Today's Topics:
1. Canada, Collectif Emma Goldman - [Open letter] Afterwards,
nothing will be the same ... (fr, it, pt)[machine translation]
(a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
2. Britain, Haringey Solidarity Group: COVID-19: NO GOING BACK
TO ‘BUSINESS AS USUAL’ (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
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Message: 1
We share with you this text which was sent to us by email by its author (Michèle Victor). Do not hesitate to do the same and send us your
news and opinion: ---- I ---- LANDING ---- 12,000 years ago, there were ten thousand of us on earth. Following the great glaciation, global
warming has pushed the ice towards the poles. Nomads, we are hunter-gatherers. In the Mesolithic, many of us settled down and became
cultivators, breeders, potters. The rest, we know it. ---- Throughout our history, and more than ever during this last century, will our
genius have consisted in committing foolish acts with an indefinitely renewed skill? ---- After ... The great (dis) illusion? ---- By what
miracle would a radical change occur, when the enormity of the site, the weight of habits, the boredom of having to deal with irritating
questions, the hypocritical inertia of the elected officials despite us, suggest that everything will start all over again, for the worse?
Would we be mithridatized to the point of no longer being able to analyze what has formatted us even in the deepest folds of our
consciousness? Self-censorship governs us even more than what represses us. Don't our bad folds risk committing us to a fatalism that has
become a functional mode of non-thought, of non-action? By dint of waiting for tomorrow, here we are stiff, paralyzed with rheumatism,
wishing that we are done with it, that we are stuffed and that we be exposed to the museum of man. Future visitors to the museum will pinch
themselves when they discover that we have disappeared following the self-destruction of our ecosystem.
Utopians, dreamers, unrealists, us? Would we be so timid that the slightest symptomatic irony overwhelms us. Who is in the utopia, who is
out of the real world, who is out of the ground? Punchers, big industry, bankers, those who keep the short bridle to politicians who find
their account whatever the label under which they hide in the company of their armies and priests determined to give up. The state lie has
been established under national virtue and the myth of meritocracy imposed as a principle of survival. In a sublime teleological
reconciliation, everything is tied up, clean, regulatory. What risks to soil the tapestry is sitting sanitized. So ... the general strike? A
revolution? The economic debacle? Come on, rubbish, they are convinced that nothing threatens them anymore. Does our torpor prove them
right? What sauce are they going to cook in the next few hours? Is the obsolescence of the living programmed? Do we still have a place on
earth, our only living space? To be sure, do you have to register, subscribe, or get a little more?
Following the viral disturbances that we know, the European central bank is still injecting hundreds of billions. To do what? To reassure
the financial markets and initiate an economic recovery. The stock indexes are going up. Talks on the energy transition can continue. So
will endemic pollution accelerate, the disappearance of species - when will ours be? The liberal economy, which we know historically that it
generates lies, scandals, social damage and environmental disasters, would it take precedence over earthly life? Are we at the threshold of
the worst? Is our present reduced to the prelude to the horror that is coming: mutations of viruses, repeated pandemics, suicides,
widespread murders following exasperation and uncontrollable anxieties, wars,
The recent crises (Greece, Iraq, the economic and field wars, the irreversible ecological mutation, ...) and those which preceded them stem
from the ultraliberal model which crushes us. Their consequences demonstrate that the attempts at insurrection against this model were not
adequate. As for totalitarian utopias, history has sufficiently demonstrated their destructive processes.
The reduction in pollution due to the cessation of activities through containment makes it possible to measure the insane impact of our
lifestyles on our environment. The concept, consensual and superstitious, of progress collapses. The man-machine lost in the machine-world
stinks of death.
Well, it's time to give the floor to two or three who don't have it. The blacksmith Abdel made unique, beautiful and useful objects, he took
the time, chose the metals, tweaked what he was ordered, until the visit of a guy who proposed to make it in series. Abdel specifies his
price and deadlines, the other laughs and explains to him: go for it, we don't care, you give us a max at the wholesale price that I told
you and it will go like that. Abdel and his brother got into it as they said. Her crazy brother began to drink; as for Abdel, he does not
even remember his art. Like them, it swarms, those who can no longer mount an earthen wall because concrete blocks are faster, those who can
no longer turn a pot and who paint because the enamel is is from the job before, those who sell synthetic things made pure Chinese in the
souks because mowing, carding, dyeing, spinning and weaving is a thing from before. These guys, I know them, they are friends who live where
I live for ages. Like them, there is only that and they would like this shabby turbine to stop, no need to explain to them, just listen to
them. I also met an old man, a shepherd who climbs the mountain every day, a stone's throw from his lost douar in the Atlas. He works with a
knife, a small pointed knife with which he sculpts. Sitting on a stone, he makes any animal with a root picked up at his feet, he is a
genius, a sheep, an elephant, a camel, he does whatever he wants that day. When he comes down with his sheep, the children of the douar are
waiting for him. He gives what he has done to one who has had nothing yet. One day, a guy who was passing by his douar suggested that he
sell it in Marrakech. The shepherd almost choked so much that it made him laugh to hear such a thing. You guys just have to meet them.
