“Yellow vests” – The struggle continues

“May the Force be with Us”

Submitted by Richard 1917 on January 10, 2019

Since what some have called Act IV, the central apparatuses of repression of bourgeois order and capitalist State are really aware of the magnitude of the ongoing social movement taking place before our eyes. On that day (December 8th), they went in a big way and pretended not to let “misbehaviour” of the previous weekend to develop: 89,000 cops, gendarmes, CRS [antiriot units] were deployed throughout France, including 10,000 in Paris, tightly controlling the country’s main cities, mass and preventive arrests, armoured vehicles to break down barricades, direct laying fires of thousands of grenades, “sting-ball grenades”, “stun grenades”, “GLI-F4 grenades” (presented as a “non-lethal weapon” containing an explosive charge consisting of 25 grams of TNT)…

Facing this impressive arsenal, the “yellow vests”, or at least the most radical of them, fought back and reacted with strength and determination. And other segments and sectors of the population are joining them, those who blow up and find themselves engulfed in this breath of fresh air represented by this commendable movement, this process of struggle, this momentum for refusal of poverty and misery, in short those that “the powerful” of this world and “the rich” have always disdainfully called “the vile populace”, “the plebs”, “the scum”, “the rabble”… And this time, it was not only Paris that was burning but the anger spread like wildfire to Bordeaux, Toulouse, Lyon, Marseille, Saint-Etienne, etc.: barricades and burning cars, very violent direct clashes with the militias of the capitalist order, looting of luxury shops, and thus re-appropriation of a small part of the social wealth produced by our class, by us proletarians, just a tiny and minuscule moment in the general process of expropriating the expropriators, of negating the private property of capitalists that the social revolution movement will have to assume in the next and future confrontations…

More than ever, we are right to refuse poverty, dehumanization and permanent war, which are our constant companions, we are right to confront all the combined forces of the social dictatorship of capitalism (government, police, militias, army, political parties, trade unions, churches, media under control, charity associations…) that seek only one thing: to bring us back into the fold, to submit us, either by the brutal police and military force, or by dissuasion, discussion, negotiation, disinformation…

We are absolutely right to want to take our lives and struggles in hand. Let’s continue to refuse any “representative” who will only represent himself and the economic and political interests of his class, his clique of gangsters. All our class enemies ask us to become “structured”, “organized”, to “raise demands”, to “negotiate”, etc. We just spit on them: our spontaneity and our movement, we will structure them and organize them in our own way…

More than ever, we are right to refuse to negotiate with our masters, with our exploiters, with our oppressors, with the rulers, because we proletarians have NOTHING to negotiate at the risk of getting lost in the whirlwind of renunciation: we only have to lose our chains (certainly somewhat gilded ones, as bourgeoisie pretends in its posh lounges!) and we have a whole (new) world to win; we are fed up to survive, we want to LIVE! To negotiate? That smells like dying! So let’s continue to firmly drive our radicalism because the history that passed and the history to come, the past and future generations are watching us and count on us to ensure that humankind finally triumphs over the sordid…

Facing the watchdogs of “the haves”, “the rich”, “the pleasure-seekers”, facing their militias armed to the teeth, facing the media and peacemakers, let’s continue to oppose our rage and our determination, and let’s push them to break ranks. Let them desert if they don’t want to remain bastards. We don’t want our blood to spill; we just want the end of their privileges…

We are absolutely right to continue to radicalize, to shake up their world made of wealth for them (wealth that we proletarians produce) and of misery, of “low wages”, of difficulty “making ends meet” for us, “those without teeth”…

Let’s continue to refuse the crumbs “generously” granted by Macron and his clique (“de la poudre de perlimpinpin” – “snake oil”) as we refused to be fooled by the instrumentalisation of the “Strasbourg attack” and all the calls to stop demonstrating; let’s continue to resist evacuations by the police and military forces of our road block points: roundabouts, shopping centres…

Every day we can see this obvious fact: violence is all about capitalism and its State, what we do is only to defend ourselves. It’s the capitalist society, where “the rich” crush “the poor”, which as a whole is brutal, which breaks and destroys our lives. All of us, we merely react by a healthy and vigorous violence that expresses our humanity. So, rise and shine comrades, friends, brothers and sisters in the struggle, let’s destroy the fortresses of our masters....

Many of the “yellow vests” call for Macron’s resignation, and even if we understand the class hatred that this “buffoon” can catalyse in the movement, this is not enough but it also constitutes a false alternative, a diversion by which “the power” intends to neutralize our energies. The problem with Macron’s resignation (or even better if through our struggles we make him resigning) is that at the very moment the ruling class, the national and international bourgeoisie, will immediately find a successor, more “clean”, more “honest”, more “close” to our concerns, to us, “the rednecks”, the “scum of humanity”, “the hungry”, “the wretched of the earth”, we proletarians who have only our arms and our heads to sell every day to the boss, who only have to go to work every day for a miserable wage. The real problem is that the whole of this capitalist society must be destroyed so that we can finally establish genuine human relations without never again dominating and dominated, without oppressors and oppressed, without exploiters and exploited…

Among the “yellow vests”, many are still calling for legality (RIC, etc.). Let’s simply say this: bourgeois “Law” is only the legal codification of the relations of production, of the relations of domination of a social class (the bourgeoisie, the owners of the means of production of life, or better said the class of capitalists) against another social class (we, the dispossessed of the means of existence). This bourgeois Law is ultimately only the fierce exercise of their class violence under the guise of more or less passive participation by the dominated in their own domination. But more and more, it’s tearing apart at the seams and the movement of “yellow vests” is only one of the expressions of this saving and renewing process…

Let’s go until the final consequences of our critique!
Let’s organize, let’s discuss, and let’s feed together the fire of the revolt!
Friend, do you hear in the distance the revolution rising?

“Merry CRISIS and Happy New FEAR” (Athens, 2008)

December 31st, 2018
nosotros.proletarios

Comments

baboon

5 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by baboon on January 12, 2019

Another perspective from the ICC's section in France. It's about a month old but nothing fundamental has changed and the text remains entirely relevant.

http://en.internationalism.org/content/16621/police-violence-riots-urban-guerrillas-looting-real-cause-chaos-and-violence