The Institute for Experimental Freedom's European appendages and friends are proud to release an English translation of “La Grève Infinie” (Infinite Strike). This text was written on Oct 27th 2010 from within the events transpiring throughout the French strikes and blockades. It has appeared throughout France, and is available in at nantes.indymedia.org/article/22087 and http://juralibertaire.over-blog.com/article-la-greve-infinie-59845046.html.
Although the US is not France, we can't help but find a certain resonance with the strike, with the determinacy of struggle. We welcome the return of causseur, of the vandal, of course! We delight in the fine fractures that link our deep sense of despair with the its negation—the secret solidarity between our weakness our others strength. And so, as a means of reverberating the call, the IEF offers this text to those of us who are everywhere homeless, and everywhere foreign.
Within the text—which is just overheard within the event—we see a clear proposition. The elementary strategy of “shutting it all down.” Blockade the oil refineries, extend all self-reductions beyond ourselves, block the ports, defeat the police, shut down the nuclear reactors. Realize all strikes as a position.
Practice makes perfect.
INFINITE STRIKE
It's clear. The Party of Order seeks, with all the forces at its disposal, to have us return home. On this point, at least, the unions and the government are of one accord. Doubtlessly banking upon our most miserable inclinations, our insidious predilection for the emptiness and absences in which we have so perfectly forgotten how to live and struggle. Here they are mistaken. We will not go home; we who are everywhere homeless. For if there exists a single place that we might deem inhabitable, it's within this event, in the intensities taking shape therein, thanks to which we are living. In accordance, above all, with the means we will be able to provide ourselves.
It's clear. An insurrectional process gathers strength to the extent that the givens that make up its particular understanding of reality become, imperceptibly, blaring truisms. Being given that Capitalism is a universal lie, the form of its negation, inversely, will be that of a plurality of worlds combined jointly by the truths that hold them together.
The words by which a situation becomes comprehensible to itself directly determine both its forms and its spirit. The forced objectifications will manage, at best, to trace vague contours around a muchness. The diversity of analysis, be they those of the sociologists or those of the radical activist, put about the self-same concert of confusion: broken-winded apology or interested pessimism. In either case one is struck by the want of so much as a glimmer of the tactical sense by which a voice finds its real comprehensibility, a veritable Common which could liberate the possibilities opened-up by the situation, and through which one could rid oneself, like a nightmare upon waking, of our programed despondency. The trenchancy of this voice resides as much in its choice of words as in the positivity of its orientation.
An opening gesture proves necessary to set out the strategic intelligibility of the events in progress. That of situating oneself, of orienting oneself. To speak from somewhere, not simply from behind one or another point of view, but from the position of a party. ...
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