Against the maxi-prison and the world that needs it

Mid-May we were treated to a small avalanche of shit in the press. Journalists flocked to throw their light on the struggle against the maxi-prison. Scandalized by the fact that this struggle does not take legal paths and advocates direct action and self-organization to prevent the construction of the new prison hell, it does not address institutions and politicians but blazes its trail into the poor neighbourhoods of Brussels (and not only) and has nothing to share with journalists and everything to discuss with other rebels, they have not hesitated to describe it as “urban guerrilla” and the inevitable “terrorism” .
For the two years that this struggle persists, unlike all the political cliques and benevolent citizenists, we have not minced our words: to prevent this maxi-prison we need to conduct a direct offensive combat. Organize ourselves outside any formal structure, speak out in our own areas of struggle and in the streets (and not in front of the microphones of journalist hacks or sitting quietly around a table with our enemies), act through direct action and sabotage against the companies that want to build this maxi-prison and against all that encloses us in this city that looks more like an open air concentration camp each day.
It does not surprise us that this struggle proposal, and the sympathy and enthusiasm that it generates among all those who are sick of everything to do with this rotten system, displeases power greatly. The fact that it displeases reporters, these amplifiers of the voice of power, only makes us smile. That it makes developers and builders of this work of repression nervous is quite logical.
If they thought they could build this prison safely and applauded by everyone to make money on other people’s misery, they made a big mistake. If our response to the press has been to ignore them coldly and continue our struggle far from the cameras and the places the media like to gather like vultures (the hacks well know that they will be welcomed with stones in the neighbourhoods and so they rarely venture into them without the protection of their buddies in uniform), that of others opposing the maxi-prison has been very different.
As for the “symbolic occupation” (their own words) of the terrain of the future maxi-prison, many people have felt the need to declare in front of the cameras that they are opposed to “criminal acts” and are “pacifists.” So pacifist that they prefer to rub shoulders with magistrates (they even belong to the civic platform against the maxi-prison, these same judges who every day condemn people to die in jail), elected officials, journalists, cops rather than be associated with the “scum”, “criminals”, “illegal immigrants”, the “poor” and the “violent”.
“This amalgamating must stop,” said a spokesman of the legalistic opposition (who thinks he can stop the maxi-jail with shots of citizen participation, petitions, interviews, playful actions). Well, oddly, we agree: a deep abyss separates those who struggle autonomously and directly, agitating in the neighbourhoods and acting both by day and in the night, from those who prefer official conferences, a smaller maxi-prison, a few carrots. Day after day, action after action that abyss is widening: either you fight against the power that wants to impose this maxi-prison or you lick the ass of power, its laws and its defenders, regardless of the “good intentions” that you imagine they have.
“We have nothing to do with these actions” stated an “occupier” of the land in Haren, speaking of acts of sabotage against the companies and those responsible for the maxi-prison project. If he was already probably making an amalgam in assuming the right to speak on behalf of all the other occupants, he tried to torpedo a fundamental aspect of our struggle proposal: solidarity between rebels, hostility against the State and its henchmen. If others have claimed, still on invitation of the hacks, that self-organization and direct action “discredit the struggle,” the answer comes almost alone: but what struggle are you talking about? Not ours anyway.
Published in Ricochets, No. 7, June 2015 (Brussels)

Everyone should fall in line. That’s what they want, from our first to our last breath. We should be in line for the classrooms, for the checkouts of the supermarket, for work; we should queue up on the roads, in front of the counters of bureaucracy, at the polling stations… until the end of the line, in rows of tombstones.  An entire existence that drags on like this – our muscles only contract to kneel down, our hearts only beat for goods – in the safety of a prison.

The cities are looking more and more like prisons, with every corner planned to be better surveilled, controlled, patrolled. The inhabitants are like prisoners escorted by capitalist exploitation and handcuffed by social obligations, always under the artificial eyes of security cameras. Everyone directed towards craving the consumption of feelings, carefully calculated, delivered by omnipresent screens.

This prison-society promises well-being, but delivers mostly massacres, as it is demonstrated by the drowned dreams of those who have tried to cross its moat and the bombarded bodies of those who rise up at its gates. Those who take the freedom to not beg but would rather trace their own paths, will be confronted by an army of politicians, judges, police and journalists.

While in Brussels a new maxi-prison is being built, in Athens a special regime is being imposed on combative prisoners; while in Paris they are laying the first brick of the new Justice Palace, in Zürich and Munich other monstrous Police and Justice Centres are being planned; while powers are making agreements beyond national borders on how to carry out counter-insurgency strategies, research laboratories and surveillance industries are set up to produce social peace. And everywhere, from Spain to Greece to Italy, repression hits anyone who is tainted by the most intolerable crime: ending with obedience and inciting others to do so as well.

However, these huge projects of repression are not only met with applauses, silences or complaints. Sometimes they crash against a hostility that is resolute and daring. It is the case, for example, of the biggest belgian prison to date, currently under construction. A project whose path has already been studded by direct actions against those who collaborate, both public institutions and private enterprises. From paint to stones, from hammers to flames, from destruction to sabotage, it’s a constellation of attacks that completely breaks away from the penal code, political strategy or complacency with the State. If the defenders of this order want to smother this struggle, it’s because a breath of freedom can become contagious. Everywhere.

