Get out where the homes are and the large families and the subproletariat and the proletarian women who are just waiting to punch the right people in the face. They’ll take the lead. And don’t get caught and learn from them how not to get caught – they know more about it than you do.
Unleash the class struggles. Organize the proletariat.
Gudrun Ensslin – Building the Red Army, June 1970
The clamor is great, the petty-bourgeois mob rages in the networks and media, fascists and Greens finally united in the cause. The Minister of Health has completely internalized the permanent state of emergency of the pandemic, anyone who obstructs operations by cops and firefighters should be obligingly thrown out of his apartment.
Everyone who wanted to know knew what was going to happen. Anyone walking the streets of this city, moving outside their comfort bubble, talking to the proletarian youth, knew that the night of reckoning had come. Almost three years of pandemic state of emergency, everywhere harassment, repression and cops, now the next solidarity effort of society, all have to make sacrifices for the just war. Where the coal is not enough at the end of the month anyway, it is not even enough for half the month. The everyday racism of the cops, the poverty that you only escape if you earn your money in a creative way beyond the bourgeois rules of the game. You are the dregs of society, educationally distant sounds more elegant than antisocial milieu, but it means the same thing.
For days the proles have been stocking up on pyrotechnics, the weapons of the little people, long queues in front of the stores, the smartest were beyond the borders, it must be really rumbling when the cops come. Already 2 days before New Year’s Eve the first confrontations with the cops in Berlin, partly the are lured with burning garbage cans and then attacked from a tactically clever position. The surplus proletariat of Berlin studies the actions of the French banlieue. Partly on Netflix. That’s how the times have become.
Then the night of nights, the pleasure of excess, which has become strange, scary to all the leftists and self-proclaimed anarchists, because they only nurse their neuroses, trying to control everything, their thinking, their language, their feelings. Have become their own cop. Everywhere cadaver obedience, only parroting the hollow, always the same phrases. So different life in the rough corners of the city. Direct, hurtful, irritating, dazzling and deepest black. But life. Real life.
For days, there have been calls on the net to come to Sanderstraße in Neukölln for New Year’s Eve. For 3 years, the surplus proletariat of the neighborhood has been fighting with the cops here. Even in 2020, when in Berlin any gathering of more than 3 people on the street was forbidden and all pubs and Spätis were closed, the gas stations were only allowed to sell fuel, they had a whole hour the cops so covered with pyrotechnics that the simply could not advance into the street. The one or other Molotov, a stylistic device that a whole generation of pseudo-militant radical left activists only knows from hearsay, found its form of expression.
So now on time to the second as announced, at 11:30 p.m. a gigantic fireworks display lights up Sanderstraße, where it meets Kottbusser Damm, reflected in the paint of the waiting tubs. The cops try a first advance, even shields emerge again from the sinking, they do not get 10 meters far into the Sanderstraße, for a quarter of an hour the whole street is covered in fireworks, everywhere it rumbles, flares fly wildly through the area. The cops change their tactics, sit up again and speed off with their vehicles, conquer a street corner, then stand helplessly at the intersection, the surplus proletariat has long since evaded, sends pyrotechnics from another street corner in the direction of the cops. So it goes back and forth for a good half hour, at some point the cops are back at Kottbusser Damm. Then it collects in the Sanderstraße, it is called Yalla, a closed attack on the cops, who sit up and flee into the night. The street belongs to the youth. Cheering and shouting, a fascist petty bourgeois throws bottles at the youth from his balcony, thinks he is safe up there on the fourth floor, poses on the balcony until he abruptly flees to his apartment under pyro fire. Garbage cans are dragged in from everywhere, Sanderstraße is barricaded off from Kottbusser Damm, soon a large fire is burning, and again and again there is a deafening roar when larger firecrackers are thrown into the fire. People show up with fire extinguishers, probably socialized in the nearby subway station, spraying the powder into the air, it’s a wild war dance. For an hour people have created their proletarian temporary autonomous zone, happy, euphoric faces everywhere, including most of the residents.
Then the sore losers come back, with big cutlery, water cannons and their best police squad, the police president herself has rushed to Neukölln, standing with her command staff at nearby Hermannplatz, perplexity on her face, one of the most battle-hardened police forces in Europe paraded by a few dozen youths. With announcement. In the meantime, there is also banging in many other corners of Berlin, in many proletarian neighborhoods there are targeted attacks on the cops. Gesundbrunnen, Gropiusstadt, Hermannstraße, Sonnenallee,… well after midnight 50 people build barricades on Huttenstraße in Moabit and set it on fire, in Urbanstraße also burning barricades are built, also in Brunnenstraße in Mitte barricades are built. And this is only a very incomplete list, the cops themselves speak of actions extending over the entire city area, in some cases Molotovs were also involved.
For decades, there hasn’t been such a ruckus in Berlin as this New Year’s Eve. It was an escalation with a purpose. And it is deeply political. The joke is that the radical left-wing actors in this city who see themselves as political, and who have not been able to get one resistant mass action off the ground in the entire year of 2022, have absolutely nothing to do with this event. In December 2022, people and contexts from several German cities published a statement in which they wrote: “It’s about organizing, about daring a new beginning. We are less concerned with the next organization that strives for structure, responsiveness, mediation and other buzzwords from management, but rather with organizing the irreconcilability with the existing conditions in theory and practice and that beyond old certainties… We know that other people are also thinking and acting in this direction. That’s why we are certain that sooner or later our paths will cross.”
Yes, it is really overdue for a new class-based social antagonism to organize and acquire the theoretical and practical means to intervene in existing relations. The Surplus Proletariat doesn’t need us, but we do need a social reference point if we want to be more than a bunch of lost souls.
Sebastian Lotzer from the fog of the fireworks of the night of January 1, 2023
Via: La Nemesi