Montréal Contre-information
Montréal Contre-information
Montréal Contre-information

Toward a Politics of Destitution: Nuclei and Revolutionary Camp

 Comments Off on Toward a Politics of Destitution: Nuclei and Revolutionary Camp
Oct 122025
 

Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info

Each generation must, in relative opacity,  discover its mission: fulfill it or betray it. —Frantz Fanon

Our generation is up against a wall. And by generation, we don’t mean the mainstream division by age groups, but rather all those who, at a given time, ask themselves the same questions and face the same problems. The wall we are facing is that of meaning. This is what makes us orphans. Political orphans; orphans of forms, explanations, and words by which to make sense of the historical conflictuality in which we are involved. As Jacques Camatte observed in 1973, 

Militants go from one group to another, and as they do so they “change” ideology, dragging with them each time the same load of intransigence and sectarianism. A few of them manage extremely large trajectories, going from Leninism to situationism, to rediscover neo-bolshevism and then passing to councilism. They all come up against this wall and are thrown back further in some cases than in others.1

This rebound effect is always present: some become Marxists after being thrown back by the failures of a territorial struggle, others become formalists by ricocheting off the disappointments of community, and still others are propelled into movementism by the failures of their group. All seek in these different forms the answers that will illuminate the situation and give them the means to fight.

The fact is that our period of experimentation differs from that which characterized the previous cycle of struggle. The same questions no longer have the same answers. What the various revolutionary perspectives of the 20th century had in common was programmatism. In short: revolution would be brought about by the rise of the proletariat as a class and its reappropriation of the capitalist productive forces. Anarcho-syndicalist, socialist, Trotskyist, or Maoist, this was the starting point for all ways of thinking about the overthrow of capitalist society, each pointing to it as the enemy to be defeated. We now find ourselves with a much weaker capacity for strategic clarity than those who came before us. How can we break down the wall of meaning that so many have bounced off of over the past few decades?

For us, meaning has long been linked to our experience of politics: a refusal of the world and an experimentation within that refusal, the attempt to make a community out of it. A common relationship to politics is what we might call a subjectivist understanding of the meaning of commitment, an existential relationship to politics. This way of thinking, which says, “I choose to fight because it is a way of living intensely, fully,” is contradicted when politics appears redundant rather than new, when intensity leaves the terrain of politics, when the community is torn apart. We chase the madness of movement elsewhere, in the couple form, in work, in art, or else we abandon ourselves to our own madness. This way of thinking is matched by an objectivist conception of meaning, which asserts that “revolution will be the result of a gradual rise to power of the masses,” and that history is moving inexorably in this direction. The latter decays as the labor movement is swallowed up by the world of capital, and the language of protest reinforces the political construction of power. The emphasis on the historical determination of revolution, dictated by objective material conditions, is undone by movements that die without attempting insurrection and without building a counter-power, as attempts at revolution give rise to new governments that are just as lamentable as those they leave behind.

Without falling into either of these dead ends, or denying the force that each carries, we say: revolution is not necessary — as an inevitable necessity of history — but it really is possible. We believe that developing this possibility, and the possibility of acting, within it, as an ethical as well as a political force, involves raising the question of organization. The problem of organization concerns the time that separates our present from a possible revolution. This time is a time of questioning and political experimentation, but also of ethical experiments that bind us to this wager. For if revolution is only possible, it is also possible that it will not happen, that the catastrophic course of events will continue. That is why we must continue to reaffirm our choice of it every occasion we get.

With this in mind, the present text aims to contribute, locally and internationally, to the debate on revolutionary organizational forms. In the cycle of struggle that is coming to an end, destitution has been a powerful driving force. Rather than closing this chapter by denying its significance, it is crucial to learn from it and open a new phase of political experimentation. By developing certain shared fictions — destitution, the revolutionary camp, and the nucleus — our aim is to deepen the intuitions that have proven correct, while dissecting those that have led us astray. Such tools can change our relationship to what transpires across the various political landscapes we encounter. We are not alone in our search for answers. This is what drives each of us to seek, despite differences in language and despite the gap between our experiences, what brings us together, and to inquire whether what we have in common seems sufficient. We’ve only just begun.

Destituent movements

Destitution was vividly expressed by the slogan “¡Que se vayan todos!”2, which was the watchword of the Argentinian movement in the early 2000s. In the years that followed, the same unrest spread, marked not only by a refusal of the world as it is, but even more so by a refusal to seek an outcome that would bring closure to any particular political sequence. The aim was to do away with all conceptions of “social change” and with the prospect of taking power. “Fuck toute,” said the student strikers in Quebec in 2015. In the same way, something is happening today on a global scale, an exacerbation of political violence in the streets that claims no legitimacy, is not based on any clearly identifiable subject, and is not justified by any social project.

In 2008, Mario Tronti exclaimed, against his own Leninist political grammar, that another history was opening up, one in which the logic of revolt no longer relates to a project of building something, but consists entirely in putting all that is into crisis; it is no longer merely political, but ethical. For Tronti, ethical revolt reflects the state of crisis in which working-class subjectivity finds itself as the bearer of a positive project. It testifies to the collapse of programmatism. What is revealed in this type of revolt is precisely the refusal of the totality of the social model, which leaves no room for any exteriority, intruding into even the most intimate aspects of our lives. Ethics thus surfaces in contemporary revolts because it accounts for the totalizing grip of domination, something that classical political responses have failed to do. Moreover, what is at stake and being fought against in these revolts is not an enemy that could be conceived as totally external to us, but also something that runs through us. It is not only the institution or the commodity, but our need for them, their hold over us. It is a certain relationship to the world, ways of thinking, doing, and loving that are being disrupted. The destituent hypothesis therefore assumes that other forms of life can be invented from within this rejection of the world. Certain central elements of the classical revolutionary tradition are thus discarded: the seizure of state power, the declaration of a new constitution, or the decree, from above, of new revolutionary institutions.

The historicist hypothesis according to which destitution is “the dynamic of the era following the defeat of the labor movement,” is one possible use of the concept of destitution, a descriptive one. Although interesting, this analysis remains insufficient, as it offers a unilateral view of what takes place in political situations. In fact, their reality is an ambivalent one. As Kiersten Solt stated in her critique of Endnotes: “Contemporary upheaval is the site of a conflictual encounter between destituent gestures and constituent forces.”3 Although more precise, this statement does not completely convince us either. The political thinking that follows from it remains limited. If we need to think beyond the opposition between destituent gestures and constitutive force, this is because it does not allow us to imagine what a destituent force might be. Our role as revolutionaries cannot be reduced to the dissemination or explanation of certain gestures made within movements. This is the limitation that has also been encountered by hypotheses such as the meme-with-force, or the generalization of gestures such as the front line or the black bloc. By giving centrality to forms invented in the breaches opened up by revolts, it is no longer even certain that such a conception of destitution is a conception of revolution.

In recent debates, much has been written about destitution as a negative gesture, and not enough about what a revolutionary destituent politics could or should be. For us, it is a question of knowing how to differentiate between a historical description and a gesture of political prescription. Starting from the observation that destituent dynamics are at work, without limiting ourselves to describing them, represents for us a first step toward formulating a destituent position. From this point, however, we see two paths emerging: the destitution of politics, and the politics of destitution. Our goal in this text is to identify some of the impasses we see in what we call the destitution of politics, and then to outline a politics of destitution.

The destitution of politics

What the movement of the squares, the ZADs, the insurrections of recent years, and the “non-movements” in which life is reinvented through struggle show above all is an insurmountable gap between the aspirations of those who take up the struggle and their political translations, even by the most radical organizations. Destitution refers to the realization that there will no longer be any organization that can unite all demands, at least none that is not a scam within a negotiation framework, none that does not benefit the state. If even “revolutionary” organizations fall far short of what is happening everywhere on the planet at the slightest sign of insurrection, what is the point of holding on to them? 

In recent years, one of the responses that has emerged argues that we should instead focus on sharing these moments, certain experiences of the world, and the ethical shift that emerges in polarized situations. As the title of the journal Entêtement suggests, it is a matter of “holding a sensibility.”

Everywhere in this era, the representative [identity-based] “we” is overwhelmed by the experiential “we,” which is so malleable and unstable, yet so powerful. The representative “we” on which this society is built cannot understand this historic emergence of an experiential “we.” They are literally terrified, traumatized, and outraged by it.4

One form of what we call the destitution of politics states that what needs to grow is the distance between ethics (experiential “we”) and politics (representative “we”). The widespread disillusionment with representative politics and the opening up of questions beyond the logic of interest certainly point to an opening in which we need to deep dive. Taking a stand for ethics in this manner, however, tends to evacuate the possibility of a “we” that is neither representative nor purely experiential, but partisan. A new idea of politics can arise from the failure of its representative concept.

If they are not supported by a political form, ethical revolts fall prey to two kinds of betrayal. The most obvious is reformist betrayal: a revolt against the whole world (including our way of being in it) goes down in history as a movement against one of its particular aspects, or as a victory giving rise to a sense of progress and justice.5 The other betrayal is one that, while recognizing the total nature of the political challenge, forgets the centrality of revolt in the emergence of this truth and, from there, retreats into ethics. It is easy to imagine the former: movement leaders who have become politicians, NGO presidents, professional leftists of all kinds. The latter are those who, having experienced revolt, see their lives turned upside down and, in an attempt to secede from everything, ultimately break with revolt itself. Having entered movements through the political door, they leave through the ethical door and try to create a world in which this way of being can flourish. After the intoxication of the movements, many think they can continue in this way. 

The attempt to formulate an orientation based on ethical withdrawal tends too easily to lead down the path of what we call alternativism. Alternativism is one of the figures we associate with the destitution of politics. By focusing on projects as projects, it offers the possibility of pleasing everyone. For radicals, the alternativist horizon is that of a counter-society, while for reformists, change will come about through the gradual spread of these practices within the economy. In short, there is no head-on struggle with the hegemony of the economy, no thought of going beyond “what is possible, here and now,” only abdication in the face of the struggle to be waged. The fact that, instead of fighting, radicals and reformists are defending the proliferation of short supply chains, bioregions, and community service centers is more indicative of the historical defeat of revolutionaries than their ideological victory.

