Destroika-Video: March 18th 2015: European Central Bank opening in Frankfurt

Destroika III

The Troika, not content simply to oversee or even directly administer the budgetary functioning of entire States, seeks also to dictate the very conditions of our lives, reducing the latter to a simple question of “human resource management”. The impression of being dominated, overwhelmed, and finally altogether crushed by a self-appointed clique of “Core European” bureaucrats has become one of the more salient features of the present.

We are living through the intentional destruction of the social, a calculated pauperization of our daily lives, a massive acceleration in the concentration of wealth and power, a conscious instrumentalization of xenophobic resentments. The German state, operating as a sort of European metronome for the above phenomenon, is the right target for all those who find themselves in the cross-hairs of this attack: refugees risking their lives, all those whose conditions of existence grow more and more precarious, the
middle-class deprived of its security along with its last remaining illusions. Who will join us on our way? It´s time to get our lives back, to reinvent community, to organize practically.

In the interval, various forms of “local struggle” have come to the forefront. Some of them have gone as far as to set the tempo for conflicts spanning an entire country: Val de Susa in Italy, Notre-Dame-des-Landes in France, Gamonal in Spain, Chalkidiki in Greece, Lampedusa-Hamburg in Germany. Still, these struggles, even when they seem to win out, never go beyond a certain political threshold, thereby allowing the national government in question to dismiss them as fringe elements and marginal phenomenon.

Remaining confined within purely self-referential forms of conflict condemns us to defeat in advance. Calls to align our diverse “local struggles”, to create a common front, magically united by simple declarations of solidarity are in no way sufficient to combat the world-wide social attack underway at present. Just as some of us turned our backs on an increasingly abstract global struggle ten years ago, it now seems to be the moment to tear ourselves away, when necessary, from the attraction of the local.

For us the response to the present situation passes by the unmediated presence of those who stand up for themselves, those made superfluous in the Europe of the Troika, those who are not satisfied with an individual resistance to the reign of unconditional self-optimization. To combat this concerted and highly organized attack, we need a new way of imagining how to fight together.

This is why we will go to Frankfurt
As the restructuration of the European economy takes on the character of outright plunder, as the violence of disciplinary practices becomes more and more generalized, the more it becomes necessary to fight back – to defend our infrastructures and friendships everywhere the present social attack is being planned, prepared and made to operate on a vast scale. Therefore we will go to Frankfurt, because our defense requires us to attack.
It is necessary to transpose our experiences of local struggle to a higher offensive level, beyond the national frame of reference inherent to the movement, in order to sandwich the State on the European level as well. The opening of the new headquarters of the European Central Bank will be the occasion for us to reconverge, to unite our forces against a common enemy.

They think they can conduct business as usual without reckoning with us. But the number of those
who’ve subtracted themselves from the dreadful business of constant self-assessment grows and grows. There will be a reckoning to made by all those who’ve suffered through their politics of pauperization and destruction, a reckoning to be made for all the humiliations endured in the corridors of the administration, in the rat-race of our daily lives, for the shame we feel to no longer be young enough, fit enough, or flexible enough to “compete in the global economy”. And the more that their world breaks down around them, the more they seek to redouble their sinister grip on everything that lives.

And to our enemies, who understand no language other than that of calculation – you will pay the bill.

WHAT IS, IS – WHAT IS NOT, IS POSSIBLE


Video


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