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Title: No borders no papers Author: Raoul Vaneigem Language: en Topics: Albert Libertad, borders, immigration Source: Retrieved on January 10, 2011 from http://www.noborderbxl.eu.org/spip.php?article282
There was a time when the anarchist Albert Libertad, having a
premonition of the kafkaesque bureaucracy and the paper dictatorship,
invited citizens to burn their ID papers and to become humans again,
refusing to let themselves be reduced to a number, duly filed in the
statistic state inventories of slaves.
Our beings today seems so impregnated by numbers that define bank
payments, wages, social security, unemployment benefits and old age
pensions that living without papers seems as impossible and unpractical
as the recommendation of Libertad to finish this degrading and
controlling labelling of the social livestock.
In this way we are confronted with a double and paradoxical existence :
on the one hand, everybody — no matter what his or her ethnical
belonging, social status, or character — has to have the right to access
this bureaucratic jungle that our society has become; on the other hand,
it is unacceptable that the fate of humans is so divided by a gargantuan
calculator, of which the inhumane character is incompatible with the
right for a free and beautiful life.
If we add to this a process of state collapse because of financial
forces. States who in their turn are threatened by a worldwide monetary
collapse. States have lost the privilege — that they arrogantly
claimed-, to look after the public goods. Yesterday still, they took
their levies from the citizens by fierce taxes and fines, but in return
they took care of public services — education, health care, postal
services, transportations, unemployment benefits, old age pensions. What
has happened to this now ? States have become the valets of banks and
multinational enterprises. These banks and enterprises however, are
confronted with the fiasco of insane money, a whirlwind of billions of
investments in financial speculations, where money flies around, instead
of working on the progress of primary industries or other sectors with a
social use. Billions forming a bubble bound to implode and to provoke a
great monetary crash..
We are the prey of managers of bankruptcy, eager to reap their last
short term profits overexploiting citizens, the same citizens that a
demented austerity policy invites to sacrifice themselves, to fill the
bottomless deficit gap, dug by monetary embezzlement. Not only can the
state no longer fulfill its obligations as seen in the old social
contract, the state even cuts the budget of public services. Burying
everything that guaranteed, if not a real life, at least survival. And
the reason given for this is a great swindle called public debt. The
state has folded itself back upon the only function that reminds itself
of its reason to exists : police repression. The only lifeguard of the
state is spreading fear and despair. The state accomplishes this rather
efficiently by spreading an apocalyptic worldview. It spreads the rumor
that tomorrow will be worse than today. Wisdom consist according to this
view in consuming, spending before going bankrupt, make profitable
everything that can be made profitable, even ruining its own existence
and the whole planet, as to make this great swindle last forever. The
fight supporting undocumented migrants should take into account such a
context, in several ways.
a)The state takes attention away from the way in which public goods are
rerouted, the state installs fear and discouragement, and entertains it,
so to fulfill its role as a security police. And, as always is the case
in such conditions, it uses the old tactics of scapegoating. For
citizens, frightened by the rise of unemployment, the lowering of
purchasing power, the rise of precarity, it names some ‘dangerous’
groups that will serve to reroute the anger and aggression, that would
otherwise be directed against the corrupt exploiters that govern us.
Everything is good to keep up the smokescreen that masks the real
problems.. While in Belgium Walloons and Flemish are both as much
victims of the mishandling of the state at the fringe of a financial
gap, there is a criminal nationalism that tries to put one group against
the others. A shifty xenophobia aims to identify people of Arab descent
as Islamic terrorists, it turns into anti-Semitism the grounded
opposition to the anti-Palestinian politics of the Israeli government,
it works to oppose unemployed workers and undocumented migrants, it does
not blink to resemble the nazi’s in the way they despise and treat
gypsies (Rom and other travelers). We have to take into account that the
corrupted state does everything to hinder a true solidarity between
have-nots struck by precarity, and those who still enjoy a little bit of
good existence, bur who’ll lose this security if they do not accept the
fate that awaits them. It is this solidarity that we need to restore,
and it is to this solidarity to which we appeal when we defend
undocumented migrants, unemployed, but also workers who fight their
exploitation, organisations preparing the autodetermination and the
abolishment of money, movements that fight the cuts in public
transportations, education, health care, postal services, primary
industries and agriculture. We will defend the poetry of life against
the laws of profit that degrade life.
b)answering the repressive politics of a corrupt government, does not
mean using the same violence against the state, the answer is going
beyond their humiliating dictates, it’s propagating civil disobedience..
How ? By interfering to restore a quality of life that the state has
ruined under the pressure of maffia bankers. We are all left-behinds,
sacrificed for the morbid interests of an absurd system. We do not have
another choice than to bet on ourselves to get out of this mayhem. There
is, within most women and men a poetic richness and a creativity capable
of installing in all domains more humane conditions. Many people,
pacified by routine, ignore this still. But it is often the only source
that those people, scapegoated and marginalised by the politics of
corrupt democrats, have.
In stead of trying to bring someone down, we should valorise the human
and creative aspects of someone. Is it not an awful shame to fear and
chase gypsies, instead of developing their artisanal and musical
resources so that every passage they make turn into a joyous event.
Instead of trying to re-integrate unemployed in a labour market upset by
the multiplication of enterprises shutting down, why not let structures
develop where each ones potential and imagination can develop fully ?
The struggle for undocumented migrants slides too often into a
desperate, even suicidal defence. But offense is the best defence. Not
an aggressive answer, like a police intervention remote-controlled by a
functionary who calls for austerity with those that he ruins. It can be
an offensive who installs everywhere spaces liberated form profits,
market and commerce. Spaces where the right to live, to be happy, to
create, spaces for beauty, for enjoyment reject the rights of barbary,
commerce and survival of the richest. We will have to fill up the gaps
that the state lets, as it furthers away form the demands of citizens.
It is up to us to prepare ourselves starting now if we do not want
anymore that taxes serve as gapfilling for banking mistakes and
speculation on the stock market. Our main task, is restoring poetry in a
society where the taste for profit and power have removed all poetry. In
a blindly aggressive world, drawing, reinventing, giving priority to
human values, like generosity, creativity, enjoyment, an autonomous
life.. Becoming human means denying the slavehood of labour and the
power to proclaim your right to be happy creating good conditions for
the benefit of all.