Before long, infrastructure that was supposed to serve as support becomes its own end. By putting in place infrastructures that are not immediately political, we hope to contribute to a possible political situation, or even a future crisis. Thus, in its autonomous form, alternativism expresses a distance from the insurrectionary fabric, and places antagonism in a future time. A day will come when these lands will feed the communards. Who can be against virtue? In any case, the prefiguration of a post-revolutionary world, coupled with a desire to build it now, has taken precedence over the construction of a political force.

Which forms after informality?

Until recently, the emphasis on ethical revolt went hand in hand with the rejection of all forms of organization. For a while, alternativism appeared to be a serious path that didn’t betray what had given rise to it. More broadly, while informality and destitution seemed to go hand in hand, we quickly felt their limits. In many ways, the last few years have seen the question of organization come back with a vengeance.

Informal organization, which is the implicitly dominant option in the current cycle of struggle, is running out of steam and meets criticism from all sides. The dynamic, which was based on the recurrence of classic social movements in which reformist or pseudo-revolutionary organizations could be overwhelmed, criticized, and fought, reached its swan song with the pandemic. After the last insurrectionary outbreaks, any political possibility was crushed by the authoritarian management of Covid. Most of the pre-existing informal groups were reduced to their involvement in various projects (community, mutual aid, neighborhood, social center, business, magazine), if not to maintaining a pessimistic, even cynical attitude toward any political attempt. Of course, there are still informal groups that maintain political relationships by participating in this or that struggle, but as a hypothesis, it no longer makes sense.

The failure of the first phase of destituent experimentation — which could be defined as the first two decades of the 21st century — has thus produced a formalistic reaction that manifests itself in the creation of open groups. This reaction believes it can remedy the weakness of the revolutionary movement through technical solutions: formal structures of engagement that allow for the broadening of the organizational base. Some have thus reacted to the obvious failings of informality6 by donning the old clothes of politics: they oppose the clandestine nature of the crew with formal, public, open groups aimed at breaking the isolation of a politics condemned as sectarian. But strangely enough, old clothes smell like old clothes and formalism is returning to frameworks centered on social categories, such as class and other objective markers, or (it’s often both) to vanguardist theories of organization.

The pendulum has swung back, leading former advocates of informality to respond to the problem of numbers, commitment, and isolation with public structures, and to the unspeakability of their ethical and political content through broad petitions of principle (anti-capitalist, feminist, environmentalist, etc). Their publicity, presumed to be a guarantee of expansion and propagation, leads in the end to a feeling of being too exposed to carry the desired intensity, or to draw strength from it after the fact. Moreover, in critical moments, open spaces do not provide the confidence necessary to really get involved, and the vague sharing of identity or principles does not generate real commitment.

To seek the solution to the problem of strength in a mode of appearing is to pose the question backwards. Public organization may well give a momentary feeling of power, but this proves deceptive in moments when the police attempt to systematically crush what springs forth. As these public organizations succeed in their political construction, they are defeated by repression. They do not contain the seeds of their overcoming, but of their own crushing. At a time of surveillance and control specific to the faltering of the global capitalist order, there can be no openly — and truly — revolutionary group in the public sphere.

In addition to the problem of appearance, returning to the use of outdated historical fictions or sociological categories derived from new criticism cannot provide meaning to contemporary conflict. These terms found their strength in their ability to give meaning to what was experienced. They were devices for simplification, as political concepts always are. Today, the rhetorical pirouettes and academic arsenal needed to give them meaning testify to their fragility, not their strength. Programmatism did not run its course because the labor movement was defeated as an enemy, but rather because it was swallowed up by the world of capital. Everything that made the labor movement strong has been integrated into the reign of the economy. What could be seen as the expression of the proletariat, or as Marx put it, of an “order that is the dissolution of all orders,” has been lost. The labor movement was born in the economy, so it is not surprising that it died there.

For many, there is a great temptation to return to class struggle as a general explanation. It serves as an analytical crutch in their search for the power that these historical hypotheses actually brought into existence. Instead of taking this path, we ask ourselves: what force was made possible by the hypothesis of class struggle?  

Even if the terminology of the past cannot help us grasp the complexity of the events that arise, the fact remains that fiction is a serious matter. We need fiction to believe in the reality of what we are experiencing. The most urgent political task is to find and share the terms that give meaning to our experiences, to what opposes domination, exploitation, destruction, and all forms of power. Money is a fiction, as are the state and the law. We must oppose our fictions to those imposed on us. Paired with the concept of destitution, the nuclei and the revolutionary camp allow for the recapitulation of historical conflictuality.

Organizing a destituent force

Destitution implies a “crisis of what is,” a total rejection of the world. The stance we are calling the “destitution of politics” is part of this negativity. However, due to its ambiguous relationship with conflictuality, it fails to participate in the development of a revolutionary force — a force capable of confronting constituent power, not just to call for desertion from it. Furthermore, the formalistic public response, the renewal of anti-capitalism, necessarily fails to meet the demands of clandestinity imposed by power.

As we stated above, although destituent dynamics are at work in contemporary movements, they are too often covered up by pacification, order, and the reign of normality. For Idris Robinson, the task of revolutionaries is to reveal the destituent dynamics in order to disrupt the order of things and precipitate it into an uncontrollable conflict. Rather than saying that destitution is immanent in contemporary revolts, he argues that the unmanageable conflictual situation is in fact the result of the organization of a destituent force. It is therefore necessary to “organize a power capable of producing a diametrically opposed enemy, thereby provoking such a savage confrontation that it leads to a totally unmanageable, uncontrollable, and ungovernable situation.”7

It is obvious that there is no switch that can magically trigger such a confrontation so savage that it would lead to a totally uncontrollable situation. What is possible is to seek out, push, and reveal the antagonisms contained in each situation. At the very least, we must rebuild an imaginary of political struggle and seek out those who can agree on similar approaches. If the destitution of politics has for the moment taken the form of refusals, the content of what a politics of destitution might be remains to be elaborated. The question, then, is how to develop a political force capable of reinforcing the revolutionary polarity within situations, of making the destituent option stronger. How can we ensure that “none remain”?

To arm destitution with a politics allows us to imagine a positive content for the various refusals it entails. The politics we are attempting to describe here concerns the way in which we remain faithful to situations that disrupt the ordinary course of things, so that what opens up in these situations does not close again as soon as normality resumes. Badiou put it aptly when he wrote that “the party” is what organizes fidelity to the emancipatory event, carrying its consequences as far as possible. 

What is then revealed, and what we must remain faithful to, is the following truth: the normality of the economy is not the only conceivable path; it is possible to make choices based on other logics. We must politicize the refusals that emerge in revolt and that can irreversibly disrupt our lives by becoming part of us. If ethical revolts have the power to erupt, the challenge is to find the political forms that make them last over time, the statements that make them shareable beyond experience. Remaining faithful to this truth means continuing to nurture this upheaval. This shared density exists in opposition to the economy and necessarily imposes something that transcends our own lives. From there, politics calls upon the idea of a “we” that is a belonging but which we must always try to place within a horizon, including as participants in a camp.

A contemporary, deeply liberal inclination, leads some to conclude that they must avoid involvement in any group, that “my life is my choice.” Ultimately, it would be more interesting to navigate the emotional misery of existential liberalism than to get caught up in what could become a sectarian drift. The critique of activism that we ourselves spread was in fact too soluble in this epoch.8 To break out of this dead end, we believe it is necessary to formalize political spaces. Formalize in the sense of giving shape and putting into words, so as to clarify the contours of a position: who shares it, how porous is it, how do we relate to it, and how can we strengthen it?

We also believe that it is possible to formalize our positions without betraying our belonging to a larger “we,” that of the insurgents, our historical party. In other words, we need to give ourselves political forms, while knowing that situations will reveal their limits, and they will have to be overcome. Our partisan coordination bodies, our revolutionary nuclei, must never lose sight of their relationship to a larger conspiracy. The plan remains that of revolution in the moment of insurrection. Everything else is merely prolegomena.

On the one hand, the “revolutionary milieu,” largely characterized by informalism and a refusal to commit, is clearly not up to the task. Out of fear of confronting the wall of meaning, or out of a guilty leftist conscience, we have developed a reflex of creating spaces for others — even if it means stating half-truths we don’t believe in the hopes of increasing our numbers. In the absence of a space in which to bring strategic orientations into play — not in terms of sectoral struggles, but in terms of the revolutionary horizon — the various organizational attempts are doomed to produce radical agitation with no future. On the other hand, current formalizing responses are insufficient to rebuild a force capable of bringing about and growing the revolutionary possibility. Here we propose to outline the contours of this force, which we refer to as the revolutionary camp, and the more restricted space from which we conceive it, the nucleus.

Building the revolutionary camp

The Party, which not so long ago held the vast majority of revolutionary organizations within its fold, has been replaced in recent decades by the milieu. What binds revolutionaries today is essentially a set of implicitly political interpersonal relationships. The milieu is a fantasy of organization, an aggregate without a horizon, almost accidental, which reproduces itself through ritualized dates (book fairs, annual demonstrations, etc.), in a radical aesthetic, or through the creation of new projects that will die as quickly as they are born. Although it can concentrate its strength during this or that event, it must be admitted that this form has not produced the slightest political clarification that goes beyond its microcosm in the last decade. Nothing very threatening for the moment.

