Montréal Counter-information

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WORK IS WAGE SLAVERY

PROPERTY IS THEFT

The history of the economy is the history of theft.

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

In both cases, we see the pattern of forced dependence. People who were actually working in a dignified way – which is to say, for themselves, for their communities, at their own pace – were prevented from doing so through the organized violence of colonisation. Land that had belonged to everyone was divided up and usurped by the elite, the ancestors of many of those who are still wealthy today. Even after colonization, labour was little more than a tax. Give up a certain amount, more if you were black and less if you were white, and keep the rest to feed yourself. You could at least still see the product of your labour, and nourish yourself with it.

But then something happened. Slavery gradually ended – not in a sudden moment of liberation, as the history books tell it, but through a gradual shift towards the more profitable system of wage slavery. While no longer forced to work at gunpoint, the end

result is the same with all of the means of survival out of reach without money; people are forced to work, spending their time in the service of capital. Prisons and police await those who disobey. No one was liberated. Rather, black and white were transformed into machines.

Where’s the use in outright slavery when the bank can own your house, the boss can own your time, the collection agency contracted by the credit card company or the National Student Loans Centre can own your future, fashion companies can own your insecurities, Hollywood producers can own your heart, and the newspapers can own your mind? The daily life of a worker-consumer only consists of scrambling around to appease her owner’s needs.

The factory system makes workers a part of the process. The service sector jobs of today go even further, making demands of our very moods. No longer do we owe our bosses merely a certain amount of product, or even a certain amount of time, but a measured quantity of enthusiasm. Service with a smile. Who can imagine a more intimate form of violence? We’re not even allowed to be depressed by our total lack of power over our own lives. Already by the age of five, the sullen and the impatient ones are screened out for Prozac and Ritalin prescriptions. Kids diagnosed with disorders are often suddenly “cured” when they are allowed to organize their own lives, or determine their own rhythms. But once the needs of the economy send them back to work, back to school, suddenly they relapse and have to go back on pills.

The disorder is the society that sends bodies through a meat grinder, that demands we become interchangeable parts. The blackmail is the society that demands everything from us – not just our time, our obedience, and our energies, but also our friendliness and good faith – and gives us nothing in return but the means to participate in it more fully, on its terms, spending our meager wages on resources stolen from across the entire planet; the right wardrobe, the right diet, the right music collection. In fact, this careful assemblage of mass-produced goods is the only legal way we have to express our individuality.

At the base, those who extol the virtues of work are the same old blackmailers: work for us or starve in the gutters. But once we begin negotiating those who call themselves leaders, they only start to make more demands of us. Let’s not negotiate with the world of work and misery that we desire only the end of, but attack it in order to destroy it…

While misery exists, we choose rebellion.

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FIRE TO THE PRISONS AND THE WORLD THAT NEEDS THEM

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

The state is not interested in reducing crime, but in increasing social control. Decent imprisonment, like a humane capitalism, does not exist. Imprisonment – being held hostage by the state – is a reason in itself to rebel against jailers and their barbed wire. Just like on the street, there are people in the prisons, psychiatric institutions, and detention centres who do not come to peace with their conditions, who do not bury a certain taste for freedom just because a judge decides that they will live in a cage. Within these walls, there are those who refuse the daily humiliation of obeying the guards, for whom the walls and the barbed wire are not yet seared into their brains, and who rather observe them as obstacles that have yet to be overcome. The punishment that the judge imposes upon them is a consequence of a world that is based on exploitation and obedience, a world that would not function without the constant threat of prison for those who choose to not submit to the misery surrounding them.

Waves of revolts, riots, and rebellions are widespread within the prison system. By rising up, by burning the prison’s infrastructure, by attacking guards, and by escaping, some prisoners have rediscovered what the system has tried to take from them: courage, the desire for freedom, and the will to put an end to at least a part of this society of domination through rebellion against it.

