autonomy. This is the substance of decolonization; it is crucial that Indigenous peoples be free to develop and regain their relationships with the land rather than settlers taking it upon ourselves to do it in their stead.
On Inhabit and settler territorial autonomy
In Inhabit, a text coming out of appelist/tiqqunist/autonomist networks in the so-called US, the desire for territory is expanded.The goal articulated in Inhabit is the extension and multiplication of the isolated communes of Rattachements. Yet unlike Rattachements, whose authors claim to be committed to their own understanding of an anti-colonial politics, Inhabit does not articulate an anti-colonial politic at all. This is not necessarily surprising, as anti-colonial politics seem to be less present in settler radical milieus in the US than in Canada, but it still matters.[14] “Our goal”, they say, “is to establish autonomous territories—expanding ungovernable zones that run from sea to shining sea. Faultlines crossing North America leading us to providence.” Like the westward expansionists of yore, the writers of Inhabit posit a better way to use the land and suggest that pockets not yet taken up in service for their revolution be transformed in their image. In other words, one can read the writers of Inhabit as promoting their vision of Manifest Destiny: the expansion of land use in their vision, faultlines moving unimpeded across a vast and unclaimed North America. Perhaps following the paths of the railroads that came before?
Inhabit’s authors seem unable or unwilling to engage with settler colonialism. With the exception of the mention of incidental interaction between settlers and Indigenous families in contexts where they are already comrades, race and colonialism are invisible in their text. The authors’ unwillingness to engage with the larger collectivities of Indigenous life and their settler colonial context betrays their colonial understanding of the land itself. In proposing territorial expansion without concern for the claims to land that cover this continent already[15], Inhabit calls to its readers with imagery of the settler state national project – from sea to shining sea: “Build the infrastructure necessary to subtract territory from the economy,” they urge. But the land has never been just territory, and settlers occupying it has more often looked like removing Indigenous peoples than subtracting it from the economy. One need only look to the southern US to see how, for example, white people squatting “vacant” land was an intended consequence of the process of allotting Indigenous people land far from their communities. The US banked on the fact that these communities would be unable to prevent squatters from setting in and taking possession. “Rent a space in the neighborhood. Build a structure in the forest. Take over an abandoned building or a vacant piece of land.” Inhabit repurposes thought and strategies from contexts highly unlike their own (squatters movements in europe, for example) and tries to implement supposedly liberatory strategies for “inhabiting” space that merely further entrench settler access to and control of land.
The flight from identity
In an October 2020 report-back called Chasse à la chasse[16] (translated as Hunting the Hunt in the English version published by Inhabit’s “Territories” newsletter), the writers (based in Quebec) give an account of their time spent supporting Anishnabe communities fighting for a moratorium on moose hunting in their territory. They conclude their summary of the situation with the following reflection: “It would be an illusion confining one to weakness to think that we cannot be and appear other than as illegitimate settlers, regardless of ‘how’ we intend to inhabit what is left of the world.”[17]
It is surprising to me that one of the most pressing takeaways from organizing in solidarity with an Indigenous community would be the possible escape from settler “identity” it uncovers. It seems to me that the fear of being seen as an “illegitimate settler” is what motivates some of their rejection of social position and in turn undermines their analysis. I don’t intend to say that the authors have nothing to contribute to anti-colonial struggle because they are settlers. Rather, I disagree with the importance being placed on not being perceived as settlers, instead of on evaluating what is the most effective contribution they could make to anti-colonial struggle. Their position as settlers in a settler society is necessarily going to be an important piece of this evaluation. This rejection of social position is visible in Inhabit in so far as race and colonialism are made invisible. In Rattachements, it is only visible as a thing from which the writers flee. “Ecstasy: bliss provoked by an exit, a departure from what has been produced as our ‘self’, our ‘social position,’ our ‘identity.’” In a hurry to reject identity politics, and in conflating “identity” with an attention to social position, the writers remove the lens that would allow them to analyze our context more fully and accurately. In doing so, they doom themselves to a flat and limited approach that says that if it is strategic and possible for Indigenous people to build territorial autonomy, it must be just as strategic, possible, and subversive, for settlers to do the same.
The St. Lambert rail blockade was a multi-day action called by and mostly attended by settlers last winter in the context of #ShutDownCanada. It was an opportunity for a proactive and explicit explanation of why we as settlers thought it important to respond to the call for solidarity actions in the way we did, and an encouragement of other settler radical milieus to do the same. This could have been very valuable in a context where some settler supporters were hesitant to propose or participate in settler-initiated actions[18]. Unfortunately, this proactive communication approach was not taken for a variety of reasons, including lack of political cohesion amongst the people organizing the action. In the end, communication coming out of the camp opted for vague language about who was there and who was being spoken to and missed an opportunity to speak as settlers to other settlers about what we could do to intervene[19]. Obfuscating our position made it easier for the mainstream media to use the fact that we were not Indigenous as a “gotcha” moment which helped them attempt to turn public opinion against us without using overtly racist tropes. Our lack of clear analysis also left space for Premier Francois Legault to separate us from the other blockades because we did not explain how we saw ourselves in relation to them. Of course the cops knew all along the demographics of those in attendance and acted accordingly. There were no tactical advantages to this approach, and we lost the opportunity to put forth clear, decisive analysis as to why other settlers should take the risks we (and many Indigenous communities) were taking at that time to shut down Canada. I worry that an avoidance of addressing head on issues of social position and the role of settlers in anti-colonial struggle may lead us to make similar choices in the future.
