Face to face with the enemy. A yearly overview of attacks against power in France

Face to face with the enemy. A yearly overview of attacks against power in France 2020-2021

Domination has acquired a dazzling rythm of mutation. The veil of technological advance is covering the world as we knew it in shrowds. Ecological disaster is not “coming”, is is already there. While industrial progress advances triumphantly, instability on all levels (social, political, economical, ecological) is increasing. A difficult challenge for those who will continue to fight for freedom as a totality, and not as a negociation on the lenghts of our chains. Old models of revolutionary intervention are fading away as the urge for new perspectives presses.

A century ago, anarchists on the banks of the Rio de la Plata in South-America declared war on power and came “Face to face with the enemy”. They went to seek out the enemy in their lairs with offensive moves. They bombed banks, police stations, institutions, getting ever more closer to the enemy.  With anarchy in their hearts, and a gun in their hands, they went forward, not waiting for the masses or the building of a broad movement. And every bomb they put echoed with the numerous publications they spread. Action and idea went together, hand in hand.

Today, how do we come “face to face with the enemy”? Where does he hide, where can we hit him? As domination shifts to new models, anarchists and rebels also broaden their views. In the last year, amidst an unprecedented lockdown in the name of collective health, many went out at night to come face to face with the enemy. While attacks took place against many targets of repression like police stations, prisons and State institutions, a broad wave of sabotage targeted the veins of domination: its networks of telecommunication, transport and energy.

Some decades ago, a critique of industrialism wrote : “We need not be surprised, then, that in more than one area the Power Complex has been undergoing severe strain. Though immune to any frontal assault except by another power system of equal size, these giants are particularly vulnerable to localized guerrilla assaults and raids, against which their mass formations are as helpless as was heavily armored Goliath against a nimble David who did not choose to use the same weapons or attack the same parts of the anatomy.” Today, this is more then ever the challenge for anarchists. To fight in small groups, without any centralisation, hitting the enemy relentlessly with all the means and creativity we have at our disposal, learning how to keep out of our lives and circles as much of the technological nuisance as possible, supporting and aiding eachother in all possible ways to shape good conditions for continuing the hostilities in a world that tends to close ever more spaces. Without any guarantees that these paths will lead the world to anarchy, but knowing for sure that such lives are worth being lived.

webadresse: 
Lizenz des Artikels und aller eingebetteten Medien: 
Creative Commons by-sa: Weitergabe unter gleichen Bedingungen