However, there is undoubtedly still something like an “historical party,” a way of naming all the people and gestures that are actively working to overturn the world of the economy and its governments. While this way of envisioning things inspires us, we believe that it is only possible to form something like a camp if we are truly organized. We need fictions — ideas that allow us to think about and recognize ourselves — that push us to produce forms. A plane of consistency. For us, the revolutionary camp is not only a place for sharing ideas, but also for actively taking sides for revolution. It must serve as a space for discussion, strategic planning, and organization among different groups. The camp is a space, it is not an institution that can be replicated with its codes and procedures. Rather, it is a way of thinking about conspiracy, a form that is beginning to spread. The revolutionary camp is therefore both a hypothesis and a concrete form for political organization.

The purpose of a space such as the camp is primarily to remedy the scattered and isolated nature of revolutionary forces. In a given situation, coordination within the camp leads us to consider more powerful interventions, both tactically and in terms of discourse. Avoid multiplying calls and confusion. If necessary, think about disagreements on political and strategic grounds, not in terms of misunderstandings or interpersonal conflicts. Outside of the movement, when forces tend to withdraw into themselves, the camp establishes a space where exchange allows for endurance over time. In the same way, the camp offers a strategic distance between the forces that compose it. Instead of merging them, it allows for their interplay.

The camp does not constitute a point of enunciation, a new political subject capable of acting and expressing itself. We seek to organize the conspiracy: to find ways of bringing together the various forces at play and to break out of our impasses. However, the camp cannot be reduced to a space that represents the elements that compose it. Groups should not approach it in the mode of a congress — where everyone seeks to assert the positions of their political unit over those of others — nor in the mode of an assembly, from which a decision must emerge by individual vote count. The decisions taken there are based on the possibility of agreements and initiatives that cut across the forces that compose it: a new situation may lead to an original initiative that does not overlap with the previous division or with all the groups present, but is a new set of its own. Belonging is based on the encounter between different positions, and it must always be updated; but for this reason, it is more sincere.

In addition to belonging achieved through a common political sense and the choice of a shared narrative, we also believe in the generative nature of commitment. The camp must provide formal and concrete spaces that have an interiority, that are linked to active presence and participation: spaces for discussion, debate, planning, debriefing, etc. The degree of formalization, as well as the characteristics of the groups that compose it, and the question of whether it can include individuals or only groups, remain to be determined based on the basic guidelines set by those who use this space.

Although the camp does not require all its members to have the same priorities, it nevertheless presupposes a basic criterion and orientation, which is to raise and bring to life the question of revolution: the ability to say “we,” even if this necessarily covers differences. But the label “revolutionary,” applied indiscriminately, cannot be a guarantee of belonging. The camp is not a milieu or network that gathers all kinds of tendencies with their claims to radicalism. For the forces that belong to the camp, political activity must be part of a strategy that can be explained. In the absence of a strategy, there looms the problem of a “black box” capable of magically transforming any form of reformist involvement into revolutionary activity.

Obviously, it is impossible to decide outside of any given situation what exactly defines a revolutionary position. This exercise in discernment remains fundamental; it is through this door that we must one day emerge from the tunnel of deconstruction. We will not be fooled again by reformism or the seizure of state power. Revolution implies an upheaval of the established order and ways of life by the insurgent masses. All those who work tirelessly for the advent of this upheaval and decide to organize on this basis will participate in the revolutionary camp.

Forming dense nuclei

What political forms would be found within the revolutionary camp? Undoubtedly a little bit of everything we have seen before: affinity groups, small communist cells, groups of friends, members of political organizations, milieu pillars, people making attempts in territorial struggles, on social or economic issues, etc. The composition would surely vary depending on the location, the level of intensity, and the forms of political organization specific to each place. However, the formation of dense and determined political units would drastically change the strength of a space such as the revolutionary camp, and more broadly, the general political atmosphere. These units are what we call revolutionary nuclei.

One of the current limitations we see is the lack of a clear position coming from organized groups. The affinity group, as well as the broad formal organization, are each affected by this shortcoming. In order to formulate a position, a revolutionary nucleus should ask itself certain questions: What is our framework for analysis? What is our strategic perspective for the coming months and years? What are we going to prioritize? Why? What interpretations do we share of our common experiences? Of our failures and successes? It is not a question of producing grand meta-narratives, universal explanations that seek to encompass all experiences and situations. Our interpretations must be able to adapt to the situation and emerge directly from it; once they become fixed, they confines us. We need to be able to come together around a set of articulated considerations that can be heard and shared by others. 

Revolutionary nuclei are the kind of political forms capable of accomplishing this task, in that they constitute the most dense form of political organization. It is not the number of members within a nucleus that creates its density, but rather the political position decided upon by those who comprise it. Its position cannot be summed up in broad principles or shared identities. Rather, it constitutes a strong political agreement that has consequences.

The lack of positioning among organized groups contributes to the confusion that currently prevails. Without proposals on the table, it is impossible to understand each other or to situate ourselves in relation to one another other than through effects of distinction; the interpersonal takes precedence over the political. By definition, a position is both one of the coordinates that allows an object to be located in relation to another and the orientation that this object takes according to its horizon. The nucleus must be a point of enunciation. Taking a position means expressing, stating, and formulating, like a stance one decides to take to be taken, a reading of the world to which to rally. However, a position is also the way in which something is arranged and organized. Form is inseparable from substance. In the nucleus, commitment is based on trust and understanding, which strengthen bonds and maintain form over time. This understanding develops through a mutual agreement: prioritizing something that affects a much broader horizon than the collective life of the group.

Each nucleus necessarily rests on an ethical foundation, whether explicit or not. For us, political engagement implies a profound transformation of life; it means challenging our relationship with money and work, experimenting with collective life, sharing not only material things — what we have — but also who we are, our desires, and the decisions we make. Opening up the space of the common defies the logic of appropriation and valorization within the group. Without wanting to reduce politics to life itself, we believe that what we share is meaningful: we believe that life is changed when it is experienced together. It is what gives strength and sustains commitment. 

From our experience, the lack of clarification of forms is one of the problems with crews and affinity groups. This ambiguity hinders their porosity and makes their criteria for belonging arbitrary. While we recognize the intensity of collective experimentation and the conspiratorial opacity that drives them as important, the core structure offers the possibility of formalizing procedures, clarifying rhythms, and problematizing modes of entry and exit. In this sense, it resembles a broad formal organization. In order not to become stagnant, the nucleus necessarily seeks to meet other nuclei, to become stronger and wiser. It is through belonging to the nucleus that the commitment of its members can be maintained and clarified. Similarly, sharing proposals and a commitment to them makes its expansion possible.

Nuclei only really make sense to the extent that they remain in dialogue with other nuclei and the wider space of the revolutionary camp. While for the moment we are only able to experiment with cores of this kind involving a few dozen people, our wager is that it is possible to do so with many more. History is full of all kinds of experiments that, without betraying the density of their bonds, were able to grow in number.

Spaces of experimentation: communism, use, politics

If an immense gap sometimes seems to separate revolutionaries — that of theoretical and political vocabulary — our inclinations point in a common direction. As political orphans, exhausted from constantly being thrown back by the wall of meaning, at least two things bring us together. The first, and more immediate, is revealed in what we seek to encounter or provoke in the various social movements or situations we face: gestures of rupture, discourses that elude the logic of law and legitimacy, ungovernable impulses. It is through a supplement of organization, and not through simple participation, that what is lacking in a situation can be figured out and carried through. The second lies in our desire to confront the revolutionary question based on the failures of the last century and the obstacles of our immediate present. Our paths point toward a withdrawal from the politics of power, but to date they have been in tension with the formulation of our own politics and with the principle of organization. It is within this tension that we orient ourselves.

We speak of strategic spaces as a use of politics. But what makes this use possible or, more generally, what makes politics possible? We are committed to the negative dimension of destituent politics, because we know that it is in the destruction of state power that the possibility of communization lies. Insurrection, the political event par excellence, is precisely the privileged moment, because it allows the most general question possible to be opened up to the greatest number of people possible. In it, any prefigurative or planning attempt would be either humiliated or imposed [imposé]. However, this negative redeployment of politics, its mistrust of ends, requires us to rethink the meaning of communism, which has served as the horizon in the politics of the last century. Communism has been disastrously understood as the fabrication of a new world by the state. Today, we instead think of communism as the condition of destituent politics, in at least two ways.

Firstly, communism is the name given to a politics of enmity and antagonism to capital. As Bernard Aspe points out, it is the name given to a general philosophy of antagonism, of irreconcilability with the world, and of the possibility of exteriority here and now. Communism is therefore the name of a possibility of politics, because one politics can only reveal itself in relation to another that serves as its enemy at the level of totality. Not momentarily, in a process of internal modification, but completely. It is specifically by revealing how decisions other than those related to interest are possible that communism establishes itself as the name of a politics against the economy.

Secondly, communism refers to the condition of politics in yet another way: we cannot imagine shouldering [porter] something politically without collective elaboration. This requires the opening of a space in which the question of survival does not constitute the central issue. More than a material arrangement, communism transcends our simple ability to make ends meet, and arises when beings stop counting and instead share what they are as much as what they have. Ethical withdrawal is, after all, only one of the possible forms that destitution can take. If we allow the existential dimension of the destituent movement to become indefinitely inflate, its communist charge ends up neutralized. We are not saying that this dimension should be denied, only that it must be linked to the construction of a political force. 

Communism is therefore an idea that guides us, something we aim to spread as much as we seek to discover it in the world. It is a relationship that allows us to see in a gesture or an event the potential either for division, intensification, or alliance. Communism is experienced by many wherever the logic of appropriation fails, like an ambiance: wherever the distance between those who decide and those who act, between those who own and those who do not is abolished, allowing decisions to be made, orientations decided, practices adopted or eliminated. In this sense, communism can only be experienced at a distance from the state. The soil from which such experiments grow does not lie the pleasure of combat, or any scientific knowledge regarding the possibility that the nightmare might end, even if this can nourish us. Its breeding ground is the shared truth that the nightmare can end.

Of course, our participation in this or that situation is never fully conditioned; we can always be swept up in an event, independently of any space that preceded it or outlives it. However, anyone who finds comrades there and decides to remain faithful to the event will inevitably confront the question: how could this continue? However useful the distinction between ethics and politics, we may be touching here on their point of inseparability.


