from Liberación Total (March 27, 2012) via This is our Job:
Street protests against the attacks of capitalist States on our living conditions have recently spread throughout Europe. Despite the strikes, actions, and massive demonstrations, and despite the broad movements that haven’t even expressed any grand revolutionary aspirations beyond the mere defense of minimum basic necessities, the States have responded with indifference.
Appealing to confusing economic formulas, numbers, statistics, and abstract concepts, those States have tried to locate the problem’s origin in inaccessible, metaphysical realities. However, the origin and causes of our daily problems have no metaphysical foundation whatsoever. Poverty, exploitation, repression, and systematic abuse are the results of very concrete structures, of specific decisions taken by specific people who have specific interests.
One such structure is called the College of Business Administration and Management (ESADE). Nestled in the middle of the wealthy Pedralbes neighborhood, this school produces a stream of executives who—day after day—order, manage, and benefit from the destruction of the lives of the great majority of the population. Each year, the school propels social predators into the world, and for the rest of their lives they dedicate themselves to plundering and trampling on this country’s exploited from their institutional (like the presidency of the Generalitat itself, occupied by Artur Mas) or corporate positions.
Facing a context of intensifying exploitation and instability, and facing the new, deeply serious attack brought on by the recent Labor Reform, we have decided to respond by pointing out those responsible for the situation we are suffering through. Therefore, last Wednesday, March 21, we decided to carry out an attack that forced the interruption of the school’s functioning and caused its evacuation. The action was specifically designed (through the location of the device’s placement, the quality and quantity of explosive material used, etc.) to not cause injuries. Our goal, apart from singling out an entire social network of exploiters, was to sabotage the offensive, insulting social peace prevailing in the wealthy neighborhoods, which are totally hermetic and oblivious to the anguish and suffering generated by their decisions and privileges.
Having reached this point, we pose a question for reflection. Since the press have noted that students, professors, and area residents got away unscathed, how can we describe the everyday experience of those who live in poor neighborhoods? If being evacuated from your school for a few hours means getting away unscathed, what should we presume to call what thousands of evicted people feel—those who sleep in the street, those who are psychiatrized for not bearing the pressure, those who are brutally beaten for protesting, even peacefully? What do we call the suffering of the excluded, tortured in prisons and Immigrant Detention Centers? What do reporters call what the families of people murdered by the police have experienced, experience, and continue to experience?
If we have given them a “scare,” what are they doing to us?
We, and more people every day, know full well who the real terrorists are. They are the ones whom the press define as honorable people, the ones who have their luxurious offices on Plaza Sant Jaume or Avenida Diagonal, the ones who live in mansions in Pedralbes and Sant Cugat and send their sons and daughters to ESADE. They are the ones who, even though they have it all, dare to overstep their own legal limits and steal more of what they theoretically get according to their own rules.
We warn that if the State isn’t willing to withdraw its attacks, then we won’t be willing to withdraw our resistance. If they are prepared to bring back the policies and living conditions of the last century for us, then we will be prepared to revive the weapons and tactics of that era for them. And if they believe they will go right through us—not just our group, but all of society—without resistance or rebellion, then they don’t know the history of our people.
STRUGGLE IS THE ONLY PATH.
—Barcelona (The Rose of Fire), Spanish State, March 2012
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