Let's Free Ourselves from the Traditional Protest Format

After the demonstration, some went home delighted that 10,000 people had marched through the city, others frustrated that they hadn't disrupted the established order. Many of us no longer believe in the traditional form of demonstration.

 

Yesterday afternoon, we participated in the eternal repetition of the same old pattern: marching from point A to point B, confined within the confines of the prefecture and its law enforcement agencies. A few outbursts from a few who enjoy creating disorder in this overly orderly world livened up the demonstration in places, but the feeling of helplessness that emerged still has the same bitter aftertaste. We repeated these forms extensively during the pensioners' movement, to what end...? Yesterday, many of us in the march were watching each other out of the corner of our eyes to see if a truly disruptive movement was about to take place, waiting for a spark to ignite and seize it. It's not surprising that at the end of the demonstration, several hundred people felt the urge to continue beyond the route and take to the streets in their own way. Uniting our bodies in the spontaneous movement to the rhythm of anti-fascist and anti-capitalist chants, writing our messages on the walls, disarming the cameras that monitor us, giving voice to the rage that grips us at the sight of a brand complicit in genocide, like Starbucks, Carrefour, or McDonald's, or law enforcement, etc.

 

At 9 p.m., some of us were still taking to the streets, protesting the repression of our arrested comrades. The rage is there, and it must completely overflow the union structure. We certainly need a time and a meeting place to meet, but we can invent the next steps together. Let's remain an autonomous and horizontal movement and not give in to the temptation of over-organization. Beyond the demonstration, the "neither unions nor parties" slogan that initiated the movement must take shape in Bordeaux. General meetings must not be shams of horizontality or spaces for power grabs. In Bordeaux, organizations are very present, and general meetings have gradually become more vertical and have sometimes even been misled. As proof, the September 10th demonstration was declared by the unions at the prefecture, contrary to the decisions taken at the August 31st general meeting and announced as such at the start of the following general meeting.

 

According to some, we should be pleased to have succeeded in convincing the unions to participate in this call by declaring the demonstration: no, it's not a victory, it's a concession, even a compromise for those who identified with an autonomous movement.

 

September 18th is already a union date that has been announced; we will participate and seize it as an additional opportunity to grow the movement, but we must at all costs refuse to be absorbed by the union forces, who are too quick to channel movements and sit at the negotiating table with those whose dismissal we demand. To avoid being co-opted by the institutional agenda, let's above all not seek political smoothing. General meetings must be places for organizing and confronting points of view where self-management and collective intelligence can be deployed. Let's not seek to channel the movement into a single path; collective organization must allow for the expansion of possibilities, not their restriction. Let's remain diverse to be unpredictable and ungovernable: the horizon is the fall of the system that is crushing us, but the paths to achieve it are diverse.

 

Let's organize ourselves to truly block everything.

 

While organizing the movement is a double-edged sword, organizing offensive actions is necessary for them to be effective. Let's be honest with ourselves: Bordeaux didn't block anything on September 10th, and across France, few blockades held, due to police repression. In our country, the morning meeting at the Bassens UL at 4 a.m. only brought together about fifty people who, lacking other plans, attempted to block the tram depot. After being quickly evicted by the already on-edge BAC, we went to the Fargues Saint Hilaire roundabout to support the action proposed by our peasant comrades, but there were too few of us to establish a balance of power that would allow us to truly disrupt traffic.

How is it that so few of us ultimately wanted to "block everything", if we believe in the strategy of blocking the economy?

 

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