Our desire to live free of exploitation is worthless if we are unwilling to act on it. The prison machine isn’t as well oiled as it seems, and those on the outside can find its gears on every street corner – from prison architects to banks that finance prisons. Our passion for freedom is stronger than their prisons!

“It’s the most terrible institution of our era, this justice, tired of outbidding the crime it pretends to punish; it no longer crucifies, tears apart, skins, impales, brands, and even beheads. There is no longer the iron, the wheel, the gallows, the stake, or anything. What replaces them is time. Life amputated by time! This is prison: time imposed in its nakedness. We no longer kill, we let die.” – Serge Coutel

“Even if prisons were transformed from human storerooms into luxury hotels, even if the prisoners of all prisons are satisfied with ‘reduced sentences’, even if the everyday beatings of prisoners are replaced by sly agreements and assimilated by correctional policies in accordance with the ‘human rights’ model, even if the ‘white cells’ turn ‘pink’ and heroin gives way to methadone we will remain forever enemies of any structure that denies us our freedom. We will be the rebels inside your luxury hotels and the arsonists of legal justice. We will be eternal fighters in love with freedom. Better prison conditions mean nothing more than improved conditions of captivity. For us the issue remains in its essence, the condition of captivity in itself.” – Yiannis Dimitrakis, anarchist bank robber imprisoned in Greece

“Prison is not simply a place, it is also a condition, the antithesis of which is freedom. By the same token, the absence of freedom is prison, and only when the latter is perceived as one’s own condition does it become possible to enter the destructive dimension without measure…Nothing less will do.” – Jean Weir

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AGAINST THE LAW, POLICE, PRISONS, AND THE ‘GOOD CITIZEN’

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

To the rulers of this world, we are, indeed, all criminals – at least potentially. We are capable of threatening the tranquil sleep of power, because we can see through through the veil of the law, choose to ignore it and take back the moments of our lives, whenever we can, on our own terms. After all, we are the ones they are policing and monitoring. One can only wonder if it is the fact that this is so glaringly obvious that makes people blind to it.

If the banks are attacked, it’s because money is the central cause of misery. If the windows are smashed, it’s not because life is expensive, but because the existence of commodities prevents living at all costs. If the machines are broken, it’s not out of a desire to defend work, but to attack the slavery of salary. If police and prisons are attacked, it’s not just to get them out of our neighborhoods, but to get them out of our lives. Anarchists are those who would set fire to a bulldozer or a new luxury home rather than let a forest be cut down, who would rather hear the sound of shattering glass than a politician’s speech. The criminals are those who care. And the greatest crime is to sympathize with them. The greatest act of servitude is to pretend they are monsters.

In the eyes of the powerful, we, all of us, are to be domesticated. What better way to prove that we are well trained than to make us bow down to absurdity? Our bosses kill many people every year in this country through easily preventable work accidents, occupational diseases, and the release of poison into the air and water. Yet, we are taught to fear those weaker than us and to cling closer to our leaders for protection. The ‘good citizen’ collaborates with authority, reports suspicious activity, follows the rules and works hard, to make it easier for the government to protect him from shadowy threats that he cannot, and must not, understand.

The good citizen doesn’t notice anything suspicious when politicians and CEOs take credit for “creating jobs” and blame immigrants for “stealing jobs”. The good citizen may complain when the banks steal millions, but he will agree that it is terrorism if someone burns the bank down, and he will be afraid of the person who robs a bank. The good citizen goes to war for the ambitions of politicians and the profits of corporations.

The good citizen forgets where he came from.

The good citizen identifies with her owners.

The good citizen follows the rules that are stacked against him.

The good citizen has nothing to hide, and is willing to be strip-searched to prove it.

The good citizen is a snitch, a follower, a sellout.