The inventory is made. The inventory too. Me, you, you, we all know what it means nothing will never be the same again . What to do? Without
illusion, without respite, without return, we have rudimentary our small arsenal of anesthetized neurons so as not to remain the ass on the
ground to roar in pain.
So what do we do now? The impossible . This is what we scream from the top of the world, we aim for the impossible.
A system creates its limits and its contradictions. To get out of it, you have to design another system. It was not by improving the candle
that the electric bulb was invented. Dixit Einstein. By introducing new gestures that block economic viruses that destroy us,.
AFTER ... It's now!
How? 'Or' What?
We know that institutions are contrary to the establishment of a free, equal and fraternal world. The first step is to jump out of the
crosswalks crossed by the institutional.
Do we relax first or do we start right away? Right now. Perfect.
Alone. Ostensibly. To isolate in order to reign is the first principle of all power. How to meet to consult and act? Stuck in our kitchens,
we simmer a virtual protocol of actions without waiting for deconfinancelooms. Cities, countryside, wherever we are and elsewhere in the
world, it runs. Free and fairly secure tools are not lacking. We are fast, discreet - Indians. In parallel, cross-hunted, backwards, above
or below, we network our experiences and knit with or without those who occupy the offices of the town halls of our neighborhoods. The
communal space, it is from there, and only there, that we want to be present, it is from there that we can commit ourselves towards the
impossible.
Not like before
Keeping us away from the exquisite corpse of a growth which ravages everything in its path, a growth which was brutally interrupted by
Corona, the air once again became light, confirmed to us that it was urgent and by all means to bring down productivist systems.
Without constraints, no freedoms. The constraints are chosen according to what we are aiming for: direct democracy (self-management of
political, economic and territorial decisions) and confederalist municipalism. It is the foundation of our social charter, of which the
commune of Lyon in 1870, that of Paris in 1871, that of Kronstadt in 1921 and those of Aragon and Catalonia in 1936 are its historical
beginnings. This social charter excludes the nation state and capitalism. Its implementation, gradual and radical because it is not
reformist, is carried out through councils mandated during assemblies of municipalities. The municipal organization, which we ensure that it
is free of bureaucratism, prevarication and Manichaeism, aims to establish and enforce the decisions taken in assembly and this without
distinction of classes. Any discrepancy not concerted leads to the end of the mandate of that of the municipal officials who has withdrawn.
We do not separate the short, medium and long term. We decide, whatever the impact, that the risks and dead ends likely to block our
momentum will not be prohibitive. We are carried by the ideas that our historic ancestors have expressed and defended (reread in particular
Proudhon, Kropotkin, Reclus, Boockchin, ... ). We know that their attempts were flouted, perverted, murdered and sometimes hypocritically
recovered by their adversaries.
Practical thoughts
The rights of the living, the abolition of privileges, secularism, these fundamental principles are first and foremost on the agenda and
applied by municipal officials - namely, potentially, each of us. Freedom of opinion, freedom of the press, free movement of people are the
result of a social life that takes into account each and everyone, united (linked by a community of interests) and aware of being part of ''
a responsible community (which assumes its acts) within the precise framework of the Thinking global / Acting local precept. These words
graze the tongue of wood ... I do at best, you see and correct, it's hard to be in the hair with each step committed to the virgin, the
perennial and the beautiful today - eh , sometimes we need
Pragmatic Resolutions
It is first of all a question of blocking, by each of our choices and each one to his measure, the programmed economic recovery.
Having defined what appears essential for each of us, we concretely apply these choices in daily life. In view of the forces in conflict
(our lives / their profits) it seems idealistic that what we aim for be implemented. What happens to beautiful feelings, to the nobility of
spirit, to the courage of our thoughts in the face of barbarism? Should we, the vertigo of history / inexorable mechanics of the decline of
the human species, shed our blood and that of others? We would betray what drives us.
II
ACT
Nationalization of the energy, banking, public transport, health, education and cultural sectors, zone by zone. Self-supporting, they
generate no profit and balance budgets through co-optations between the different partners for each of the sectors concerned.
