A prisoner of my class and some clothing, I walk,
dressed in white along the gray street.
Melancholy and merchandise harass me.
Must I keep going until I collapse?
Can I rebel without arms?
Filthy eyes in the tower clock
No, the time of complete justice hasn’t come.
It’s still the time for dung, bad poetry, phantasms and hope.
A poor time and a poor poet
Melt together in the same impasse.
In vain I try to explain myself, but the walls are deaf.
Beneath the skin of the words there are ciphers and codes.
The sun consoles the sick but does not renew them.
Things. How sad things are, considered without emphasis. A flower bloomed in the street!
To vomit this ennui on the city.
Forty years and no problem solved, not even stated.
No letter written or received.
The men all return home.
They are less free but carry newspapers and spell out the world, knowing they are losing it.
Crimes of the earth, how to pardon them?
I took part in many, others I hid.
Some I thought clever, they were published.
Smooth crimes, that help one to live.
The daily ration of error, home-delivered.
The fierce bakers of wrong.
The fierce milkmen of wrong.
To set fire to everything, me included.
They called the boy of 1918 an anarchist.
But my hate is the best part of me.
With it I save myself
and give to a few a small hope.
Let the trolleys, busses, the steel river of traffic, keep their distance.
A flower still in bud
Eludes the police, pierces the asphalt.
Observe complete silence, stop all business,
I swear a flower grew.
You can’t see its color.
Its petals aren’t open
Its name isn’t in the books.
It’s ugly, but really–it’s a flower.
I sit on the ground of the capital of the country at five in the afternoon
and slowly pass my hand on this insecure form.
Beside the mountains, massive clouds pile up.
Little white dots move on the sea, chickens in panic.
It’s ugly. But it’s a flower. It breached the asphalt, the ennui, the nausea and the hate.
Carlos Drummond de Andrade, The Flower and the Nausea
In Brazil, we are witnessing this intensification of violence, repression, and electronic surveillance not as an interruption of the rule of law, but as an extension of its logic. Today this is called the “austerity policy”—the similarities with Greece are evident, especially in Rio de Janeiro. These austerity measures are only the latest reallocation of resources in a centuries-ongoing series of colonial robberies channeling resources from the public purse into the pockets of the powerful, a process that precedes democracy yet has been stabilized by it. What is disappearing now is the illusory promise of isonomy (self-rule and equality under the law) that supposedly qualified Brazil as a modern democracy.
From the Crimethinc Collective, reflections on the “exceptional” politics of Brazil …
The war against autonomy: The State attacks the ZAD of Notre-Dame-des-Landes
This April 9th, the expulsion of the ZAD of Notre-Dame-des-Landes began. If the proposed airport for the region was struck down, the french government has repeatedly announced that it will not accept the “illegal” occupation of the land by squatters.
Some 2,500 military police, with heavy equipment and demolition vehicles were mobilised for the occasion, for an estimated 250 people occupying some 40 structures.
If the forces of the State seem excessive, the language of the government leaves no room for doubt as to the motives.
The target, according to the police are the more radical elements of the ZAD. (Le monde 09/04/2018) The prime minister, Edouard Philippe has not tired in repeating that it is a matter of reinstating the rule of law and that all of those whose presence in the Landes is not inscribed in a legal framework must quickly leave the territory. (Parisien 07/04/2018) “I hope that during the day everything will be fine and that in a few weeks order will return to Notre-Dame-des-Landes,” said Gérard Collomb, minister of the interieur. “The law had to be reinstated,” said the interior minister, who nevertheless reminded the police of the need to act with “restraint” and “ethics”. (Le monde 09/04/2018)
Between the lines, it does not take a great deal to see what is in fact at stake. The so called “radicals” are not only those people, all of the people, who have resisted successfully the construction of an airport (in a fifty year struggle), and thus the saving of a way of life and its associated environment, but they are as well those who have experimented with autonomous forms of life, and it is this that must be destroyed and erased.
The law, and the creation of the leveled space of “normality” in which the law can function, revels itself as thereby grounded in the “exception” of violence, which is in fact itself the norm.
The ZAD of Notre-Dame-des-Landes resonated across france, and beyond. And whatever its fate today, it stands as an example of what a radical anti-capitalism can be.
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