The great empires weren’t just built on oppression. They were also built on the consent of the applauding masses in the timeless Roman stadiums of every dictator. The good citizen is the enforcer of law and order where the police don’t have the numbers to be present, and without them we become one step closer to determining our lives in total freedom. The good citizen will betray those who rebel. Most of all, he betrays himself, because the system he protects offers nothing to inspire loyalty other than lies

LET’S FIND EACH OTHER AS COMRADES IN THE CRIMINAL STRUGGLE FOR FREEDOM –

AGAINST EVERY MENTALITY THAT WELCOMES POWER, AND EVERY CONSCIENCE THAT TOLERATES IT.

LET’S KILL THE COP IN OUR HEADS, AND REFUSE TO CARRY A PRISON INSIDE OURSELVES.

“In my life, I haven’t learned to crawl left and right like a snitch and informer, I haven’t learned to betray my friends and comrades, to abandon them, to denounce them in front of my persecutors to save myself. In my life I’ve learned to keep my head high, to be a proud person and not to crawl, even if that has a cost. If some people have learned to live like snitches, I really feel ashamed for them.”Vaggelis Stathopoulos, anarchist prisoner in Greece

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Black bloc: attacking authority, capital, and the state openly in the streets for all to join

“It is true that the state is not a window, but neither is it just an abstract concept. Breaking windows is not a revolutionary act and neither is any other act if taken out of context and presented as an abstraction, ignoring the intentions and strategy of those who break the windows. The state or capital or colonialism cannot be attacked as abstractions. They can only be attacked in their material forms, their social relations, and their institutions. It is not possible to attack all forms and material components of power at once, so they must be attacked in pieces at different times and locations.”

When the intention of being in the streets is merely to politely ask something of our rulers, demonstrations become reproduced as controllable and purely symbolic events. Enforced passivity and obediance characterize these marches from point a to point b which then pose no threat to the continuation of power. The role of the democratic dissident, who pleads for power to reform the system that should be destroyed, is something to be shed. The point is not to ask for our enemies to stop, but to make them stop.

People who recognize the state and capital as total enemies of freedom – and who want to destroy them rather than engage in compromise or dialogue with them – sometimes use the black bloc tactic in the streets. Black blocs are when people wear hoodies, pants, shoes, gloves, and masks of the same colour in order to conceal their identity, preventing the police from identifying and isolating which actions are commited by whom. Participating is as easy as bringing a fighting spirit, trusted friends, and certain clothing to change into and out of. A black bloc is not a gang – unless a gang can mean a group that shares the desire to act for freedom together. It is not an organization but a tactic open to anybody who wants to participate in attacking this world of misery, work, ecological devastation, and domination imposed upon them. A bloc is united by shared intentions to revolt, not by membership or allegiance to leaders, because anarchists self-organize and have no leaders.

Since the 1980s* when it became popular in Germany, black blocs have been used by anarchists so that people can act as they desire while minimizing the threat of repression from the prisons and courts, which use their laws to protect power and property. This social order which imprisons, exploits, and dominates us can be subverted by attacks, and black blocs allow people to attack and develop their strength with others. These moments, during which power loses control to enforce itself, create social points of reference for rebellions to come, pushing towards insurrection.

It is the police who are the front line of defense for this social order, and everywhere is propagated the myth that they are invincible. There is a constant effort to convince us that attacking them is senseless hooliganism. We know otherwise. Our lives can be reclaimed together in an empowering way and brought closer to freedom by acting against the enemies of our freedom: the police and their prison society, the banks and other institutions of capital, the good citizen snitches.

Those who revolt are presented as “thugs”. The authorities tell us that we are violent, because we are those who want to live our lives freely on our own terms, who refuse to reproduce the roles forced down our throats, who seek the abolition of property, capital, and authority for a world of total freedom and solidarity. This is all to distract us from the immense and systematic violence with which the power of capitalism and the state maintains its control. By struggling to put an end to this social order, which will always condemn us as “violent”, we can steal back our lives and dignity.

In a society that values property over life, property must be destroyed for us to live.