Inhabit and Rattachements share a desire to produce affect in their readers which inspire them to see themselves as full of power and possibility. Toward this end, they encourage readers to reject guilt or sacrifice and to understand themselves as central protagonists in struggle. For Rattachements, this looks like encouraging their readers to see themselves as “neither victims” of “nor guilty” for the ecological crisis. This aversion to self-sacrifice, to being ready to give something up, means denying that settler colonialism and some other drivers of the crisis continue to benefit us. This is the preemptive evasion of potential guilt for being a settler – we must not understand ourselves as the subjects for which the genocidal removal of Indigenous people from their land is ongoing. The impulse is tied to a rejection of identity politics, and while I do not suggest to instead embrace a demobilizing guilt in the face of the past and present horrors, I think it is both a strategic and ethical imperative to refuse to ignorethe conditions that produce this guilt. When we acknowledge the kinds of lives that settler colonialism continues to produce for settlers and try to find the causes for the clear disparity, we equip ourselves with the knowledge of our context necessary to change it in effective ways. When we flee the feelings produced by this disparity by rejecting a label, we may come to believe we can think or magic our way out of real structures. It is the conditions that need to be fought, not the emotions they produce.
Where do we go from here
The authors of Inhabit and Rattachements might think that rejecting, on the basis of demographics, their respective strategies of territorial autonomy or of building material autonomy in communes on the land is essentially a refusal to build power—a concession to the demobilizing effects of ally politics. On the contrary, I think this rejection is both an ethical and a strategic choice, from which we must necessarily develop a stronger and more anti-colonial revolutionary strategy. It does not weaken our movements to turn away from building territorial autonomy for primarily settler communities if what we turn towards is a greater focus on the continued rebuilding of territorial autonomy for Indigenous peoples we seek to be in struggle with. What is required is to not see settlers as the central subject of revolutionary anti-colonial struggle, and to recognize that the positions from which we struggle differ and thus the paths we take must also differ. Any serious analysis of Canadian settler colonialism will see the hundreds of years of Indigenous struggle against capitalism and the state as relevant and in many ways determinant of the chances of these communities’ potential success at building territorial autonomy. This same analysis will note the difference between this history of struggle and that of radical settler movements in so-called Canada.
If we talk about territorial autonomy in a serious sense, we will know it is far more than “a network of hubs” we’ve rented, squatted, or built in the forest, or a constellation of communal houses in the country. Territorial autonomy, if seen as a strategy for the destruction of capitalism and the state, includes the long term work of developing zones where cops cannot go, where the means to sustain and reproduce those who live there can be found, where a large group of committed and connected people of all ages has the means and the need to defend that territory, over generations. We can look to where this work has already been done for hundreds of years to see examples: Wet’suwet’en territory, Elsipogtog, Barriere Lake, Six Nations, Tyendinaga, Kahnawá:ke, and Kanehsatà:ke. This work has by and large not been done for hundreds of years by non-Indigenous communities – we are starting from zero, and thus even if prioritizing our own territorial autonomy seemed ethical, it would not be likely to be strategic because settler communities in a settler society have much less structural conflict with the colonial system. It does not make us weaker to prioritize the fight for the territorial autonomy of communities of which we are not a part. It makes us stronger, if by doing so we build relationships that contribute to revolutionary contexts in which the goals of settler revolutionary networks converge with those of anti-colonial Indigenous groups. Toward a stronger potential for joint struggle against the colonial state.
Our environmental politics must foreground material responses to the dispossession of Indigenous peoples’ land, for the sake of the planet and as part of a broader commitment to anti-colonial politics. It is dangerous to slip towards a “back to the land” politics, as Rattachements does, because these approaches and projects at best sidetrack us, and at worst set the stage for the development of twisted settler claims to Indigenous land. These kinds of claims will shatter the relationships we should seek with anti-colonial Indigenous allies, and risk strengthening settler reactionary tendencies that we should be fighting. If we see ourselves as aiming to engage in joint struggle with Indigenous communities against the colonial state, we will know that what makes our movements stronger is when our comrades are strong, and our relationships with them are strong.