Notes

1. Jacques Camatte, “Against Domestication” (1973), online here. The French original was recently republished here.

2. “They must all go” and the second part of the slogan, too often forgotten, “y no quede ni uno solo” (and none must remain), perhaps announces the task of the new phase of destitution that is beginning.

3. Kiersten Solt, “Seven Theses on Destitution,” Ill Will, February 12th, 2021. Online here.

4. Anonymous, Conspiracist Manifesto, trans. Robert Hurley, Semiotexte, 2023, 301.

5. Consider the example of the political sequence of 2012 in Quebec and the way in which it was brought to a close. Many months of heated protest were reduced to the issue of tuition fees and a change of government through elections. 

6. Informal politics has been unable to provide a theory that goes beyond its own experience. It is confined to silence, melancholy, or research.

7. Idris Robinson, “Introduction to Mario Tronti’s ‘On Destituent Power,’” Ill Will, May 22nd, 2022. Online here.

8. The rejection of classical activism, which artificially separates life choices and political perspectives, has generated confusion concerning what constitutes political action. The rejection of classical politics led to a tendency to completely blur the distinction between ethics and politics, rendering the difference between the organization of existence and the development of political forms obscure or ambiguous.

Fuck Microsoft, Fuck AI, Fuck Techno-Capitalism

 Comments Off on Fuck Microsoft, Fuck AI, Fuck Techno-Capitalism
Oct 072025
 

Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info

As crises multiply, technology companies continue to take advantage of them to reap record profits — not only contribute to the proliferation of crises, but also to profit from them.

Last night, an autonomous group sabotaged Microsoft’s Montreal facilities located in the artificial intelligence cluster in the Marconi-Alexandra sector.

Let’s not kid ourselves. Microsoft is complicit in numerous crimes against humanity. From its collaboration with the Israeli government in the genocide of the Palestinian people to its impact on gentrification and the displacement of tenants in the Parc-Extension neighborhood, to its significant contribution to climate change in the frantic race for artificial intelligence, its active participation in the technological arms race of surveillance, and its numerous partnerships with police services, the American multinational represents the new enemy to be defeated.

The action also responds to the call from the Palestinian resistance to activate all levers of pressure and escalation in the international political, media, and economic spheres. Despite the company’s recent decision to partially restrict access to some of its services to the Israeli military, Microsoft—which must also pay for its past crimes—continues to maintain ties with the Zionist state.

Techno-capitalism is waging war on us, so let’s wage war on techno-capitalism.

Message to the Climate Movement

 Comments Off on Message to the Climate Movement
Sep 162025
 

Anonymous submission to Act For Freedom Now!

PDF: A4 | Letter

Throughout the last decade, both in Europe and beyond, a new generation of activists has brought the climate movement to the forefront. Groups such as Extinction Rebellion, Fridays for Future, and Ende Gelände have succeeded in breaking out of the sidelines, convincing millions to commit themselves in defence of the planet. It wasn’t so long ago that few were even aware of the possibility of climate catastrophe – nowadays the very opposite is the case. I have no intention to downplay these achievements. What I do want to draw attention to, however, is that climate activism has made little or no difference to something very important, to the only thing which really counts: to actually lowering the amount of carbon emitted by humans across the planet. Such emissions continue to increase every year, as do average global temperatures, weather catastrophes, and rates of species extinction. Earning recognition from across society has not been enough. In all of its core aims, the climate movement remains a decisive failure.

I have a suggestion as to why this is the case. Because the climate movement remains stuck in the assumption that those in power must be convinced to bring about the necessary changes for us. Despite utilising a direct action aesthetic, most climate activism focuses on getting media attention (including mainstream social media, which is as much an extension of capitalist power as television or the newspapers) in order to achieve social recognition, ultimately in order to lobby politicians. However, the political elite will never be able to solve this crisis, because the system which grants them power is also a system which literally thrives on wrecking the planet. What we call “the economy” is an out-of-control megamachine which deems anything short of unlimited expansion (a process which entails ecological devastation) some kind of disaster. No matter their affiliation or the promises they offer, all the politicians and corporations pledge allegiance to the backward logic of this world-eating monster.

Some would argue that certain elements of the climate movement escape this concern. Contrary to Extinction Rebellion and Fridays for Future, anti-capitalist groups such as Ende Gelände do not make explicit demands of politicians, instead focusing on disrupting critical infrastructure directly. However, we cannot suppose that peacefully occupying a coal mine (or its arteries) for a few hours is a realistic way of shutting it down for good; this is just another way of getting the media interested. Such actions make no sense unless one hopes, consciously or otherwise, that they might serve to convince politicians to step in and reform the economy for us. Other mass organisations (for example, Soulèvements de la Terre/Earth Uprisings) might seem like an improvement, given that they favour sabotaging ecocidal infrastructure, and in this sense encourage something resembling direct action (albeit directed by a secretive vanguard). Again, however, this might only be a more seductive way of receiving media attention; for such attacks would be far more effective if performed by small, autonomous groups who strike under the cover of darkness, especially where the authorities do not expect it.

In short, most climate activism is fixated on requesting help from a system which is inherently incapable of responding. It therefore spreads an ethos of disempowerment and infantilisation, implying that ordinary people are incapable of addressing the climate crisis for ourselves. But really it is the other way around. We will all be burnt to a crisp before the governments will do what needs to be done. It therefore falls on unspecialised, dedicated rebels to begin solving the crisis directly. What might that look like? Enacting without delay the necessary changes which those in power will never seriously consider. By this I mean, shutting down the power stations, airports, motorways, and factories, whilst arranging decentralised (and therefore ecologically-minded) means for sustaining ourselves without them. This proposal no doubt involves a massive escalation in strategy. Nonetheless, given the severity of the situation, combined with the fact that current methods have proven insufficient, I think it’s about time we considered radically overhauling our approach.

Inspiration is already out there. For example, the Switch Off! campaign (initiated in Germany in 2022, and since spreading beyond Europe) forgets about reforming capitalism, instead focusing on directly incapacitating the infrastructure responsible for wrecking the planet. Such instances of sabotage are spreading, whether they are associated with the above banner, another one, or are not claimed at all. To mention but a few of many relevant actions: In September 2023, the railway network outside Hamburg was sabotaged at multiple points, majorly disrupting one of the largest ports in Europe; in March 2024, an arson attack on the electrical grid nearby Berlin closed down the huge Tesla Gigafactory for multiple days; in May 2025, a double arson on a power plant and a high-voltage pylon caused a blackout in a sizeable portion of France, depriving an airport, various factories, and the Cannes film festival of electricity. One might also recall that London Gatwick airport was closed down for multiple days in 2018, reportedly (and for motivations unknown) because a handheld drone was flown over the runways. Despite massive police efforts, those who performed this readily reproducible action were never found; nor have any of the other actions mentioned here yet led to any arrests. By contrast, conventional climate activist tactics (for example, usage of lock-ons, tripods, superglue) take getting arrested for granted, thereby sacrificing our comrades to the courts, prison, and ongoing surveillance. This is a high cost for actions which, besides fostering a submissive attitude towards the authorities, have little or no impact on the capacities for climate-trashing industries to function.

In order to begin addressing a problem on the scale of climate change, however, attacks against ecocidal infrastructure must become more ambitious still. This might be phrased in terms of moving beyond a focus on specific industries towards targeting industrial civilisation altogether. The relevant centres of production, extraction, and research must be targetted; so too the electrical grid that binds them together, namely, the very network which gives the system of destruction its power (in both senses of the term) in the first place. Such a bold vision will seem out of place to many. But it is too often forgotten that climate change and industrial civilisation are in fact the very same problem. The human degradation of the climate is not something ancient; it is only as old as industrialisation itself. Since roughly 150 years, human life has increasingly centred on the usage of machines which convert fossil fuels into energy, thereby emitting carbon dioxide. Human culture, in other words, has been forced into a relationship of dependence upon an ever-expanding infrastructure which cannot function without poisoning the climate. The Industrial Revolution was only initiated a few generations ago, and already its consequences have led many to question the viability of life itself outlasting the century. There could not be a more damning indictment of this relatively recent technological shift.

Some will respond, of course, that industrial civilisation is not inherently earth-wrecking, and is already in the process of being reformed. We are talking here about the so-called “Green Transition” being heralded across the political spectrum as the solution to the climate crisis. However, it is a common mistake to think that wind, solar, or hydroelectric power represent genuine alternatives to conventional methods; for in reality they are being harnessed in addition to fossil fuels, which are currently being burnt in higher quantities than ever. To think the capitalist economy would ever consent to leaving untapped reserves of coal, gas, or oil in the ground misunderstands the core logic of a system based on unlimited growth. The consequence of record investment in green tech, therefore, has only been to catapult global energy usage to unprecedented levels.

Moreover, besides failing to involve a transition, the economic restructuring underway is anything but green. Firstly, fossil fuels are highly dense sources of energy, which neither the power of sunlight, wind, or water comes anywhere close to matching; it follows that “renewable energy,” if expected to maintain current levels of intake, must consume far greater areas of land than are already dedicated to energy production. Secondly, the key technologies of such restructuring depend heavily on the extraction of minerals, especially through mining. For example, nickel and rare earth minerals are required to construct solar panels and wind turbines; lithium and cobalt are key components of their batteries, as well as those of electric cars, e-bikes, and smartphones. As such, and in the name of going “green,” the capitalist economy is plundering every corner of the globe in search of lucrative resources, thereby driving ecological devastation, forced labour, and geopolitical conflict. Even the uncharted depths of the oceans are in the course of getting ransacked; next it will be asteroids and other planets. In sum, then, what has been hyped as the technological solution to the climate catastrophe is but a massive lie cloaking the further expansion of the megamachine.