A research and development study, independent of nuclear lobbies, tackles the serious problems of dismantling and replacing power plants
with other energy sources, diversified area by area according to local natural specificities. Energy consumption becomes reasonable in all
sectors of activity.
It's a hell of a job. Already underway for many of us, it tinkers hard without it appearing, do not panic. What a boldness, to take charge
in these sectors, but it's that or nothing.
The question of air and maritime transport is settled by the commitment and the respect of a fixed quota for personal trips. We have a
limited number of km per year per person. It is up to us to use it as it should. Completed, the extras of the great cult parade (r)
photographing her back to the Mona Lisa and destroying the world's heritage. A quota depending on the obligation to travel long distances is
defined for business trips, knowing that by favoring activities at a shorter distance,
For road transport, fuel voucher booklets are sold in each communal area for the year and stamped at each refill. Polluting engines are
disappearing because the purchase of clean vehicles is made accessible thanks to a partnership with innovative manufacturers (hydrogen,
compressed air, solar electricity, tires, etc.). Speed and power of vehicles are abandoned in favor of a quality of life that has long since
disappeared.
Agricultural products and their processing are regional. No truck coming from more than 100km is allowed to drive. Products are transported
on the territory by train. No more containers from China and elsewhere. We manufacture on site.
The construction sector operates on the principle of congestion relief of cities by the creation of garden cities on a human scale.
Construction methods re-establish the use of low-polluting local materials inducing the minimum of gray energy. The living spaces are
defined and do not generate any profit. They are discreetly part of the landscape and do not modify its natural richness. No more stress due
to noise and air pollution. Finished, the crisp feeling that the hell it is the others and that we are all sick of an interior plague.
The means of production and the organization of activities are self-managed. The work is organized according to the needs of each sector of
activity. This creates a considerable amount of useful and freely chosen jobs. No more work that destroys spirit and health without decent
economic consideration. We have shattered the mystical / intellectual / manual rupture and its procession of firefighting prerogatives, the
crime of which benefited those who, as always, at the firefighters dance. Understand who wants. The competition is replaced by mutual
assistance. Nobody above and nobody below, everyone participates to the best of their physical and intellectual means, without fear of being
dismissed.
Taxes on capital and profits of large companies are distributed in proportion to needs. With fewer needs, a balance is struck. The trading
world is losing speed and, conversely, the living world is regaining strength.
The cultivation of land that has become extensive, sees the rebirth of natural species whose biosphere had disappeared. Local productions
improve the quality of life and health for all. Hunting is prohibited. The municipal water and forestry service maintains the maintenance
and surveillance of animal and plant species. New practices, new attitudes. The observation of the living is serene, all paths, trails,
forests, beaches are free to access. The desire to freely cross places of life while ensuring their protection takes precedence over any
other. These are the foundations of an ethical naturalism, of a social ecology that no COP since that of Rio in 1992 has touched on. It
would seem that we spontaneously have the eco-citizen profile, since we clean inside and outside, except that it takes us three seconds
since we hardly soiled anything or almost. The Biosupermarket is chasing us with its green junk, it will never catch up with us.
The old law enforcement agencies generated disorder and killings. One cannot imagine a just society by unjust means. The regulation of
conflicts and grievances depends on each municipality. The proximity and knowledge of the people in conflict living in the commune allow a
concerted approach to the problems posed. Constraints are discussed and applied by members of the municipality in turn and according to the
skills they demonstrate. Any attack on the life and the security of the people involves a period of rehabilitation by an activity for the
common good. The practices are little or not coercive, listening and discussion, insertion and probation take precedence before any decision.
In France, demography has doubled in a century. In other countries, it's worse. The Earth can no longer keep up with this insane rate of
exploitation. From now on, the regulation of births is done by long known processes which are applied globally and systematically. We are
helping to ensure that our children, our children's children and everyone else inherits a world worthy of them.
Knowing yourself does not mean knowing who you are, but knowing what your place is in this world.
Michèle Victor
April 2020
Collectif Emma Goldman
http://ucl-saguenay.blogspot.com/2020/05/lettre-ouverte-apres-rien-ne-sera-plus.html
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Message: 2
Below is another statement from a few of us in Haringey Solidarity Group recently sent out. ---- For years we had to accept “austerity” as
Britain didn’t have any money. Ordinary people had to “tighten their belts” while the rich became super rich. But Britain was “skint”. We
‘couldn’t afford’ pay rises or increases in benefits. Hospital beds were lost, NHS staff were treated like scum. Jobs we knew were important
were seen as “low skilled” so bosses paid minimum wage and use zero hours’ contracts. Prisoners and asylum seekers were “evil” so the only
option was to lock them away. ---- Well isn’t it funny (no) what a virus can bring about! ---- Look how politicians change their tune when
it suits them. Millions are having to claim Universal Credit (UC). Because these new claimants ain’t the “great unwashed” or “scroungers”,
suddenly even the government realise living on £75 a week isn’t possible. So up goes Universal Credit a week by £20. After no increase for 5
years, suddenly we can increase it by nearly 30%. Funny that! Working Tax Credits is also increasing by the same amount, as apparently Boris
& Co were forced to realise that was too low as well.
