Our environment is constantly changing. And slowly but surely, almost imperceptibly, we also change with it. The environment changes us. It influences our gestures, our understanding of our times, our movements, our desires and our dreams.
Look at this city. A place that is in a constant state of change. Power keeps erecting malls and prisons, occupying the neighbourhoods with thousands of new cameras and additional police stations, building condos for the rich and pushing the poor further out of town, improving public transportation so that everyone can arrive everyday on time to their place in the economic system. Yet – and the defenders of the system know it all too well – the occupation of the territory by all these infrastructures remains quite relative. Within the time span of a few wild nights, an insurging crowd could, technically speaking, reduce all of it to ashes. It is exactly because of this that the real occupation – the long lasting occupation which guarantees the survival of oppression under different forms, throughout history – lays somewhere else. It lays in our heads.
We grow up in a certain environment, and without pity this environment tries to determine our imagination. This is exactly the goal of the powerful, with no consideration to the time or the expense necessary to transform the city of Brussels into their image. In the end, not only do they want our daily activities be conducted to the service of this environment, but that also our thoughts are limited to these frames. To the point where our dreams remain within the cages that this environment traps us in: citizens, consumers, employees, prisoners, petty criminals/dealers, always on the margins…
It is right there that the real victory of Power lays: in the moment where all the memory of revolts demolishing cages is erased. In this city, not too long ago, these revolts were often breaking through the daily routine. Cops were lured into ambushes, police stations assaulted, video-surveillance was sabotaged, the toll gates of the metro system put out of order, entire neighbourhoods were made dangerous for all sorts of uniforms, mutinies in prisons, with echoes of solidarity on the streets… Power wants us to forget these possibilities, so they become less and less seized. Because once they are forgotten they simply cease to exist. It is a constant struggle to keep these possibilities open, to push them further, to invent some new ones and to put them into practice. It is a constant struggle to regain our imagination and our memory, because it is them that can be the fuel of an uncontrollable fire against oppression, or to stifle any possible outbreak. Direct action in all its forms is our weapon. Like a crowbar prying open the gates of our imagination, she keeps our thoughts alert and our actions ready for combat.
There is nothing but the offensive game that can make us really dangerous for the established order. Let’s imagine what seems impossible and let’s do what seems unthinkable.
[Translated from Ricochets n°9, August 2015]