Present in the speech of almost everyone you meet nowadays is an understanding that humans are wrecking the biosphere – and simultaneously committing suicide. Yet far fewer are willing to comprehend the crisis for what it actually is, namely, the outcome of runaway technological development. This is not a problem which can be addressed by voting, petitioning, protesting, boycotting, or investing. The only realistic response to the climate crisis is to attack industrial civilisation. I do not expect that this proposal is about to receive widespread popularity; after all, it guarantees to destabilise the only world almost anybody has ever known. However, we might have to reckon with the fact that many or most humans will forever insist on keeping their cars, fridges, and smartphones running – even at the cost of forsaking the very air we breathe. It therefore falls on those whose priorities lie elsewhere to proceed to brave and uncompromising action.

FURTHER READING

Anonymous (2011) Desert (Stac an Armin Press)

––––––––. (2016) “Taking Authority Apart” (from Avalanche #16)

––––––––. (2018) The Unexpected: From Center to Periphery (Hourriya)

––––––––. (2019) Total Liberation (Active Distribution)

––––––––. (2023) Breaking Ranks: Subverting the Hierarchy &
Manipulation Behind Earth Uprisings

––––––––. (2024) “Mega-Project “Energy-Transition”: Localising the Weak Spots” (from Antisistema #2)

––––––––. (2024) Mapping the Megamachine: Microchip Production (from Tinderbox #5)

––––––––. (2024) “Nonhuman Comrades” (from No Path #2)

––––––––. (2025) “Subteranean Constellations: Lighting Up the Machinery of War and Ecocide” (from Tinderbox #7)

Gelderloos, Peter (2010) An Anarchist Solution to Global Warming

Pantarai (2024) “Nothing is True, Anything is Possible” (from No Path #2)

Roos, Andreas (2023) “We need to address the root issue, which is the aggregate, overall material-energy throughput” (from No Mine in Gállok: Ecocide and colonialism in Swedish-occupied Sápmi).

Montreal Anarchist Tech Convergence 2025

 Comments Off on Montreal Anarchist Tech Convergence 2025
Aug 232025
 

Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info

Technology is a steaming pile of whatever. The salad of transistors, capacitors, and wires that we marinate in for 17.2 minutes before we drink our coffee are the first thing we see each morning, while our subversions of the droppings of surveillance capitalism are the last things burning their images into our retinas before we close our eyes each night. The AI-augmented totality that numbs our senses and optimizes our labour lumbers on, vulnerable but unhindered. Let’s not say we never tried.

The Montreal Anarchist Tech Convergence is a yearly gathering on the intersection of anarchism and technology.

A 2-day event: October 11 and 12 2025 At Batiment 7 in Tiohtia:ke Montreal

  • workshops
  • presentations
  • skill shares
  • discussions
  • and more!

Welcome to anarcho-curious techies, tech-curious anarchists, and everyone in between.

Our goal is to connect with each other, to practice, to throw that rectangle that constantly demands your attention into a blender and sculpt the shattered pieces into the shape of a butt to plaster onto your landlord’s porch.

Please submit your proposition before September 15th.
https://mtl-atc.org

Food Liberated

 Comments Off on Food Liberated
May 022025
 

Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info

Hochelaga, April 30, 9pm

Tonight, people engaged in combative mutual aid. Food should be free, as with all essential items. The scourge of capitalism has made it so that necessities such as food and housing are things to be earned rather than inalienable basic needs.

Today we are making food free in our own way, by liberating sustenance to redistribute amongst the community. And we will do it again. The state apparatus may try to stop us, and in doing so, show its true colors. The government and the corporate interest it serves are not your friends. They will sooner let you starve than sacrifice their bottom line. Eat freely!

A Response to the Commentary on “When There Are Many of Us, We Do What We Want”

 Comments Off on A Response to the Commentary on “When There Are Many of Us, We Do What We Want”
Apr 252025
 

Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info

Following the repeated failures of so-called “combative” demonstrations in Montreal between 2023 and 2025, two militant texts sought to offer, on the one hand, a strategic analysis focused on massification through autonomous structures, and on the other, a skeptical critique of that orientation, denouncing the fetishization of demonstrations and militant voluntarism. Both texts share a common diagnosis: our collective weakness in the face of the state, our isolation, and the routinization of our mobilizations. The present text is a critique of the second piece, written by N.

The Fetishization of Spontaneity: A Critique of Anti-Strategy

The core disagreement between the two texts seems to me to hinge on a central strategic question: how can we explain the fact that the majority of the working class—including its most exploited segments—does not spontaneously respond to calls for radical mobilization, and instead, in advanced capitalist countries, remains largely passive or aligned with various forms of reformism?

N. rightly points out the routinized and sometimes performative nature of certain activist practices. However, in attempting to explain this passivity, his response leans into a kind of mechanical determinism that legitimizes a cynical skepticism—one that dismisses any form of political mediation as a futile avant-garde project: “It is the social contradictions themselves that produce struggles, not a group of revolutionary evangelists trying to convince proletarians dulled by capitalism one by one.”

If it is necessary to break with the “fetishization of the demonstration”—the idea that it constitutes the core of our political practice—it is equally important to be wary of the fetishization of spontaneity, which consists in rejecting the necessity of organization in favour of a passive expectation, based on the illusion that the contradictions of capitalism will mechanically trigger a mass uprising. This posture amounts to a strategic retreat that cloaks political powerlessness in the mystique of spontaneity.

The Passivity of the Exploited Classes

The passivity or reformist orientation of the working class is largely explained by the fundamentally episodic nature of the class struggle. The contradictions of capitalism are not, in themselves, sufficient to make workers revolutionary. As Charles Post argues, class consciousness does not arise mechanically from exploitation, but rather emerges primarily through the lived experience of self-organization and collective struggle—experiences that open space for receptivity to radical ideas.

However, this foundational condition for the development of class consciousness—active participation in mass struggles—can only ever be partial, rare, and temporary. Structurally, the vast majority of workers cannot sustain long-term engagement in the struggle, since their position within capitalist social relations requires them to sell their labour power in order to ensure their own material reproduction. The imperative of individual survival therefore limits, under normal conditions, the possibility of sustained collective engagement.

In the absence of collective struggles, capitalist logics, reformism, and the institutional forms of liberal politics tend to regain hegemonic status. Workers are then less inclined to seek a transformation of the system and instead aim to secure what they perceive as a fair share of it—without challenging its underlying structures of power. Worse still, when reformism fails and no credible radical alternative is available, capitalism is able to produce the very material conditions for its own ideological reinforcement: individualization, social fragmentation, and competition among the exploited. In this vacuum, reactionary, racist, and patriarchal movements flourish—even within segments of the working class itself.

It is therefore deeply irresponsible to abandon the self-organization of direct action and the construction of alternatives—whether in the name of reformism or out of a fetishization of spontaneity. The contradictions of capitalism, on their own, do not generate class consciousness, nor do they lead to human emancipation.

The Avant-Garde

The inherently episodic nature of class struggle means that only a small minority of the working class remains durably engaged in militant activity. What we might call an “avant-garde”—without any dogmatic overtones—refers here to those who, in the lulls between waves of struggle, strive to keep alive practices of solidarity and confrontation, whether in the workplace or within communities.

To avoid any misunderstanding, this is not a classical “Leninist” or “Trotskyist” notion of the avant-garde as an enlightened minority bearing a political truth to impose upon the masses. Rather, it is a way to designate a concrete role: that of individuals who, despite isolation, exhaustion, and defeat, persist in sustaining institutions, practices, and imaginaries of struggle—often invisible, yet essential to the reproduction of a militant collective memory. This role can—and should—be debated, renamed, and critiqued. But to abandon it altogether would be to surrender to strategic disarmament.

It is true that some militant figures, in certain contexts, become the social base of a working-class bureaucracy, detached from the concrete realities of waged labour and prone to the logic of reformism: distance from sites of production, freedom from the constraints of wage labour, and the adoption of organizational jargon and apparatus-driven practices.

But there are many others who continue to organize while living the contradictions of capitalist work: precarity, alienation, subordination. These are militants embedded in the everyday life of the class, patiently organizing their co-workers, neighbours, and communities.

Any organization, no matter how well intentioned, can generate its own inertia, rigidity, and hierarchical tendencies. But this should not serve as a justification for rejecting political mediation altogether. The fetishization of spontaneity, which draws a strict line between conscious militancy and popular authenticity, runs the risk of discrediting organic militant activity—that is, the kind of organizing that emerges from the lived experience of the oppressed—by reducing it to a suspicious form of avant-gardism, or even to a so-called “revolutionary racket.”

N.’s article illustrates this tendency when it cites contemporary movements perceived as spontaneous—such as the BLM/George Floyd uprisings, the Yellow vests movement, or the social revolts in Chile—highlighting the absence of mass organizations guiding them from the outset. However, it is highly unlikely that these movements emerged without the active involvement of a core group of experienced individuals, shaped by various militant traditions, whether or not they explicitly identified with a revolutionary consciousness.

Moreover, despite their strength, these movements did not articulate a clear revolutionary project—which might in fact serve as an argument in favour of the initial text. In the absence of autonomous mass structures grounded in explicitly anti-capitalist practises and discourse, social conflict tends to express itself in reformist, incoherent, or contradictory ways. Had a structured revolutionary counter-power existed over the past two decades—one rooted in collective memory, political culture, and autonomous forms of organization—it is likely that the political consciousness emerging from these popular movements would have been more clearly oriented toward systemic rupture.

Post-Industrial Society and Class Consciousness

Social classes are historically dynamic relations, and their political expression requires both a shared experience of exploitation and an organizational effort to build a collective force conscious of its own interests.

Yet many activists today resist the project of constructing class consciousness, often drawing on assumptions rooted in post-industrial society theories. According to these perspectives, the expansion of the service sector, the growing complexity of professional structures, the rise of theoretical knowledge, increased living standards, and the emergence of state regulation have reshaped social conflict around the control of information. This, in turn, is said to have enabled the emergence of a new middle class composed of managers and skilled employees. For these approaches, contemporary society is no longer structured primarily by class conflict, but rather by identities and discourses capable of defining themselves. As such, our societies are seen as less constrained by socioeconomic factors like class, and as offering greater room for individual agency—unlike the more rigid industrial societies of the past.