“Conditionality” requirements for UC have also miraculously been dropped. These were stupid hoops you had to jump through to get your
benefit. The main ones were about what you had to do to find work. With corona virus they claim there isn’t work around so the
conditionality will be relaxed. There never was a range of decent bloody jobs around – it was just a way to make us suffer and a way to kick
people off UC for not “complying”.
The “minimum income floor” for the self-employed has also been suspended. Before corona most self-employed over 25 on UC were assumed to
earn minimum wage (presently £8.72 an hour) for 35 hours – or £305.20 a week. Earn less than that and tough, benefits are still worked out
on £305.20 pw. Tons of self-employed lost huge sums and the government made a killing. But now our glorious leaders had to realise this is a
bit out of order for our hard working “deserving” self-employed.
Before corona, if you were sick most of us didn’t get paid for the first three days. What a surprise, now the state will pay us sick pay
from day one. Why was it ok with every other illness (many also being contagious)? NO ONE should have to go to work when they are unwell,
EVER.
Before “C Day” (corona virus to most of us) we were told criminals, asylum seekers and “foreigners” were all evil people who need to be
locked up in case they continued their evil ways. What rubbish. Funny then that now 8,000 prisoners are now “low risk” and it’s Ok to let
them out of the hell hole we call prison. That’s about 5% of the prison population of England and Wales.
The Tories have also released at least 300 people from detention centres. The speed and scale of the release is unprecedented in recent
years. Detainees and charities estimate that more than a quarter of those currently locked up will be set free.
And talking about our ‘foreign’ friends, normally getting an extension on your visa is really difficult as the racist politicians claim we
are “swamped” by foreigners. Now NHS workers will get an automatic one-year extension. The Home Office announced on 31 March that around
2,800 doctors, nurses and paramedics who have to leave the UK by 1 October 2020 will get a free one-year extension. Family members are
included and there are no fees involved - where there’s a will there’s a way.
And only recently apparently we are flying in up to 600 people from Romania to help pick our crops. Even the Sun and Daily Mail had to bite
their lips and agree these workers were needed.
Then there is that homelessness “problem” the state and successive governments can never “manage” to solve. But wait what’s this? Ministry
of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) have found £1.6bn of additional funding for councils to respond to pressures during
this national emergency. Apparently 4,000 of an estimated 5,000 homeless have been housed in hostels and hotels in a matter of weeks and
they hope to house them all soon. How is this possible in such a small space of time we hear you ask?
As for all those companies manufacturing crap for us to buy. All of a sudden their products are pointless and they all want to “help” by
manufacturing testing kits and PPE. If they can make useful stuff now, why have they been making, promoting and ripping us off with rubbish
for years? We even heard a proposal to ask armament factories to switch to making ventilators - a proposal we heard made with a straight
face and no-one called them a hippy dreamer or dangerous radical.
And finally, quoting the New Statesman’s sister publication City Metric “On the morning of 23rd March 2020 the rail franchising system that
has been in place in Britain since 1996 came to a rather unceremonious end. With travel limited to only critical workers it was likely that
government would have to step in. And step in it has. Rather than taking the franchises back in-house (as with LNER and Northern), the
government has essentially re-awarded the franchise holders with quick-and-easy “stay-put, we’ll pay you” contracts. This isn’t full-blown
nationalisation.” But it is as good as.
If we can manage to do all this when we are meant to be in the worst financial crisis we have been in since the war, then we can bloody well
do it when this crisis is over. Austerity was never about money or protecting us – it was always all about moving money from the poor to the
rich.
But now they have gone and started making things slightly better for a few of us – we need to make sure they don’t go back on these when
corona virus is a distant memory. But of course they will. Unless we get organised and fight the bastards. Because we know this and they
will want to put us back in our place once it is all over.
We might all have our own campaigns. Some may see disability rights as most important; some housing; others refugees. All are equally
important. We don’t want a hierarchy of needs. Fight for your particular cause yes – but link up with others. An injury to one is an injury
to all. The state always tries to divide us. Too often we fight amongst ourselves and miss the real enemy. We need to stick together because
once Covid-19 is over the state will come for us like they have never done before. And we need to be ready and supporting each other.
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