The human being was not born to fall in line, to keep his head low, to wait for a permission to live. But by raising our heads, arming our hands and challenging power – that’s where life begins: by the destruction of all ranks.

From breakranks.noblogs.org

 1. (noun) Illegal act, usually violent, of interference, destruction, aimed at rendering unworkable production, civil or military installations.

2. (noun) Manipulation, acts aimed at the disorganization or failure of a business or project.

3. (noun) Material act aimed at preventing the normal functioning of a service

At times we would be led to believe that we live in a world of ghosts. Without body or form, they haunt our days and nights, trying to identify and control, our entire existence. They are called Economy, Nation, Politics, Public Good, State, Order. Nobody knows exactly what they are, why they exist and above all, no one agrees with what the other means by them. So, ghosts are elusive, extremely resistant to benevolent or constructive criticism as they say, because doted with an incredible capacity to absorb half-opinions, approximations and superficial criticism.

Power is constantly widening the abyss between these ideological concepts and the undeniable substance of exploitation, oppression, injustice, lack of freedom. Economics is spoken of as if it was something separate from the hours of stifling work we do, as if it was not the clothes we wear all manufactured by millions of slaves in a far-off country. We speak of Order without realizing that this concept, when applied to reality is, for example, thousands of dead immigrants at the borders. There is talk of Confinement, Punishment, Justice, but the speaker has rarely spent years in nine metres square.

By struggling we pierce this castle of ghosts, the lies that this society is based on. We see things in all their cruelty, in flesh and blood. Beyond the game of the deforming mirrors of ideologies. Beyond the professionals of discourse and specialists of analysis. We break the false separation between objective and subjective, feeling and reason, thinking and acting: our thoughts go with the rhythm of our hearts that give strength to our hands to act.

In our struggle, one of the weapons we have at our disposition, is sabotage. The illegal and destructive deeds of one acting in hostile territory, behind the enemy lines. Rather than engage in a frontal battle and succumb to the ultra-developed defences of the system, we proposed sabotage to prevent the construction of the maxi-prison. To impair, undermine and destroy the inner workings of the machine that is about to build this prison horror: the companies that build it, the architects pencil in hand, the engineers that calculate the most economical and safe way to confine a human being, the banks and institutions that finance it, the politicians who acclaim and justify it. While power is preparing its waltz of ghosts with shots of discourse on overpopulation, security, Justice, sabotage brings out the materiality of all this maxi-prison affair.

In addition to preventing its normal functioning, sabotage spreads disorder in the ranks of the enemy. It cannot know where the next blow will come from. One moment it is the windows of an architect’s office that shatter overnight, another time a building of engineers is stormed during the day, and yet another flames ravage the construction site and equipment of prison constructors. Sabotage disrupts the enemy.

And it is by disorganizing it that it is unable to meet its goals, such as imposing a maxi-prison on Brussels. So, far away from us the politicos’ speeches, the journalists’ chatter, the legalist illusions of citizenist opposition, all hypocritical bla bla bla. Let’s sabotage the castle of ghosts.

[Published by Ricochets, Bulletin against the maxi-prison and the world that goes with it. No. 6, May 2015.]

The building work for the construction of a maxi-prison in Brussels, the biggest in the country, is due to start. It will be erected in Haren, in the northern suburbs of the city, not far from the NATO headquarters. A struggle has been going on for years against this great repressive enterprise by those who don’t conceal their hatred of authority in any form: leaflets, posters, books, videos, wild demos, occupations, concerts, meetings, talks… have all contributed to creating and spreading a hostility that has gone beyond words to materialize in dozens and dozens of direct actions.

Concrete acts of revolt have taken place not only in the most turbulent neighbourhoods of the capital but all over Belgium. So, for this reason alone they cannot be attributed to just a few hotheads.  It is an « the exquisite elevation of the rebellion of the arms and the mind», that is worrying the Belgian authorities, having proved itself to be within the reach of every variety of rage and mind. As well as being determined not to accept the compromises of politics.

This explains why so many have busied themselves with every means to put a stop to this struggle against the future maxi-prison of Brussels.  The recuperators of the (extreme) left – who can’t stand a self-organised struggle carried out autonomously without begging for political consensus and explicitly turned against all the authorities – haven’t been able to put a stop to it.

The journalists – who have recently been striving to transform the enemies of all prisons into the enemies of mankind, portraying them as bloodthirsty beasts determined to turn against anyone – haven’t been able to put a stop to it. The inquisitors in ermine who have tried unsuccessfully to divide the subversives into good protesters and bad saboteurs haven’t managed to put a stop to it. Uniformed and plain-clothes cops with their operations, even coming out with indecent proposals in search of collaborators, haven’t been able to stop it.

The latest “anti-terrorist” operation kicked off at dawn on Wednesday June 10, when police were unleashed to carry out raids and seize of every piece of paper, every publication, every leaflet or poster, every piece of writing and every computer found in the raided houses and at le Passage, the premises of the struggle against the maxi-prison.

