The aim was disruption; not a demonstration as normal event, a weekend affair to idle away one’s idleness. As Blockupy announced, the March 18th intervention against the inaugural ceremony of the European Central Bank’s new headquarter’s building, was directed at interrupting the flows of capital, in its many forms, and to oppose it, a commune, however ephemeral it might be. “Against the malicious spectacle of capitalism, we pose the actual movement of ideas. The multiplicity of the many is more militant than a black block and more peaceful than a sitting blockade. We act together and we will not fear. Vive la Commune!”
The response by the german State was 10,000 police, fully equipped with riot gear and supporting vehicles and other technologies of physical containment and repression, against some 20,000 protestors. Over three hundred protesters were arrested, and many more injured. The responsibility for the violence that did follow was then attributed to the protestors; as if the massive militarised police presence was circumstantial, as if their task was not to prevent at all costs the protestors from disrupting “normal” activities in the city, as well as the bank cerimony, as if it were not the task of the police to first and foremost protect and guarantee the circulation of commodities.
In the reign of exception of contemporary crisis capitalism, movement and speed are essential to the reproduction of the social relations that define capitalist society; to not move, or facilitate movement, is an irrationality, an obstacle to be removed. To struggle against capitalism is, today among other things, to rupture its spaces and times, its paths of circulation. The collective protest in Frankfurt was one such effort.
Creating cracks, in pictures …
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… video …