Düsseldorf, Germany: The “Angry Birds Commando” and the collapse…

Posted on 2025/02/03 - 2025/02/03 by darknights

[In Germany’s seventh-largest city, Düsseldorf, located in the North Rhine-Westphalia region, the “Angry Birds Commando” is regularly in the news.

In August 2024, for example, it claimed responsibility for setting fire to railway signal cables in Mettmann, adding to its previous sabotage attacks on rail traffic: one in Düsseldorf in January 2024, and five others in the same city claimed in May 2023. And since the angry birds can also be generous, last September they published a little manual entitled “Setting fire to cables for beginners”, which contains a number of homemade retardant techniques.

But let’s move on to more recent news: on Thursday night, shortly before 6 a.m. on Friday January 24, a fire broke out in a cable shaft near Eller station, a district in the south-east of Düsseldorf, interrupting rail traffic on the city’s most important freight line, as well as passenger line S1 between Düsseldorf and Solingen. This time, while the Angry Birds Commando’s communiqué no. 3 was written in rhyme, the one published the following day on de.indymedia and entitled “Switch off Deutsche Bahn – Communiqué no. 4” is in the form of an Open Letter.

Below is a translation from the German of this text, which develops its own vision of collapse, as a contribution to the ongoing debates within the revolutionary movement. To put this statement from across the Rhine into context, it’s worth rereading the brochure “Switch off! Radical interventions against the destruction of the planet”.

On Friday morning (January 24), we used tried-and-tested methods to take Düsseldorf’s most important freight line out of service for at least 12 hours. For at least 24 hours, its use was only possible with severe restrictions. In addition to the immediate economic damage, we would like to draw your attention to the following appeal. We would also like to apologize to the travelers affected, and hope that at least one or other of the commuters was able to enjoy a day off in this way.

Dear fellow citizen,

We were lied to. We’ve been told that our leaders always act in our best interests. We were told that we lived in the best of societies. That we were the envy of the world. That nowhere had it ever been better. That the answer to every question was “technical progress!” and that the answer to all the problems that ensued was “even more!”. We’re supposed to believe that we can live without whales, beetles, bats, forests and clean water, but that without the state, the economy and the police, we couldn’t survive a week. We’ve been led to believe that Elon Musk and his gang will build us a paradise on Mars and download our consciousness into the cloud, but that a life without smartphones and cars is utopian, that economic change is even impossible.
And we were told that everything would be fine if we did our jobs well, voted, and let the politicians do their jobs.

Let’s look at ourselves: sick, cowardly and lazy, we stare at our screens wondering what went wrong. Under the blows of constant propaganda, too dumb and confused to recognize genocide as such, it’s no wonder they can even sell us natural gas, fighter jets and solar power as sustainable. Cancer, diabetes, bad posture, severe depression and many others are no longer exceptional these days, even among the young. We drag ourselves into minimum-wage jobs where we’re treated like sub-humans. We’re then allowed to do things that don’t really make sense to us. But maybe things will get better with the next vacation. Or the new television. Or retirement. Or simply when the next beer has been drunk. Continue reading “Düsseldorf, Germany: The “Angry Birds Commando” and the collapse…” →

To Produce or Not to Produce – Kevin Tucker

Posted on 2024/11/22 - 2024/11/22 by darknights

To Produce or Not to Produce
Class, Modernity and Identity

Class is a social relationship. Stripped to its base, it is about economics. It’s about being a producer, distributor or an owner of the means and fruits of production. No matter what category any person is, it’s about identity. Who do you identify with? Or better yet, what do you identify with? Every one of us can be put into any number of socio-economic categories. But that isn’t the question. Is your job your identity? Is your economical niche?

Let’s take a step back. What are economics? My dictionary defines it as: “the science of production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services.” Fair enough. Economies do exist. In any society where there is unequal access to the necessities of life, where people are dependent upon one another (and more importantly, institutions) there is economy. The goal of revolutionaries and reformists has almost always been about reorganizing the economy. Wealth must be redistributed. Capitalist, communist, socialist, syndicalist, what have you, it’s all about economics. Why? Because production has been naturalized, science can always distinguish economy, and work is just a necessary evil. It’s back to the fall from Eden where Adam was punished to till the soil for disobeying god. It’s the Protestant work ethic and warnings of the sin of ‘idle hands’. Work becomes the basis for humanity. That’s the inherent message of economics. Labor “is the prime basic condition for all human existence, and this to such an extent that, in a sense, we have to say that labor created man himself.” That’s not Adam Smith or God talking (at least this time), that’s Frederick Engels. But something’s very wrong here. What about the Others beyond the walls of Eden? What about the savages who farmers and conquistadors (for all they can be separated) could only see as lazy for not working?