Nevertheless, these analyses tend to overestimate the impact of changes in the division of labour on relations of exploitation. As Peter Meiksins aptly puts it, “capitalism has never, not in the past, and not now, generated a homogeneous working class. On the contrary, it has consistently created a varied, highly stratified working class, and capitalists have had an inherent interest in making sure that it is as divided as it possibly can be.” Likewise, the increasing complexity of the contemporary division of labour does not eliminate the structural conditions of reproduction for the working class—namely, the obligation to perform surplus labour by selling one’s labour power on the market.

Although specific relations of exploitation characterize particular sociohistorical conditions and shape class formation, class consciousness has always been a contingent, relational, and collective process—constantly in flux between formation and disintegration. In this sense, class consciousness is not a mechanical product of socioeconomic factors, but the outcome of conscious agents acting within given social, political, and economic conditions. In the past as today, the development of a collective class consciousness has been a difficult and demanding process, forged through sustained and deliberate efforts of militant organization.

In short, capitalism still generates “fields of attraction” that polarize society into lived class positions. Sociohistorical processes can—and have—led to the emergence of groups becoming conscious of themselves as a class opposed to another. The challenge today is to bring about such a process through sustained organizational efforts, as was achieved in previous periods.

Self-Organization as a Conclusion

The lack of people in our demonstrations is a symptom of the current passivity of the working classes, in the sense that the street is an extension, not the centre, of social conflict. This passivity is rooted in the absence of collective struggles that provide an alternative to individualized or reactionary responses.

To claim that we should avoid organizational efforts for fear of becoming “revolutionary evangelists” is irresponsible. It condemns us to remain what we have been for the past three decades in Quebec: a radical fringe within reformist social movements; a weak political mediation with no real capacity to constitute a social force capable of threatening the existing order.

What is needed is not a dogmatic return to a rigid form of organization, nor a moralistic conception of militancy, but a materialist strategy for rebuilding the autonomous social power of the working class. This is not about imposing a universal model, but about affirming that without durable forms of mediation between experiences of exploitation and a political horizon, no counter-power can take shape.

A coherent revolutionary politics today should:

  • Identify the sites where exploitation is most intense, visible, and collectively experienced;
  • Build struggles that aim to democratize and repoliticize production and social reproduction;
  • Make the street an extension, not the centre, of social conflict;
  • Focus on the patient construction of class consciousness as a historical process;
  • Build popular organizations capable of demanding democratic control over economic spheres, through the unification, not the mere juxtaposition, of struggles.

É.

Among the Fragments – A Response to Inaction

 Comments Off on Among the Fragments – A Response to Inaction
Apr 252025
 

Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info

Struggle isn’t a puzzle we solve by sharpening definitions.

It is mud. It is cold dawn. It is the door that must be knocked on twice because the first knock was fear and the second is a promise. Like we’ve always been told.

He insists: “We must write, because only then will we be able to tell who is serious and who is not”.

We need theory that walks like the body does: limping when we limp, sprinting when sirens grow, picking glass from its heel after the march, then laughing about it around the kitchen table while the kettle shrieks.

Remember how it felt when the names were lighter? We called ourselves anarchists, autonomist, anti-authoritarian, some remained nameless, only to be used as a shorthand for the impossible promise we carried like contraband in our chests: that no hierarchy is eternal and that ordinary people can and should arrange their life without overseers.

We were meant to be the crowbar; we were meant to pry open rooms we were locked out of. Then the rooms multiplied, each declaring itself the only legitimate sanctuary. We became curators of micro‑identities: anti‑authoritarian but not anarchist, autonomist but not left, insurrectionist but suspicious of the autonomists. Language then turned itself into something heavier than the deeds it was meant to inspire.

Writing is not the enemy. Writing is a whetstone — but the blade must leave the house. Let pamphlets circulate, but let every pamphlet end with a time and place: “Meet here. Bring tools. No Phones.”

Let zines be passports that expire unless stamped by action.

Our word need be scrawled on cardboard, rehearsed in networks, corrected in practice, revised by failure, annotated in bruises, and eventually sung — without copyright — by crowds that forget who wrote the first verse, by crowds we won’t be apart of.

Hold the pen lightly, hold one another firmly, and hold no illusion that theory absolves us from the necessity of risk that is expected from each of us. Our pages must be worth the dirt that clings to their margins. So dirty them.

Fred Hampton claimed that only revolutionaries die, not revolutions. Yet, I can’t help but smell the reeking odor of formaldehyde off of both me and those around. Our rallies feel like wakes: we chant slogans that sound like last rites, we smash storefronts like mourners breaking dishes, hoping the clatter will bring about the insurrection, the revolution, le grand soir. The streets reply with sirens, batons, no red sun. Insurance replaces the window, we keep the bruises, lose momentum again.

Meanwhile, the rest of us exchange theoretical love letters across online boulevards where eye contact is impossible. We scroll, applaud, eviscerate, scroll again, waiting for the curtain to fall on the academic pageantry. If the pen must be hoisted like a holy relic above all else, I would sooner snap it, scatter the ink into garden soil, let it nourish tomatoes for me to eat, as only then would it be of use to me.

To the comrades in our Montreal milieu, who walked away, who have been seduced by the glow of theory, who are disillusioned, your absence gapes like an open ravine; it’s filled with ritualized quarrels. We keep circling the same questions — what now, how, with whom — discovering each time that the void is expanding because we have no base, no ground compacted by shared labour, no community. Inaction does not merely leave a space; it deepens the chasm that now threatens to swallow what little remains of our common ground.

To those who’ve departed: where are you now? Will we only cross paths under tear gas, silhouettes lit by dumpsters on fire? Will we be worthy of your presence then? Must devotion be visible only in the strobe of police batons? Will your labour be lent for barricades only? Come argue across the table while the coffee burns, scream at me in raw disagreement, have an unexpected laugh.

When you are all satisfied after the ink is finally dry, close the laptop, lace your boots, find the fraction of the faction you cannot stand and invite them to hash this out over a beer no obscure webpage can overhear. Let our factions braid themselves into something sturdier than agreement — into familiarity, into a landscape where contradiction is welcomed and nobody is exiled. Only dialogue, stubborn and messy, can weld practice back onto principle until sparks fly and the metal holds.

Writing is a spark, not a furnace. The furnace is built in kitchens, meetings, late night phone calls, and beer soaked arguments that end with a workable list of next steps, and a solid plan.

Respond to this post if you must, but understand I won’t scroll back to read it. I only seek a tap on the shoulder, a chair pulled out for us to sit.

Let the streets supply the footnotes.

— A Comrade Among The Fragments

Echoes of an Overflow

 Comments Off on Echoes of an Overflow
Apr 202025
 

Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info

A Partisan Reading of the Events from Spring to Fall 2024 in Tiohtià:ke-Montreal

This text seeks to take stock of the political sequence that unfolded from the McGill encampment of April 27, 2024, to the student strike of November 21 and 22 against the NATO summit. We wish to bring forward a number of remarks and lessons that the events of the past months have revealed to us.

At the heart of this text is the concern with the conditions of possibility for a conflictual situation and its possible passage into an insurrectional situation. Throughout the past year, we have tried to understand what unfolded in the movement of solidarity with Palestine in Montreal, stretching from spring to summer and up to November 2024. It is a matter for us of discerning the openings and the limits of such an overflow.

This text is addressed to those who feel concerned by the political experiments that took place throughout the spring, summer, and fall. It is addressed to those who want to engage head-on with the conflictual, insurrectional, and revolutionary political situation. That things were difficult, disappointing, enraging, and wounding is, to us, simply the obvious fact of any unusual political moment. These difficulties are not an end, but a starting point.

This past year has been a surprising one. Many people have lived through the most intense and overwhelming political and existential moments of their lives.

This text is also addressed to them.

“We’re trapped in the belly of this horrible machine
And the machine is bleeding to death”

“For the first time, workers felt at home in these factories where, until then, everything constantly reminded them they were on someone else’s property. Every moment of the working day, some painful little detail reminded the worker, at his machine, that he was not at home. These men and women, who had belonged to the factory every day of their lives, for a few days, the factory belonged to them. And that is the tragedy of such an existence: for them to feel at home in the factory, the factory had to stop. Now that the machines are running again, they find themselves under the same constraint. Yet at least they can become conscious of this tragedy. They have once felt what a factory should be. For the first time in their lives, the sight of the factory, the workshops, and the machines was a joy.”
— Strikes and Pure Joy, Simone Weil

Weil’s words feel distant to us. Between the four walls of the university, the machines are imperceptible. Yet the factory illuminates the amphitheater. The feeling of being “other” — everywhere. The intimate catastrophe of that.

That everything seems impossible, inadequate, futile, exhausting, titanic — this is precisely what shows the gravity of the work ahead. In the trough of the political wave, the specter of defeat still haunts us.

We are a few who share the sensitive affect of disaster, a few who want to organize. The world of a few years ago already feels very distant. Everything is accelerating, and the empire is tightening around the carcass of history. We are only a handful, and we are not satisfied with the small victories some proclaim. Some seem tired by the latest political sequence and take those victories as a balm. So, if these so-called victories are to be lived — reified perhaps, but still lived — so be it; let’s take them seriously, let’s cherish them. Let’s linger on the angles they suggest.

Since the end of the 2005–2008–2012–2015 sequence, we have witnessed first the festive, then the slow and silent death of something like a student force. Then, in spasms — the internships strike, “No to COP15,” the NATO summit — something like a combative spirit resurfaced. But the aura is no longer really there. Each attempt appears as a fleeting political moment. Its ephemeral character is its illness, not its direction; it is its internal limit. The punctuality of the last strikes is not a decision but a fatality. And it seems that there is something inauthentic in these moments, truly — in the sense that the act of striking does not appear as a moment of rage and breakdown.

