Grenoble, France: Fascinating and miserable

0
211

In the night of Monday 16th April, 3 estate agencies, an Apple store and the offices of a construction and public works firm were vandalized in the centre of the city of Grenoble.

For rebel individuals destruction and devastation have always represented both the goal and the means to live their own negation of the world. From small acts to big attacks, widespread gestures, fascinating or miserable, make conflictuality against all forms of power real.

In recent days several sites of social housing bodies were trashed in this city. Inevitably the rulers of these institutions and the city moaned and preached about their social function in favour of the poor. The local scribblers, virtual and paper, obviously transmitted this shameless hypocrisy. Annoyed by their insolence, tonight we are taking our hammers and going out to devastate some offices, as an echo to the attacks on the social housing bodies.

Let’s start by saying that the distinction between public and private is an artifice of social domination. The leftists fell into the trap, the anarchists didn’t. Everything is private! Our public is no less than the private that belongs to the State. Any landlord, elected or not, will always be our enemy. Private implies privation, of a roof in this case. We are left with nothing but the streets, fields, occupied places or the forced acceptance of the racket set up by the landlords’ order.

The generalized dispossession of the possibility to build and live each at their own leisure guarantees power and profit for a gang of extremely organized parasites: building companies bosses, engineers, law officers, notaries, bankers, insurers, estates agents, public officers, owners… not to mention their mercenaries, vigilantes, cops, screws and when needs be, the military.

Considering that the bourgeois classes skilfully find a common cause in the constant theft of houses and that the law and money take the possibility of living free away from us.

Why should we protest against the incompetence of the institutions, the avidity of an owner or the amount of a notary’s fees? Why overload ourselves with details when we totally refuse the social repressive organization of our individualities? As the just expression of a fantastic thief goes: ‘I ask nothing of those whom I hate and scorn’. Why, then, claim, negotiate, dialogue with a fundamentally authoritarian bureaucracy when we only dream of its ruin?

Assiduously resistant against a world that isn’t ours, we thought it possible to desert it in order to create new ones.  In voids, interstices, abandoned places, on the margins, we dived into the hope of going far away. Alas, any attempt at escaping beyond what is, always ended up with yet another detention in the jails of the old world. As we could no longer escape and didn’t want to, we stopped turning our back on the enemy so as to face it, strong in our boldness. As there’s no elsewhere, any outside the exorbitant control of our lives, we have no choice than to arm our anger and joy, and let our beings revolt, resist.

We are taking the occasion of this text to contribute to bringing an ugly episode of repression out of the shadows. Several individuals labelled ‘associations of malefactors’ were searched, almost simultaneously in Limoges, Toulouse, Ambert and Amiens. Accused of having set fire to some gendarmerie’s vehicles (Limoges) or of having caused devastation in a group (Clermont), three people were remanded in custody ranging from 4 months to 4 years [1], whereas others went on the run. The media were clearly ordered to keep their mouths shut, so we intend to open ours.

To those searched, arrested and wanted we send our full solidarity.

P.S. Why an Apple store? No links with housing, but if we had to find reasons for destroying the windows of this company, ink would flow for too a long time. Beyond the strategic reasons for making it a target, we have first and foremost sensitive experiences.

Muscles and nerves

sublimate our anger

let’s strike the glass

destruction frees us

[1] Two comrades were released in April under judicial surveillance. The person arrested in Limoges on 27th March is still being held in pre-trial detention.

[Translated from Italian by Act for freedom now!]

[en français][in italiano]