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

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

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

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

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

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

ONLY GLOBAL INSURRECTION CAN STOP GLOBAL WARMING It is a testament to the boundless horror of capitalism that after decades of its changelessness, of the end of history, of a famine of other possible futures even in the minds of children, that those of us alive today who will see this world change forever cannot count ourselves lucky. Ecological devastation is present on a scale never before seen, along with misery, work, starvation, slavery, and war. The destruction of our entire ecosystem is built into the logic of capitalism. Carbon emissions and climate change are a mere symptom of the ecological degradation caused by capitalism. Taken as an isolated issue, climate change is ludicrous. Even if burning fossil fuels didn’t cause climate change, it would still be cancerous to humans, pollute the ocean and atmosphere, fuel the automobiles and missiles of war, and create the raw materials of everything from disposable plastic bags to useless toys. Just as cutting down the forest reduces the planet’s ability to store carbon, it also destroys innumerable species, rips asunder indigenous forms of life and evicts them from their homes, and destroys even the possibility of the joy many humans get from being outside. Even if a “green” zero-carbon capitalism was remotely plausible, it would transform living natural resources into dead capital. If it’s not production of carbon, it will be the destruction of water, of the soil, of our lives, all sacrificed to capital. ...

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.” ...

In order to have a black bloc, you need to have a group of people dressed head-to-toe in black, including masks, or who are at least doing something as close to that as possible. If you don’t have that, you don’t have a black bloc. The black bloc is a tactic. A tactic is a tool that is used to achieve certain ends. As a tactic, the black bloc works to anonymize its participants. In an age when facial recognition technology is improving everyday and police departments regularly ask the cooperative public to help them identify participants in riots, a black bloc can be used to conceal the identity of those who break the law in heavily surveilled public spaces, as with almost any demonstration in downtown Montréal. ...

Two banners were hung in Montréal in solidarity with the G20 prisoners. Solidarity with the G20 prisoners / Tear Down the Prison Walls was hung from a building on St. Catherine street downtown. Solidarité avec les Incarcéré(e)s du G20 / Propageons la Révolte (Solidarity with the G20 Prisoners / Spread Revolt) was hung in the St. Henri neighborhood. Flyers were scattered at both sites, and further distributed in the metro system and on the street in the following days. We hope this counter-information action brings a smile to our locked up comrades. ...