Are economics universal? Let’s look back at our definition. The crux of economy is production. So if production is not universal, then economy cannot be. We’re in luck, it’s not. The savage Others beyond the walls of Eden, the walls of Babylon, and the gardens: nomadic gatherer/hunters, produced nothing. A hunter does not produce wild animals. A gatherer does not produce wild plants. They simply hunt and gather. Their existence is give and take, but this is ecology, not economy. Every one in a nomadic gatherer/hunter society is capable of getting what they need on their own. That they don’t is a matter of mutual aid and social cohesiveness, not force. If they don’t like their situation, they change it. They are capable of this and encouraged to do so. Their form of exchange is anti-economy: generalized reciprocity. This means simply that people give anything to anyone whenever. There are no records, no tabs, no tax and no running system of measurement or worth. Share with others and they share in return. These societies are intrinsically anti-production, anti-wealth, anti-power, anti-economics. They are simply egalitarian to the core: organic, primal anarchy.

But that doesn’t tell how we became economic people. How work became identity. Looking at the origins of civilization does. Civilization is based off production. The first instance of production is surplus production. Nomadic gatherer/hunters got what they needed when they needed it. They ate animals, insects, and plants. When a number of gatherer/hunters settled, they still hunted animals and gathered plants, but not to eat. At least not immediately.

In Mesopotamia, the cradle of our now global civilization, vast fields of wild grains could be harvested. Grain, unlike meat and most wild plants, can be stored without any intensive technology. It was put in huge granaries. But grain is harvested seasonally. As populations expand, they become dependent upon granaries rather than what is freely available. Enter distribution. The granaries were owned by elites or family elders who were in charge of rationing and distributing to the people who filled their lot. Dependency means compromise: that’s the central element of domestication. Grain must be stored. Granary owners store and ration the grain in exchange for increased social status. Social status means coercive power. This is how the State arose.

In other areas, such as what is now the northwest coast of the United States into Canada, store houses were filled with dried fish rather than grain. Kingdoms and intense chiefdoms were established. The subjects of the arising power were those who filled the storehouses. This should sound familiar. Expansive trade networks were formed and the domestication of plants and then animals followed the expansion of populations. The need for more grain turned gatherers into farmers. The farmers would need more land and wars were waged. Soldiers were conscripted. Slaves were captured. Nomadic gatherer/hunters and horticulturalists were pushed away and killed. Continue reading “To Produce or Not to Produce – Kevin Tucker” →

Interview and dialogue with Alfredo Cospito from the prison of Ferrara [Published in anarchist paper Vetriolo, Issue 2, Autumn 2018]

Posted on 2021/09/06 - 2022/11/16 by darknights

What international? Interview and dialogue with Alfredo Cospito from the prison of Ferrara.Part One

Internationalism has always been the principle inspiring the actions and horizons of the exploited who do not accept the role that society has given them. It has always been a vaccine against opportunism of every kind, a guarantee that those who practice it are not the servants of their boss or a foreign boss, but are authentic enemies of all forms of exploitation and authority. Internationalism as tension, as spirit, does not change with the changing of times. But the way it becomes real in history changes. Reformists, opportunists and authoritarians have always tried to pervert internationalism towards their own interests. The question of questions, the lever get the world to rise up, is therefore the International. How, what should the International be today? Should it be a real “organization”, a federation of groups, a “world party”? Or can there be instruments or “structures” that are closer to the anarchist Idea and that are more effective in this historical period?

Like “scientific” socialism, anarchism was born to oppose a global process, capitalism and the advent of the bourgeoisie. It is more than natural that anarchists and Marxists have from the beginning pursued with alternating fortunes an international organizational dimension. In the nineteenth century, with Bakunin, anarchy abandoned the philosophical, idealist level to take its first steps in the real world. First against Mazzini’s messianic liberalism, to then clash with Marx’s state socialism, giving rise to the autonomist federalist currents within the First International.
Continue reading “Interview and dialogue with Alfredo Cospito from the prison of Ferrara [Published in anarchist paper Vetriolo, Issue 2, Autumn 2018]” →

Avis de tempêtes #43-44

Posted on 2021/08/29 - 2021/08/29 by darknights

Avis de tempêtes – bulletin anarchiste pour la guerre sociale n°43-44 (juillet-août 2021) est sorti. Pour lire, imprimer et diffuser ce petit bulletin autour de soi (il est en format A5, et celui-ci fait 24 pages), on pourra retrouver chaque nouveau numéro tous les 15 du mois, ainsi que les précédents, sur le blog :

https://avisdetempetes.noblogs.org

“A l’heure où dans le monde entier, les conséquences de l’avancée folle de la machine industrielle et technologique se font ressentir chaque jour davantage, où les changements climatiques induits par l’industrialisation pourraient bien inaugurer des scénarios inouïs qui risquent de reconfigurer drastiquement les assises de la domination, la lutte mapuche dans un coin « perdu » du monde où des habitants et habitantes porteurs de façons de vivre antagonistes avec le capitalisme et l’étatisme se battent pour chaque mètre accaparé et exploité par des entreprises et l’État, peut avoir une signification qui dépasse le territoire du Wallmapu.

To Produce or Not to Produce Class, Modernity and Identity

To Produce or Not to Produce
Class, Modernity and Identity