The time of the strike should be a time when the empty and homogeneous time of everyday life is suspended, fissured, then broken open to new encounters, new uses, and unexpected moments. But the latest punctual strikes rather appeared as the preparation for a dull, well-known exercise.

Some have evaluated the student strike against NATO as a success, due to the level of combativeness of the nighttime demonstration of November 22, 2024. In our view, this is a misreading. The strike served as a pretext, certainly, but its real meaning lay elsewhere.

That night, as we recall, a few hundred students and pro-Palestinian militants briefly marched through downtown to the Palais des Congrès. In a skirmish, autonomous groups pushed back a police line into an alley, doused them with paint, and launched fireworks at them. A few moments later, trash bins and cars were burning; the windows of the Palais exploded under cobblestones and hammers. The crowd was quickly dispersed.

The media and police treatment of the event quickly took on enormous proportions, and the farce was set. It took the SPVM police chief himself to remind politicians that these were not antisemitic acts, but political gestures by groups known to the services. No arrests to this day — perhaps not so well-known after all.

That said, this demonstration is not representative of what was, overall, a disappointing two-day strike. Let’s rejoice in the brief insurrectionary outburst, certainly and with great joy, but also subject the real exercise of the strike to critique.

At UQAM, the most striking feature of the strike was how few people it managed to mobilize. A strike zone had been improvised in the agora. There were a few activities, leaflets, banners, readings, coffee. That was about it. A small internal demonstration of about half an hour.

At Concordia, the protest was spicier; the crowd, under the initiative of a constellation of autonomous groups, invaded the hallways and marched across several floors, leaving a trail of tags and broken security cameras behind them. At the administration office entrance, there was a moment of hesitation and confusion. One could imagine what could have been. At that moment, there was a real harmony between rage and joy. Initiatives seemed ready to spring up, unpredictable, outside of all expectations.

We say this is what a strike must produce: the play between what is expected and what is not, a proper reshuffling of the deck. But all of it was quickly aborted. Thirty minutes later, it was all over.

On the second day of the strike, a few more people showed up at the agora, mainly because students from striking CEGEPs had converged there. Just before the evening demonstration: security workshops, distribution of defensive materials, formation of teams — the agora was full, and it hadn’t been so lively in a long time. Surely, some people found comfort or real satisfaction in the exercise of the November 21 and 22 strike. We admit that we did too, a little bit at least.

Yet what happened seems to us to highlight mainly what could have happened.

“While the first form of work stoppage (the political strike of demands) is a form of violence, for it only brings about an external modification of working conditions, the second, as a pure means, is without violence. For it does not set out with the hidden intention of resuming activity after superficial concessions and some modification of working conditions, but with the resolve to resume only an entirely changed work, one not imposed by the State; a change that this kind of strike achieves less by provocation than by realization.”
— Critique of Violence, Walter Benjamin

In Critique of Violence, Benjamin focuses on two distinct forms of strike. On one hand, the political strike appears as a demand-driven exercise, where workers use work stoppage as a means to mediate and reach an objective, whether wage-related or otherwise. On the other hand, there is what Benjamin calls the “proletarian general strike.”

We will understand it here as a human strike, a social strike.

The social strike suspends the real temporality of productive labor activities and the normal everyday activities under capitalism. Labor time is freed from its dispossessing and alienating burden; time changes, space becomes inhabitable, and relationships as well.

The social strike achieves more than it provokes — that’s what Benjamin meant.

But the recent punctual student strikes have failed — or no longer manage — to suspend the normal course of everyday life. There was nothing shocking or disturbing about a few couches, a few slogans, and some banners.

Thus, we need to revisit the short list of possible objectives for a strike: apply pressure, change real life, alter the relation to infrastructure, reappropriate the use of spaces, free up time, and so on.

Given that the strike of November 21–22 did not manage to apply real pressure (since obviously it was targeting a counter-summit and no one dismantled NATO), we would have expected that the strike zone would be much more populated, that people would use the punctuality of the moment as a force — after all, it is much easier to overturn everyday life for one day than for six months — and open up much more playful, lighter possibilities than those of an endless unlimited general strike. We would have wanted associative and autonomous slogans, people taking initiatives, painting entire sections, setting up canteens, throwing parties, creating real spaces to meet.

Clearly, we are missing the organizing force needed to achieve something like that.

Yet a reappropriation of space and time — that is precisely what the pro-Palestinian encampments exercised, in their own way, a few months earlier. A melting pot between radlib-leaning students, the Muslim community from various backgrounds, insurrectionalists, the radical student left, familiar faces from community organizations, and a handful of autonomists.

But mass overflow through sheer numbers was the great absentee. Demonstrations organized on autonomous bases rarely reached over a thousand people.

That said, the pro-Palestinian encampments should still shed light on a series of things. Our reading here is that it was indeed the spring and summer 2024 pro-Palestinian encampments — and not the mobilization for the November 21–22 strike — that allowed a scene like the offensive-style demonstration of November 22 at night to emerge.

Our observation: no group, composition of groups, or organizations were capable of making the events of November 22 resonate beyond fantasy and chatter.

Parenthesis on Composition

The term “composition” became trendy after Les Soulèvements de la Terre and the impressive and macabre riot of Sainte-Soline.

In recent months in Quebec, it has been used to propose a strategic way to seize politics, its binaries, and its tendencies — and to possibly overcome them.

Here, however, we propose reading the concept of composition not as the strategic proposal of a problem, but as the real emergence, the current reality, of every contemporary social or political movement.

Understanding politics as a real situation, not an ideal one; striving to grapple with the real political landscape; organizing the counterpoints of the forces at play — the sequence of the pro-Palestinian encampments of spring and summer 2024 managed to express this political grammar differently than we were used to. It forced a number of groups and tendencies to work together.

Parenthesis on the Barricade

The encampments brought back into favor what we will call here the theory of the barricade.

We argue that what the barricade truly does is not limited to occupying or defending territory. Of course, the barricade is a liberation of a space, a redefinition of its uses, an effective dismantling of the existing landscape.

But the barricade also makes the position emerge.

It forces people not only to acknowledge its existence — something that discourse and calls to struggle often fail to do — but also polarizes and compels people to take a side. One stands either behind or in front of the barricade, and that means a lot. It doesn’t mean that everyone on one side agrees on everything, but that they share a certain sensitive understanding.

To be on one side of the barricade is also to reject the reality that the other side proposes. In a world where touching and affecting constitute real challenges, this is no small thing.

Parenthesis on Densification

We also note that the encampments managed to create a new mode of relationship-building that was unprecedented in the classical activist landscape of Montreal.

In the momentum of an international movement, McGill students, activists from the Palestinian Youth Movement, Montreal 4 Palestine, many from the Muslim community, Jewish students, and a certain number of folks in black took over McGill Lower Field and made it their own.

One might ask whether the length of time (74 days?!) ultimately showed the inefficiency of the tactic with regard to its demands — that’s a good question. Indeed, strikes or short-lived actions have little direct impact on the transformation of an institutional political situation.

But that’s not the point here.

What we saw, however, was that the exercise allowed for a particular densification of political and sensitive ties among people from all walks of life. The densification was spatial and temporal: in just a few days, strangers became comrades, then friends; people radicalized visibly; day-to-day tasks were taken up collectively; preparations were made for a smart response to eventual police raids.

All this created new forms of trust, but also new fears, new doubts, and new lived realities of struggle.

The densification achieved by the encampments was both their strength and their limit.

The shared conclusion after the camps: the exhaustion of the forces in play, particularly in the daily material reproduction of camp life.

The Dense Hour

That said, the densification also allowed new alliances and new forms of conflict to emerge — ones that agreed on the desire to clash with the police and urban and university infrastructures.

We saw a surprising contamination of offensive and defensive street tactics. Four key moments followed one another (though these do not exhaustively represent all conflictual moments):

i) the nighttime police skirmish at the Al-Aqsa Popular University and the simultaneous brawl;
ii) the occupation of the administration offices and the stormy demonstration of June 6 at McGill;
iii) the anger at the dismantling of Al-Soumoud and the retaliation against McGill’s administration building;
iv) the October 7, 2024 demonstration at Concordia amidst police confusion.

Each of these moments showed how, in a sudden surge of anger, forces that seemed impossible to bring together could realign.

It was a recurring work — both organized and organic — that allowed the normalization and multiplication of a tactic like the Grey Bloc during the summer and fall demonstrations.

In the contingency of spring and summer, where on one side relationships of trust and tactical knowledge were exchanged within the camps, and on the other side where overflow-prone demonstrations multiplied, a confrontation gradient emerged, breaking with the pacified demonstrations of previous autumns and winters.

This sequence is interesting for the questions it raises: it makes us wonder how we could have done better and earlier within the movement — whether, for example, we should have played a role from the beginning in the major demonstrations, offering a reachable presence for those who recognized themselves in rage, anger, and the desire to build a real force of overflow.

It also forces us to ask how we could have channeled the forces present beyond what actually happened.
If we had managed to meet and connect with more people, we must still ask: where and how could we have taken the overflow so that it would not just be a repetition doomed to exhaustion?

The sequence of camps and demonstrations seems to have burned out toward the end of the summer.
We understand this exhaustion both as an inability to connect widely enough to students, an inability to overflow beyond campuses, an inability to create meeting moments that were not mere repetitions of the so-called revolutionary milieu, an inability to intervene satisfactorily in already existing political spaces, an inability to resonate beyond a fairly limited group of already-convinced individuals.

This exhaustion also appears to us as a real fatigue. As we said, the daily logistics and material demands of the camps consumed internal energy that could have gone into thinking and doing otherwise.

Within the pro-Palestinian movement, this exhaustion had something tragic, tinged with an unbearable sense of helplessness.

