WORLD WORLDWIDE FRANCE News Journal Update - (en) France, UCL AL #341 - History, Sabotage: Neutralizing the techno-industrial system (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 

Victor Cachard, a philosopher by training, tackled as an archaeologist
"the history of resistance to techniques and the history of resistance
techniques". A first volume of his History of Sabotage. From slippers to
machine breakers[8]published in November 2022 by Éditions Libre,
accompanied by an equally exciting book, Émile Pouget and the revolution
through sabotage, an anthology of unpublished texts by Émile Pouget
brought together by Victor Cachard[9]. While waiting for the release of
the second volume of his History of Sabotage, the author has kindly
agreed to provide us with an unpublished extract from it: Neutralizing
the techno-industrial system to be published by Éditions Libre.

Little by little, the environmental question is being integrated into
anti-capitalist thinking. Although the meeting of the extreme left with
ecology is made difficult by the reformist, even conservative
positioning of the proponents of political ecology, the year 1974
testifies to a clearer awareness of the ravages that expansion economic
impact on nature. It must be said that the nuclear power program is in
full acceleration with the Messmer plan adopted in response to the oil
crisis of 1973.

Readers of the naturalist Jean Dorst, author of Before Nature Dies,
follow the reports on television from the program "La France disfiguree"
which covers all the themes linked to the attack on natural habitats:
excessive development, eternal waste, degradation of natural sites,
energy problem, exhaustion of resources, disfigurement of landscapes,
overwhelming architecture, poor real estate management, air pollution,
water pollution, marine pollution, noise pollution, visual pollution,
unnecessary construction of roads, tourism mass, etc.

The towers erected in the mountains for the expansion of winter sports,
the debauchery of advertising panels in the countryside, the
establishment of mining factories or even the diversion of rivers for
increasingly intensive agriculture are all points that encourage
criticism of anthropization in connection with economic growth.

To avoid leaving the monopoly of discourse on the beauty of landscapes
and the wealth of the earth in the hands of the State, the pioneers of
revolutionary ecology like the Revolutionary Marxist Alliance (AMR), the
mao-spontex of the newspaper Tout!, certain elements of the United
Socialist Party (PSU) concentrated in the Workers and Peasants' Left
(GOP) or even, the anarchists of the Libertarian World devote several
articles with unequivocal accents: "The fight against pollution is not a
capitalist diversion», "Capital pollutes?», "Every State pollutes", etc[1].

Nuclear everywhere, Ecology nowhere
Two fronts are paving the way for a resolutely anti-capitalist ecology.
Against the massive industrialization of fundamental research
increasingly oriented towards the military sector, engineers,
technicians and other laboratory personnel are seriously calling into
question the so-called scientific neutrality.

In Sciences for War[2], Dominique Pestre shows perfectly that a
technocratic turn opened the second half of the 20th century, so that we
are witnessing a nationalization of sciences, starting in the energy
field where nuclear power is before all developed for military purposes[3].

The spirit of conquest specific to military discipline appears more and
more clearly as the model of domination and mastery on which scientific
rationality is based. The military sector, which requires perpetual
improvement of weapons, is also the privileged place for technical
development.

Scientists therefore become direct actors of radical violence. In
response, various critical journals emerged such as Survivre et Vivre,
le Cri des labos, Labo-Contestation, Impascience or even the Paris VII
staff journal, Le module enragé which points out the unjust hierarchies
at work in the structuring of the know.

The second front is opened by the union base. Faced with the arrival of
new materials with an increasingly chemical transformation process, the
fight for health at work takes the form of a criticism of technological
innovation and its harmful social repercussions. In the same spirit, on
the agricultural side, peasant unionism seeks alternatives to the
capitalist mode of production.

Scientists and trade unionists are invited to exchange their points of
view in alternative journals such as La Gueule Ouvert, Le Sauvage and La
Gazette Nucleare.

