We’ve seen you. We’ve heard you. Now you are everywhere. We know who you are. You are the 99% who protest against against the excesses of capitalism and the abuses of the State. You are the 99% who demand electoral reforms, social alternatives, economic aid, political measures. You are the 99% distressed at losing your future, at no longer being able to live as you have up to now: a job, a wage, a loan for your house, a pension. Live and let live, as a minimum. A career, as a maximum. This is what you ask. You don’t want to pay for the “crisis,” you want everything to return to what it was. Let no one turn off the screens that have day after day drained your life of meaning and emotion, condemning it to the sadness of survival. And you ask all this of the governments and the banks. Because democracy is: rulers who are not interested in power but in the common good, bankers that are not interested in profit but in the happiness of the population. Like in fairy tales, like in films.
Waiting for a happy ending that is slow to arrive, you don’t tolerate anyone not sharing your delusional resignation. From Madrid to Athens, from Rome to Portland, you are quick to stop, denounce and beat those of the enraged who don’t see the guarantees of freedom in the institutions, but rather the cause of misery and oppression. You appreciate revenge only in cinema fiction, the mask removed you prefer submission. Facing a society as hateful as it is rotten you fight in favor of a civil, measured, educated protest. A protest that always remains at your height: on its knees.
Now we know who that 1% is that you hate so much. With your lines, with your service orders, with your snitching, you have made everyone understand who you real enemy is. It certainly isn’t the ruling class, to whom you address yourselves with respect. It is us. Us, who have no state to defend or improve. Us, who have no market to protect or exploit. Us, who don’t want to exercise or submit to any authority. Us, for whom life is not reducible to a time card to punch or checking account to protect. Us, for whom the crisis is not born with recent stock market speculations, or with the incapacity of those who sit in parliament today, but with living in this social order itself in all its aspects. Us, for whom all days are precarious in this world we did not want, in which we never recognize ourselves, and which smothers us.
We don’t want to have anything to do with your 99%. With your demand for a moderate capitalism and an upright state. With your political pace that reduces power and privilege to the dimensions of a credit card. With your urban camping as nostalgic boyscouts. With your identification of an opponent, the origin of “injustice,” more and more vague, immaterial and far out of our reach. With your arms mor and more inviting in the face of politicians, industrialists and guardians of order, and more and more vigorous against rebels. With your actions that get weaker and weaker and have become only a tepid interval in the status quo. No, we don’t want your reforms, your collaborationism, your alienated labor, your leftist demands heated over so many times as to be nauseating.
We know what the real causes of the suffering we endure: the sect of power, the cult of money, but also the obedience that they demand and obtain. These causes are perpetuated in the daily lives of human beings by the actions, gestures, relationships that interweave within a society in which we feel that we are strangers everywhere. And these causes – that have to be refused, deserted, demolished – have found shelter in your movement. We have never felt at home in 99% of our modern life, spent lining up to beg for crumbs, and yet you insist on defending 99% of the problem. We will take our possibilities elsewhere. Through the hopes, dreams and actions that have earned your comdemnation. You, you still continue you passage through the ocean of universal indignation. You raise your sails passing the ropes to bureaucrats and police. You share space and air with the scum who have made life on this planet so unlivable. You head straight towards a new tomorrow with the hold still full of yesterday’s shit. We won’t climb onto your ship, in case we would never get off of it. We will stay on our rafts which you so despise, because they are so small and light.
But watch out. A vessel that travels with our enemies on board is an opportunity to fine to miss. Do you laugh? Do you have no fear of us because we don’t have the strength board you? You’ve misunderstood us. We don’t want your gold, we don’t at all want to conquer you, We want to make you sink with all your death cargo. To succeed at this, there is no need for a majestic fleet, one fire-ship is enough. Small and light.