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Title: Destruction or Political Ritual?
Author: Anonymous
Date: Autumn 2018
Language: en
Topics: riots, insurrectionary, spectacle, strategy, radical movement, imaginary party, black bloc, cortège de tête, composition, Sans Détour, The Local Kids, The Local Kids #2
Source: Translated for The Local Kids, Issue 2
Notes: First appeared as Déstruction ou rituel politique ? in Sans Détour (journal anarchiste apériodique), Issue 0, June 2018

Anonymous

Destruction or Political Ritual?

“Instead of large snail-paced processions, insurrection prefers

scattering, drifting, and moving fast. Looking not to take hold of

power, but to disband it by negating all authority, all privilege of

caste, it chooses its targets by their psycho-geographical proximity:

scores to settle, rich residences to loot, symbols of slavery to

demolish. It doesn’t look to engage in battle nor to militarise the

confrontation; by its omnipresence and vibrancy, it aims for the

annihilation of all separations.”

The passion for destruction is also a creative passion, said an

anarchist revolutionary – an unrestrained promoter of tumult and

insurrection, enemy of all authority irrespective of the colour or

ideology that legitimized it. He wasn’t talking of the destruction

caused by armies – bombarding, pillaging and raping on their way – but

of destruction as an act that makes tabula rasa of the values and

symbols of power, breaking up the social bonds of submission and

dependence, upending the roles assigned by society. He wasn’t talking of

the attempt – from the side of power – to destroy every form of life,

every rebellious or non-conforming existence, but of destruction as an

individual act of awareness in a world where we get used to passivity

and delegation from childhood on, to paternalism and the omnipresent eye

of the state. Not of the destruction of one’s own - provoked by the

infernal spiral of social cannibalism, alienation, maladjustment,

exclusion, depression and addiction. On the contrary, of destruction as

an act of will and of individual resistance – a necessary action that

implies to bring down on its path every thing that allows the

perpetuation and reproduction of domination, exploitation, misery,

alienation of a subdued life and not a lived one, the representations

that forge our most intimate and profound being and that tear up our

repressed existence. Destruction, finally, as the only act not to be

recuperated by the progressive and humanist tentacles of a power that is

capable of changing face a thousand times while preserving its essence.

As a passion, a liberatory drive; it foils strategies, it doesn’t make

calculations, it is far removed from politics. However, it is not

synonymous with blind irrationality if it is moved by a liberatory

fervour.

Since some time, in several demonstrations in France, a certain

destructive joy seems to have shaken up the political forms of consented

dissent, ritualised and inoffensive, that – today as well as yesterday –

serves to legitimize and reinforce the democratic robes of domination. A

joy that dresses in black, appears suddenly in demonstrations to shatter

windows and burn some cars, that seems to want to do away with

democratic representation. Yet, in the sequence of masked moments and

those with faces uncovered, in the heterogeneous ensemble that is called

cortège de tête, it transpires clearly now that there are forces that

want to control, channel, represent and steer the dancing.

For example, the force of a party – increasingly less imaginary – that

issues bombastic communiqués to celebrate its potency and galvanize its

troops. A group that performs excellent acrobatic pirouettes to maintain

an insurrectionary face – to seduce the rebellious youth – while keeping

a political credibility towards the friends and allies of the

institutional left, towards the intellectuals, the syndicalists, towards

the associations and towards the journalists. Besides, beyond this

“party”, it seems that behind the masks are hidden several small groups

and individuals that are sincerely democratic, always concerned about

maintaining a legitimacy for the public opinion. A whole range of texts

explaining that the black block is nothing more than a spatial strategy,

that its aim is only to “attack symbols of domination”. They define

limits, normalise these moments of collective revolt. And we sometimes

saw some of these vandals physically blocking other demonstrators from

attacking an office from Emmaüs – a humanitarian association that

collaborates with the state in the managing of migrants – or from

snatching the cameras of journalists, auto-media or spectators producing

images useful for repression and contributing to transforming the riot

in a spectacle. Or, more, intervening when it is not a bank or a

McDonalds that loses its windows, but a big bar for the bourgeois in the

5th district. Of course, because “the people” will not understand and

they will not agree with us!

So, lets go for the passion of destruction, but within certain limits,

limits set by the strategy. But who gets to decide the strategy? After

all, we arrive again to this place. The cancer of politics reappears,

the thirst for freedom and revolt has to give way to the quest for

consensus. No looking for complicity between exploited, marginal,

pissed-off, potentially rebellious individuals. But rather the will to

appear credible towards fantasized revolutionary subjects; “the

workers”, “the popular neighbourhoods”, “racialised persons” etc. etc.

Brands most of the time identified with different components of the

reformist left: labour unions, citizen organisations, associations… We

also arrive at serious authoritarian excesses: on several occasions we

have seen political groups organizing real steward teams (services

d’ordre) inside the cortège de tête or physically assaulting individuals

or other groups that didn’t respect their instructions. These

authoritarian excesses don’t seem surprising to me, they’re part of the

will of these groups to channel the desires for revolt in a view on

struggle that makes its central axes from composition and strategy. More

disturbing on the other hand, is the almost total absence of critique,

passivity that allows these groups to establish their strategies.

These moments of revolt end up losing their subversive character to

re-enter in the ranks of the political ritual and the spectacle. This

with all the elements specific to them, even if they are camouflaged by

informality and masks; leaders and followers, beginnings of steward

teams and media representation. We could ask ourselves if, in fact,

these dynamics are not intrinsic to a tendency towards centralization,

to wanting at all costs take part in the “social movements” in the hope

of radicalising them. For being more visible, for gathering a greater

quantity of forces, we end up sacrificing the most important part of

ourselves and to serve, sometimes in spite of ourselves, as a radical

workforce for political forces with which we share neither perspectives

nor methods. Incapable of tracing an autonomous revolutionary path, we

go from one demonstration to another, on terrains chosen and negotiated

by the labour unions and the prefecture. So the voice of

anti-authoritarian individualities disperses in this collective

euphoria, engulfed by the ultra-consensual hymn “Siamo tutti

antifascisti!” (sic!), implicitly or passively accepting the role of the

new little leaders of the radical movement.

And if we would decide to undermine the normalising and ritualising of

revolt? If we would try to be really uncontrollable, outside the ranks

and the appointments of the parties? What would happen if hundreds of

persons would organize in small groups, everywhere, during the night,

without troops or leaders, to attack domination in its multiple

structures? If anti-authoritarian groups and individuals would decide at

times to coordinate to act together, for example to sabotage the flux of

economy? But that has to necessarily go through a critique and

surpassing of the political rituals, including the most radical ones.

The point is not to oppose collective action to that from small groups,

but to oppose the centralizing logic that tends to steer, channel and

often recuperate revolt. It’s about deepening the creative potential of

destructive action, by freeing these actions from the limited horizons

in which some want to enclose them.