When taken to the offices of the Federal Police, the anarchists refused to answer a single question and were released a few hours later.  The mastermind of this brilliant operation is the king’s prosecutor Patrick De Coster. In spite of his surname, he definitely doesn’t love the rebels like Thyl Ulenspiegel. [in 1867 Charles De Coster wrote The Legend of Thyl Ulenspiegel and Lamme Goedzak, adventures of a Flemish prankster during the Reformation wars in the Netherleands.] His gloomy office will now be invaded with anarchist papers. A good omen, given that the office has already been set ablaze, in 2005.

In any case, Le Passage can do without them; it is already full of comrades, those in solidarity, accomplices…    [11/6/15]

June 2015, from Finimondo

To the uncontrollables

Order must reign: this is the motto of all power. And we know very well what it means by order: its massacres at the frontiers, its exploitation at the workplace, its terror in the prisons, its genocides and wars, its pollution of our bodies, its devastation of everything that is beautiful and free, its invasive ideology in our minds and its despondency in our hearts. In Brussels power has been making a quality jump. We are referring to the shops for eurocrats, new loft apartments for the rich, cops which are multiplying like bunnies and surveillance cameras that pop up like mushrooms after the rain season, new malls and an urban development plans to reinforce control, the message remains clear; order must reign and the poor, the excluded, the clandestines, the criminals, the rebels, we are the undesirable in this city, only worth anything if we obey, break our backs at work and then snuff it.

Today, one of the most symbolic projects of power in Brussels is the construction of the maxi-prison, the biggest in belgian history. The shadows of its walls and the desperation of its cells will serve as a severe menace to all those who toil to survive in this world, who don’t remain within their imposed ranks, who rebel to oppression. A grim place where to put the undesirables, those who are detrimental to the glorious march of economy and power; a place which reflects all the structures where the violence of power materializes, just like in detention centres, in psychiatric hospitals and in police stations,… – and why not, also the malls, the institutions, the streets of a city which have become large annexes of a huge open air prison.

To struggle against a maxi-prison therefore means to take back a glimpse of freedom. To impede its construction means to strike the path of power towards more control and more submission. To sabotage its realization is to open the horizons of struggle which breaks with the resignation, the best ally of the powerful. But we are neither stupid nor naïve. To struggle against the maxi-prison means to battle against everything it represents, a battle which is not confined to legality, but which arms itself of all weapons it deems fit. It is a battle which we ourselves lead, in a self organized and autonomous way, without political parties nor official organizations, without elected nor future politicians.

The last years of struggle against the maxi-prison have seen a wide range of initiatives of struggle in the neighbourhoods of Brussels (far way from the spot lights of the news and the stench of institutions), of direct actions against those responsible for this project (construction companies, architects, engineers, politicians, police officers and bureaucrats) and of sabotages in every angle of the city and of Belgium. Uncontrollable, because they do not conform to the imposed limits of democratic power, unmanageable, because they spring from a free initiative that does not obey to any hierarchy, ungovernable, because it refuses any dialogue with power in order to recreate spaces of real and free dialogue among individuals in struggle. Qualities that cannot be compatible with any form of power, and therefore hold the sweet taste and the proud charm of freedom. Three characteristics capable of irrupting into ongoing social conflicts, anywhere a line of demarcation is drawn between power and its opponents, in the life and struggles of each one of us.

All of this sticks in the gullet of power. It does not like that we speak about it, that we discuss it, that we propose it, that we act in this direction. If only a few weeks ago journalists dumped tons of shit on the struggle against the maxi prison (against anyone who struggles in a self-organized and autonomous way against power), in the early hours of Wednesday 10^th of June 2015, federal agents kicked down the door of four houses of comrades and of Le Passage, the space of struggle against the maxi-prison in Anderlecht, to carry out a raid and to confiscate the words of struggle that power cannot tolerate. A repression whose objective is to clearly attempt to break this struggle which manages, through words and acts, through fliers and fires, through direct action and attack, during the day or the night, with few or many, to create an opening. These judicial maneuvers reflect the repression which constitutes the daily life of all the undesirables of Brussels and of the entire world: from tortures in police stations to homicides in prisons, from the drowned refugees in the Mediterranean to the people dying of exhaustion from work or of asphyxiation by merchandise.

If power sows fear to be able to better control and govern, “c’est reculer que d’être stationnaire (*)”: we thus affirm the joy of freely struggling, the pride in the ideas which stand in opposition to their morbid projects, and the solidarity among those who long for the dream of a world rid of power.

Let’s continue the hostilities against everything which suffocates us.

No step back: let’s attack the maxi-prison, its builders and defenders!

Courage and determination to those who fight against power and for freedom!

[June 2015]

Some contacts:

Le Passage

Space of struggle against the Maxi-Prison

rue Rossini 11 – Anderlecht Bruxelles

(opened Wednesday and Saturday between 17:00 and 20:00)

Ricochets

monthly bulletin against the Maxi-Prison

www.lacavale.be

news about struggles against prisons

* a line from the song “Le triomphe de l’anarchie” by Charles d’Avray (1878-1960): “to stay still means making a step backwards”.