It is a problem that hasn't gone away, how do anarchists get their ideas out to the general public? today there seems to be a tremendous emphasis on "social media", but to me that seems so distant and lacks that human contact. To gain your information you have to sit in front of a computer or pick up you mobile phone/tablet, and deliberately go to a particular spot on the internet dial, an isolated way of communicating, though a useful tool. I still believe that the paper in your hand, handed to another human being, is a much rich path to walk. It is a contact in real space, in real time, a possible kindred spirit. Who knows where that paper will end up, in whose hands. You give it to one, they take it home, a member of the family reads it, takes it and gives it to their mate, and so on.
In Paris it seems that the plastering the walls with paper is back in fashion. The wall, the lamp-post, can be you 24 hours a day, quiet mouthpiece, shouting to those who care to look.
Blasphegme: An anarchist broadsheet on the walls of Paris
[From the first
issue of Blasphegme: An
anarchist broadsheet on the walls of Paris. It’s been getting
pasted up around the city in the past month. The biggest difficulty
faced by anarchist counter-info projects is often distribution -- how
to get texts into the hands of people who will be interested in them?
Using posters as a way of distributing long-format texts has
definitely been tried before, either by connecting to a website or by
keeping things short enough to fit, but it's an interesting idea
that's worth experimenting with more.]
Introduction:
“I spit on your idols,
I spit on your gods, I spit on the homeland […] I spit on your
flags, I spit on capital and the golden calf, I spit on all
religions: they’re jokes, I don’t give a shit about them, I don’t
give a damn. They only exist because of you, leave them and they’ll
fall apart.
You’re resigned, but you’re a force — you
don’t even know it, but you’re a force nonetheless, and I cannot
spit on you, I can only hate you… or love you. Beyond all my other
desires, I want to see you shaken from your resignation in a terrible
awakening into life. There is no future paradise, there is no future,
there is only the present.”
Albert Libertad, To the Resigned,
1905
An excerpt:
The party’s already over?
(excerpt from a poster seen in the streets of Paris these past months)
We’ve
had a good time running through the streets these past months, trying
to subvert our existing lives and these modern, sanitized cities, these
showpieces of capitalism and the society of control.
We didn’t
give a shit about this law, just like the results of a presidential
election or of a football match, because we don’t want to work, period.
We don’t accept our exploitation, whether or not its facilitated by this
law.
So why wait for the next “movement” to have fun, when all
we have to do is to continue what we started these past months? Why
should we each return to our own isolation, submerged in the various
alienations that distract us from our self-destructive boredom and
loneliness, when we’ve seen that so many of us want to attack the
existing world? This society tries to break us down a little more each
day, and to frighten away those who have decided they can no longer
accept this comedy, no longer blindly follow the union march and the
marching orders of good citizens, no longer accept states of emergency,
or, for that matter, any states at all.
We have discovered, or
rediscovered, what it means to run across the pavement, to play in
spaces where policing controls our every movement. We knew that this
society of misery depended on our servitude, and our fear of cops, but
we’ve learned that we are strong enough to overturn it, that they can’t
prevent us from playing like wild children who destroy everything they
pass.
We’re off to such a good start, let’s not trade any piece
of the present for a fictional tomorrow, and let’s not surrender
anything of this moment for the winds of the future!
Solidarity with all those arrested these past months!
Read the full article HERE:
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