Profusion of anti-nuclear journals
Thanks to Henri Montant, alias Arthur, author of the colorful Memoirs of
a Sloth, sabotage is very often featured in the pages of La Gueule Ouvert.

It was thus on his initiative that issue 16 of February 1974 included
extracts from the brochure Lordstown 1972 or the setbacks of General
Motors. Likewise, it is again in La Gueule Ouvert that we find for the
first time in France a reference to the term "eco-sabotage", accompanied
by a brief history of environmental struggles in the United States.

At the beginning of 1975, the journal Interférences, run by a small
group of communications specialists, introduced the public to the sordid
world of new technologies. Subtitled "For a critique of information and
communication devices", the authors clearly demolish the myth of
scientific neutrality.

In an interview for La Gueule Ouvert, a member states: "It is not only
the content of the messages and information conveyed by the means of
communication that conditions and manipulates, but the communication
tool itself. Take television for example: it is of course used to
disseminate the dominant ideology. But its role is above all to be lit!
The first message on television is the post. When it is on, all
relationships between people are blocked and nothing passes between them.»

To the question of how to combat the power of the media, "sabotage,
jamming, the drift of power, provide some answers.»

The magazine does educational work, it desecrates computing to teach
readers how to build pirate radios and practice electronic espionage. It
provides information on the pollution generated by waves and gives
advice on sabotaging and hijacking new information and communication
devices.[...]

A Convergence between scientists and work
As Renaud Bécot and Céline Pessis show, in the 1970s we witnessed a
fruitful rapprochement between intellectuals, critical scientists and
workers exposed to new technological dangers[4].

Obviously, the development of the nuclear sector is decisive in the
birth of these new alliances. Through nuclear energy, the complicity of
science with power appears in all its splendor. The choice of
electricity production based on such a complex industry requires and
justifies state control. Since only the State is able to guarantee the
proper functioning of the power plants, it naturally finds a reason to
legitimize its action and makes any non-State social alternative impossible.

Governments thus pass off political choices as technical necessities,
democratically incomprehensible, which only serve to ensure that we
agree to be governed.

The coup represented by the transition to nuclear power is designed to
reinforce society's dependence on sovereign power. The State becomes
indispensable to those it dominates. Thus, nuclear technology is the
paragon of anti-democratic state action: it dispossesses the population
of its energy autonomy to better enslave it and impose a productivist
electrical order, centralizes the places of production and arms the
territory over which it reigns.

An anarchist summarizes: "Nuclear power confirms that only the State and
Capital must have the capacity to produce energy, that these capacities
represent a relationship linked to the degree of dependence of
populations, that any revolutionary burst wishing to radically transform
the world will have to confront these energy behemoths. In short, energy
means domination.»[5]

The anarchist criticism of nuclear technologies therefore naturally
joins the antimilitarism of the sixty-eighters installed on the Larzac
plateau against the extension of the military camp onto peasant lands.
At the heart of this nebulous protest, among other non-violent demands,
we find individuals who threaten the authorities more directly.

This was the case from the winter of 1971 when a helicopter parked at
the entrance to the camp at La Cavalerie was neutralized with
explosives[6]. Four years later, in February 1975, the expropriation
files of the peasants were destroyed in the town hall of La Cavalerie[7].

At the same time, the feminist intellectual Françoise d'Eaubonne and her
friend Gérard Hof, close to the autonomous group Marge, joined the
anti-nuclear movement which was particularly active near the German
border in Wyhl and Marckolsheim. While opponents merrily survey the
region's groves to the sound of a transverse flute, others cut barbed
wire and overturn fences.

For d'Eaubonne and Hof, it involves carrying out scouting, knowing the
stages of building a power plant and identifying vulnerable regions.
Because they have in mind sabotage which would target an essential point
of the Fessenheim power plant. Also, on the afternoon of May 3, 1975,
several explosions rang out on the construction sites.

Damage to the hydraulic circuit pump was noted which delayed the work by
almost a year and caused 20 million Francs in damage, or the equivalent
of 15 million Euros in 2022: "minimal" damage. 'after EDF.[...]