Faced with these conclusions, we inevitably have to ask ourselves the following questions:
• How can we break through stagnation in conflictual political sequences?
• How can we avoid isolating ourselves within radicality while preserving it?
• How can we become reachable?

If there was an overflow last year — and we believe there was — it eventually ran into the trenches of a certain lack.

We think that lack is precisely that of organization.

A conflictual or insurrectional situation materializes through the articulation of several elements. We will name just two here:

On the one hand, such a situation can appear as if by itself — in the sense that the overflow seems neither anticipated nor properly organized. This is what appears to have happened with the pro-Palestinian movement in Montreal: it was more the accumulation of small events (and their international resonance) that led to the emergence of the camps and combative demonstrations.

This is also the form that riotous moments like the one on May 31, 2020, in Montreal, following the death of George Floyd, take. We call this spontaneity.

On the other hand, there are movements that are organized and strategized in advance. Here, we think obviously of the 2012 and 2015 student strikes.

These movements were organized based on local, regional, and national organizational structures.
The ASSÉ (Association for Student-Union Solidarity) was the structured element of the combative student movement. It allowed the establishment of training camps, mobilization campaigns, media coverage, and the organization of relatively large demonstrations throughout Quebec (especially in Montreal).

It was both a vehicle for student mobilization and something like a democratic front that could be joined on an almost permanent basis.

The relative success of the 2012 and 2015 movements was obviously not solely due to the work of ASSÉ and its various committees. Rather, it was the massive and autonomous overflow of these structures that allowed truly conflictual situations to arise.

We are not here to regret the death of ASSÉ or to advocate for the construction of strictly identical structures, but rather to observe what organizing on a formal basis makes possible.

This type of structure is obviously insufficient and full of limitations, but it still significantly expands the possibilities for mobilization. It is also alongside and starting from these types of structures that autonomous groups and affinity groups reach the height of their effectiveness.

That said, we must not fantasize about the revolutionary character of such structures. Nothing is truly revolutionary unless it dismantles the real course of everyday life under capitalism.

The coming months are uncertain: the looming shadow of mass impoverishment, the continual state of exception around a vampiric and filthy management of the housing crisis, mass layoffs, exploding inflation, and the doubling-down of extractivist projects everywhere.

The questions raised earlier must be taken seriously if we hope to be up to the situation.

If, trapped in the belly of a bleeding machine, a revolutionary politics is possible, then it must necessarily take place on the long timeline.

We must develop more infrastructures and organizational practices that allow us, collectively, to become reachable by others.

Post-scriptum on the Revolutionary Body

There are things that surge forth. But what surges forth also sweeps away.

We have seen it: insurrection will bear the mark of the strongest signifier. To refuse to play the game of hegemony — a game that inevitably leads to betrayal of oneself and of others — is to refuse to lay claim to insurrection for a program.

However, we must attach uses, ethics, and forms to it. We must embody gestures, and by embodying them, change their course.

When the State or Capital stumbles, someone or something must be there to make it fall. We cannot rely on a body that would surge forth spontaneously and strike the fatal blow. The opportunity is too great, and the risk too high.

What we need is a body capable of clarifying and strategizing this fall. In the same way, we need a body that can build quickly, connect, write, share, diffuse, and organize.

We are not under the illusion that this body would create insurrection itself — the exact recipe for that remains unknown to us. We recognize the role of the revolutionary body in creating movement, but not in creating the movement.

The Groupe révolutionnaire Charlatan said it — and we share their view: the role of the minority is indeed to force a taking of position.

We also assert that a revolutionary body must not be about a historical political tendency. We have seen in recent years how these tendencies allow us very little understanding among ourselves, even less the means to realize our ambitions or to draw real lines of convergence and fracture.

There is nothing revolutionary about claiming an anarchism or a communism of one kind or another.
Everything revolutionary lies in the work of making them happen.

On the other hand, it is never about denying or hiding radicality. The revolutionary question must cease to be constantly relegated to historical binaries.

These binaries must be brought back down to earth.

The reformist, in a given moment, may tip into insurrectionary action: they are crossed by the situation.

We are among those who prefer to think in terms of situations, strategies, ethics, and uses rather than political identities or moral principles.

Also, the revolutionary body must not have the subject as its object.

The band, the group, the organization: none are the image of what a revolutionary body should be.
There should be no claiming or process of recognition to belong to the revolutionary body — only the material and existential reality of participating in its construction.

We understand the historical necessity of certain groups and their key role in real infrastructural scaffolding. On the other hand, we also understand their insufficiency in constructing strong common revolutionary positions.

A revolutionary position does not consist in charismatic and publicizable proposals.
It consists in the creation of an opening, of a faultline within everyday life, a faultline that can be reactivated by others, and differently.

A revolutionary position must be reachable — but being reachable must not be its sacrifice.

We have been told that what enables resonance with others is authenticity in the gesture. We agree.

We have been told that creating relationships while distancing oneself from political identity affirmation is inauthentic and dishonest. Yet the very word “identity” does the thing and performs it.

Calling oneself insurrectionalist does not make an insurrection. Pastors preach to us that to be “anarchist” or “revolutionary” should prefix our political existence.

We will simply say here: calling oneself revolutionary or anarchist has little meaning in itself. It is the gesture, and its articulation with the situation, that gives those terms their meaning and strength.

We also reply that there is authenticity in wanting to be heard and understood — and that we must strategize the ways to be so.

We say that not everyone is able to understand what is being attempted by 50 people dressed in black standing isolated against an army of police. We say that, often, that does not resonate — or resonates only like a scream in a box, an echo of one’s own voice.

And we are not particularly keen on deafening each other.

We do, however, want to speak loudly enough to be heard and understood. We want neither to scream into the void nor to whisper among ourselves.

We move in the direction of that phrase which says: we cannot force everyone to speak our language; we must become polyglots.

In the end, being reachable means touching the heart of what is shareable in the intimate and sensible catastrophe of the world.

If the revolutionary position can appear as a secession from the everyday life of the economy and politics — in the sense that it emerges from torpor, incapacity, confusion, and anguish, and seeks to build ways of life harmful to the capitalist mode of production — it must not, at any cost, become a secession from the “individuals” of the social body.

Being able to formulate revolutionary or insurrectionary positions that are reachable requires a certain level of formalization.

Thus, our conclusion: overcoming the opposition between movement and organization appears more as a necessity than a wish. It seems the only way to get out of the insular “militant milieu” and actually try our luck.

As we said: one role of the revolutionary body is to elaborate revolutionary positions.

But the revolutionary body must also be wary of its own corporality.

The revolutionary body is not the sum of the identities that compose it, unlike the band or the group.

Its historical function must not be recoverable because it must consist in dismantling the everyday reality of the capitalist mode of production.

It must carry the destructive joy of the band — but without its gregariousness, without its character traits, leaders, and egos.

The revolutionary body must find its meaning only in what it actually achieves.

It must obsess over these questions: analyzing lines of force and weakness; following the evolution of conflictual sequences; distributing tasks for an upcoming situation; theoretical and critical elaboration; strategic and tactical follow-ups of past sequences; mapping and developing the infrastructures needed for building and maintaining said infrastructures; intervening politically at the right time to break the spectacle, etc.

The revolutionary body must fluctuate in intensity depending on the density of social conflict.
It must at the same time guard against activist urgency and remain a quiet force in the trough of the wave.

It must constitute itself as the interface for those who live the revolution in the world, head-on, even in the dead time of political sequences.

The revolutionary body must not claim the social body — in part or in whole — but its positions must seek to open it, clarify it, polarize it, and transform the real processes of production and reproduction of everyday life and its aesthetics.

Thus, the revolutionary body does not deny the forces already present in revolutionary milieus, but surpasses them.
It surpasses them because it seizes existing powers, but instead of claiming them or reproducing them, it articulates them strategically and opens them outward.

What must appear essential in the coming months is to succeed in creating a relatively formalized space where the different organizing forces of the revolutionary body can agree on a certain number of real priorities, distribute tasks to build and consolidate an upcoming conflictual situation, identify infrastructural shortcomings, and think about how to fill them.

Learning from the past year, from its successes and failures — and because the times demand it, doing better.

– HN

Flyer: REMEMBER 2020, 1968, 1878, 1791

 Comments Off on Flyer: REMEMBER 2020, 1968, 1878, 1791
Apr 042025
 

Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info

Download PDF to print (front/back), cut in half, hand out.

For distribution at protests, festivals, sporting events, waiting rooms, cookouts, libraries, dining halls, courtrooms, traffic jams, emergency rooms, corner stores, public transportation, sideshows, recreation yards, or anywhere else you may encounter others who’ve had enough.

\\\\\\\\\\\\ FRONT & BACK TEXT BELOW \\\\\\\\\\\\

REMEMBER 2020, 1968, 1878, 1791 — WE CAN WIN

Thousands of years of kings, queens, emperors, presidents, & ministers demanding obedience. 500 years of crackers enslaving & colonizing this planet. 250 years of anglo/yankee domination.

Trump this, Musk that. Democrats, Republicans, Zionists, Confederates, Fascists, Conservatives, Liberals, Progressives. So many flavors of the same expired bullshit.

2020: Cops executed George Floyd. A police station was burnt down. For a brief moment, the world opened up.

1968: White power executed MLK. Black communities erupted into rebellion. For a brief moment, the world opened up.

1878: Indigenous peoples in the South Pacific rose up in arms against european colonizers attempting to exterminate their communities & hijack their homelands. For a moment, the world opened up.

1791: Enslaved Africans & their descendants began an uprising in the Caribbean, destroying property, profit, & slavery. For a long moment, the world opened up.

Whether a handful of friends or a massive crowd, we know that the footsoldiers of every regime can be defeated. The secret is to begin.

« In Memory Of Our Fallen; Let us turn their cities into funeral pyres.
In Memory Of Our Fighters; Let us honor your names with fire and gunpowder.
Peace By Piece
(A) »

NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE!
¡QUEREMOS UN MUNDO DONDE QUEPAN MUCHOS MUNDOS!