If we focus on the material realities of settler colonialism and the real ways in which it continues to structure our lives, options, and resources, we can develop more effective strategies by asking what our differing social positions allow and disallow, and how we might put these differences to work for common goals. Mike Gouldhawke explains that “people think of settler as a personal identity but it’s more about a categorical relation between a social subject and settler states”[20]. As La Paperson says, the term settler (and native, and slave) describe “relations of power with respect to land. They sound like identities, but they are not identities per se.”[21] Instead of an attempt to flee these labels, we should put our time to better use and focus on changing the conditions producing those relations of power.
Social position as the sole lens of analysis for developing revolutionary strategy is of course insufficient. It matters deeply how people, no matter what their lives are like now, want the world to look like in the future. However, we need to be able to see and understand the different material realities of those around us in order to have any hope of those realities changing in the world we want to build together. Seeing these realities for what they are, and why they are, shows us that the relationships settlers build with the land are far less important than the ones we dismantle. It is clear that supporting the resurgence of Indigenous territorial autonomy needs to be a greater priority than building a territorial autonomy of our own. The question becomes how to build and sustain formations that can offer long term support and solidarity to Indigenous people struggling against the colonial state, and how best to cultivate a politics that will continue to respond to the shifting contexts, relationships, and terrain of that joint struggle toward self-determination and an end to capitalism, colonialism, and Canada.
[3] To be clear, for myself and many others, we saw ourselves as “initiating” specific actions in response to explicit calls for such activity, in response to changing contexts that we thought demanded it, and in at least the case of the rail blockades, very clearly directly inspired by already ongoing Indigenous initiatives. I use the phrase “settler-initiated” not to take credit for the events of what was very clearly an Indigenous-led movement, but rather to note that there is a real difference between those actions seen by supporters and adversaries as taken by Indigenous communities and those recognized as settler solidarity actions.
[4] It should be noted that the communes they describe are essentially nice places to live where people share meals and daily activities and talk to each other, and not necessarily communes on a scale where they would produce meaningful reorganizations of the economy or social reproduction. It is reasonable to assume that shift in scale is desired.
[10] Another example of this kind of communal settlement that I learned about during the writing of this text is the Finnish socialist settlement of Sointula, located on the territory of the ‘Namgis First Nation. The village was established in the early 1900s on so-called Malcolm Island in British Columbia.
[11] The English translation uses the word habitable rather than liveable.
[13] I do not wish here to forward a romanticized view of Indigenous peoples as never exploiting the land, as the Red Paper cautions against doing on page 60. Rather I wish to remind us that without Indigenous peoples’ ability to steward the land, the destruction of capitalism alone would still leave us without the intergenerational knowledge to care for it in effective ways. https://redpaper.yellowheadinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/red-paper-report-final.pdf
[14] Conversely, critiques of anti-blackness and slavery are often not well integrated into analysis coming out of settler radical networks here in Canada compared to in the US. This makes it even worse that Inhabit also makes no reference to this kind of critique or analysis either.
[15] By pre-existing claims, I am referring both to Indigenous claims to land as well as longstanding claims by groups such as the Republic of New Afrika.
[17] It is worth noting that the English and French versions differ somewhat significantly. Whether due to large errors of translation or intentional changes in anticipation of an Anglophone American readership, the closest sentence in the English version reads: “The question of how to inhabit concerns any living being in any given place.” This is a major difference.
[18] #ShutDownCanada was a massive, broad, and heterogeneous Indigenous-led movement. A large catalyst was the militarized RCMP raid on Wet’suwet’en land defenders protecting their home from Coastal Gas Link pipeline construction last winter. In that context, a number of explicit calls for solidarity actions were put out including by Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs, and specific camps on the land such as the Gidimt’en checkpoint. Despite these very clear and explicit calls to action, I think that some of the hesitancy of some sympathetic settlers to participate in settler-initiated solidarity actions came from a belief that all actions needed to either be Indigenous-led or explicitly endorsed or approved by an Indigenous person. I believe Indigenous critiques of the ways that settlers participate in anti-colonial organizing are important. I believe that it is crucial to consider how one’s actions might be perceived by or have consequences for Indigenous communities when planning solidarity actions. However, sacrificing basic security principles of “need to know” in order to obtain an Indigenous stamp of approval on a risky settler-initiated action seems like an especially egregious form of tokenism. That our organizing communities in Montreal are often majority or exclusively made up of settlers is something to be examined and addressed on a more foundational level rather than attempting to hide it by seeking an endorsement of our choices after the fact. I could be wrong, but my assumption from this winter was that some settlers sympathetic or supportive of #ShutDownCanada were worried about the risks of participating in solidarity actions and used the fact that some actions were settler initiated to avoid having to take risk and join the blockade. I think this is unfortunate and is something that must be changed in part by clearer anti-colonial analysis coming out of settler networks.
[19] Limited record exists of other speeches to the media, but this is one example. https://contrepoints.media/en/posts/declaration-du-blocage-de-saint-lambert-declaration-from-the-saint-lambert-blocade