Just a month later, the Framatom company, which works on the
construction of nuclear reactors, was the target of two explosions.[...]

Sabotage actions are increasing
In the brochure "Direct actions against nuclear power and its world,
1973-1996", we learn that the central computer of Courbevoie is 50%
destroyed while on the Argenteuil side, numerous instruments intended
for the repair of Fessenheim are affected.

On Friday August 15, 1975, it was the turn of the Monts d'Arrée power
station located in the town of Brennilis in Brittany to bear the brunt
of an explosive attack. The latter, perpetrated by the Front for the
Liberation of Brittany - Breton Republican Army (FLB-ARB), neutralized
several essential parts of the reactor's peripheral circuit.

If the action is not claimed, very often, press releases are published
through various ecological expression organs such as the Ecological
Rehabilitation Press Agency, APRE. In the second issue of the Écologie
magazine, an investigation is devoted to eco-sabotage, covering the
positions and reflections of activist organizations on this subject.

The publication by the CFDT of the book Nuclear Power in France, which
quickly established itself as an essential reference for opponents of
nuclear power by revealing the harmful effects of radioactivity on
workers, made the year 1975 a pivotal period. of radical ecology.

So as not to forget anything about this first year of resistance against
nuclear power, under the heading of "little echoes of shit", La Gueule
Ouvert of December reports sabotage on the EDF construction sites in the
immediate vicinity of Cholet in the west of France.

The newspaper reports: "Unknown persons set fire this afternoon to a
truck-mounted drill on an EDF construction site in Liré
(Maine-et-Loire). The machine, used for survey work carried out by the
EDF with a view to establishing a nuclear power plant, was completely
destroyed. An investigation was opened by the gendarmerie.

On November 11, a model of the future power station was burned in a
village square. An anti-nuclear committee is campaigning against the
establishment of an atomic power station in Liré.»

 From this date, the struggles are increasingly focused against the
influence and extension of technologies to all dimensions of existence.

For the theorists of autonomous journals, sabotage represents the tactic
around which workers come to an agreement with those who refuse
exploitation and prefer to live on the margins of society, like the
mathematician Alexandre Grothendieck, one of the founders of the Survive
and Live magazine.

Victor Cachard

To validate

[1]Philippe Buton, "The French extreme left and ecology. A difficult
encounter (1968-1978)", Vingtième Siècle. Revue d'histoire, n° 113,
2012/1, pages 191-203.

[2]Amy Dahan and Dominique Pestre (dir.), Sciences for War. 1940 - 1960,
Editions of the School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences, Paris, 2004.

[3]The French nuclear program was developed without the knowledge of the
population in 1945 with the creation of the Atomic Energy Commission
(CEA) with the aim of providing the country with atomic weapons.

[4]Renaud Bécot and Céline Pessis, "Improbable but fruitful: meetings
between critical scientists and trade unionists in the "1968s"",
Mouvements, n°80, 2014/4, pages 51 to 66.

[5]Collective, The Swan Song - Scuttle industrial society and defy the
fate it has in store for us, Éditions Tumult, p. 251.

[6]Édouard Lynch, "The "first Larzac" or the genesis of an atypical
social movement", in Gilles Richard and Jacqueline Sainclivier (dir.),
The parties put to the test of 68. The emergence of new divisions,
1971-1974, Presses universitaire de Rennes, 2012, pages 55-69.

[7]Gaël Franquemagne, "The socio-territorial mobilization of Larzac and
the making of authenticity", Spaces and societies, n° 143, 2010/3, 117-133.

[8]Victor Cachard, History of sabotage. From tramps to machine breakers,
Éditions Libre, November 2022.

[9]Victor Cachard (dir.), Émile Pouget and the revolution through
sabotage, Éditions Libre, September 2022.

https://www.unioncommunistelibertaire.org/?Sabotage-Neutraliser-le-systeme-techno-industriel
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