through europe

Prologue

Looking around ourselves today, we realize that we have already seen all this. It wasn’t quite the same in terms of style; skirts were longer, kids were wearing shorts, cars were slower and fewer, and everything was in black and white. Yet, we have seen all this before. We have encountered it in history books, or in the tales of our grandparents. We have met it in the novels of Faulkner and Musil, or in the pig-faced paintings of Grosz. We forgot about it long ago, since we started to repeat to ourselves that its atrocious offspring would never come back to life. Never again. And yet, he is coming back now. Once again, we are living in the nervous times, pregnant with the monster.

Disclaimer: God

There are several ways of understanding an object or a phenomenon. We can talk about its essence, its form, its origin... We can also understand it according to its way of being productive. I would like to use this latter point of view. The question, then, is no longer ‘what is it?’, ‘what does it look like?’, ‘where does it come from?’, but rather ‘what does it produce?’, ‘how is it definable according to its production?’.

  – Bardziej niż wybór walk, wyzwaniem jest czasem wybieranie pól walki –

W całej Europie młodzież, pracownicy, bezrobotni, emeryci, migranci i rodziny mierzą się z jednakowo posępnym zestawem środków zaciskania pasa, kapitalistyczną reakcją oraz brutalnością policji. Nie sposób nie przywołać tutaj ulubionego powiedzenia brytyjskiego premiera: w tym historycznym momencie europejskie klasy niższe i średnie rzeczywiście „są w tym wszystkim razem”.

- More than battles, sometimes the challenge is to pick battle-fields -

All across Europe, youth, workers, the unemployed, retirees, migrants and families are today facing the same bleak army of austerity measures, capitalist backlash and police brutality. Like the British Prime Minister loves to say, in this historical moment the European lower and middle classes truly are ‘all in this together’.

Another day of direct action, another day of semantic stretching. Kids run inside the Tory’s HQ, break the windows, or maybe they stop a coal power station, or they enact a political performance in a socially sensitive place. All legitimate and often noble means of protesting, but, still, their classification under the label of ‘direct action’ seems to me to be a misguided attempt to stretch the meaning of this expression.