We continue to share voices from Nuit Debout.
The french journal Ballast is one of the most lucid, eloquent and critical voices on the country’s left. The members of the collective responsible for the journal have been involved individually in Nuit Debout since its first days and on the “44 of March” , as a group, distributed freely a paper edition, Ballast Debout, in support of the movement. Below, in translation, is the opening statement of the “newspaper” …
We need to keep open not only our ways of thinking, but also the related methods of organising, the tactics, techniques and technologies we use – it’s a constant battle to ward off institutionalisation. That sense of openness and movement seems fundamental to a different way of life.
The Free Association
On the night of the 12th of April, the french organisation Attac organised a conference on the movement Nuit Debout with David Graeber and Frédéric Lordon, at the Paris Bourse du travail/Labour Exchange , a stone’s throw from the occupied Place de la Republique. The debate had the virtue of clarifying questions and crystalising positions.
Thousands of persons gather in the Place de la République in Paris, and in all of France, since the 31st of March. Assemblies are formed where people discuss and exchange. Each appropriates speech and public space.
Neither heard nor represented, people from every horizon re-take possession of reflection on the future of our world. Politics is not an affair of professionals, it belongs to everyone. The human being must be at the heart of the concerns of those who govern us. Particular interests have taken priority over general interests.
Each day, we are thousands occupying the public space in the Republic. Come and join us, and decide together our common future.
A Nuit Debout Manifesto
The Nuit Debout movement in france is a moment of excess, a composite of such monents played out everyday in occupations, assemblies, protests, mutual aid. In Paris, the daily organising and meeting around a multiplicity of themes (labour law, refugees, feminism, the economy, prisons, police violence, solidarity with workers protests/strikes), commissions set up to respond to the needs of occupiers (food, shelter, infirmary, etc.), the creation of a “popular university”, radio and television, and the contagion and diffusion of the movement through Paris’ neighbourhoods beyond the Place de la Republique and beyond Paris, is testimony to convergences of protest, as well as creation; the excess that creates new desires, identities, subjectivities formed in encounters freed of divided labour and hierarchical legal and social status.
The Nuit Debout movement in france takes on no single form, even behind the ritual of the general assemblies in Paris and now other cities. It is plural, chaotic, fed by the multiple protests against the country’s new proposed labour law and a diversity of organisations and collectives coming from other social movements. Yet it is precisely in this absence of order that the square occupations become spaces of convergence and of proliferation (rather than of enforced collective decision making), susceptible of generating lines of resistance/creation beyond State-Capital.
The anarchist collective CrimethInc. initiated last month a critical analysis and discussion of “democracy”, promising a series of reflections. What follows is the fourth essay, Destination Anarchy! , preceded by the introduction to the series and an introduction to the essay. We have shared earlier the first three essays, The Party’s Over, From Democracy to Freedom, From 15M to Podemos …
“This must be a perfect mini-society,” a member of the gardening committee told the crowd. A poetry committee has been set up to document and create the movement’s slogans. “Every movement needs its artistic and literary element,” said the poet who proposed it.
the guardian 08/04/2016
From its first night on the 31st of March, the “Nuit Debout” (stand up/rise up, at night) protests in france have spread from Paris’ Place de la Republique to over forty cities in the country, and beyond (e.g. Brussels, Berlin, Valencia, Lisbon), while mass protests against reforms to the labour code continue. The echoes of earlier occupation movements resonate, from Tahrir to Gezi Park, in form and substance: the occupation of city squares, the organisation of horizontal assemblies, working groups and thematic commissions, self-organisation of the needs of the occupiers, the refusal of all political representation by parties or labour unions, the absence of any identifiable leadership or of demands made upon public authorities … in sum, a politics of affirmation, self-creation, rather than of opposition to established powers; a politics of autonomy instead of a call on existing powers to respond to unsatisfied social needs.
Whether in time of revolution or in time of peace, the worker must be housed somehow or other; he must have some sort of roof over his head. But, however tumble-down and squalid your dwelling may be, there is always a landlord who can evict you. True, during the Revolution he cannot find bailiffs and police-serjeants to throw your rags and chattels into the street, but who knows what the new Government will do to-morrow? Who can say that it will not call in the aid of force again, and set the police pack upon you to hound you out of your hovels? …
Now the worker must be made to see clearly that in refusing to pay rent to a landlord or owner he is not simply profiting by the disorganization of authority. He must understand that the abolition of rent is a recognized principle, sanctioned, so to speak, by popular assent; that to be housed rent-free is a right proclaimed aloud by the people
Are we going to wait till this measure, which is in harmony with every honest man’s sense of justice, is taken up by the few socialists scattered among the middle-class elements, of which the Provisionary Government will be composed? We should have to wait long–till the return of reaction, in fact!
This is why, refusing uniforms and badges–those outward signs of authority and servitude–and remaining people among the people, the earnest revolutionists will work side by side with the masses, that the abolition of rent, the expropriation of houses, may become an accomplished fact. They will prepare the ground and encourage ideas to grow in this direction; and when the fruit of their labours is ripe, the people will proceed to expropriate the houses without giving heed to the theories which will certainly be thrust in their way–theories about paying compensation to landlords, and finding first the necessary funds.
On the day that the expropriation of houses takes place, on that day, the exploited workers will have realized that the new times have come, that Labour will no longer have to bear the yoke of the rich and powerful, that Equality has been openly proclaimed, that this Revolution is a real fact, and not a theatrical make-believe, like so many others preceding it.
Peter Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread
The lines of fissure in capitalism are many. No one single contradiction, if any, marks it. It is, as with any society, a conjunction of social relations, relations of oppression, in permanent re-constitution. To then identify amidst this complex composition a single relation (capitalist-worker) as definitive is illusory (which does not thereby mean that that relation is secondary or irrelevant). But if we begin from the idea that capitalism is a confluence of social relations constructed and sustained on the basis of the private appropriation of common creative activity, then the battle lines in the war against Capital are plural.
The anarchist collective CrimethInc. initiated last month a critical analysis and discussion of “democracy”, promising a series of reflections. What follows is the third essay, From 15M to Podemos, , preceded by the introduction to the series and an introduction to the essay. We have shared earlier the first essay, The Party’s Over and the second essay, From Democracy to Freedom …
When I play the saxophone, I play life, I play love, I play anger, I play confusion, I play when people scream …
Gato Barbieri
For the free jazz artist that he was, is, Gato Barbieri, who died on this last 2nd of April; for his music of freedom and for his music as a politics of liberation …
Nuit Debout: An anonymous voice among many
The voices of Nuit Debout are many. If by political or social movement is meant a consistent, unified, centralised and programed force, then Nuit Debout is not one. It is rather a space, a confluence, a threshold of and for initiatives, agencies, projects. The “general assemblies” of the squares should aspire to no more than that, to be but the condition for that confluence. Anything more than that is to transform the assemblies into embryonic sovereignties which will demand exclusions while including, which will generate leaderships and corresponding policing, which will gate and close the threshold.
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