I know I risk becoming trop français here, but I couldn’t let this one slip through… Spotted this on the libcom forums yesterday, which is proving a great place for first hand reports as much as analysis & debate. Anyway, this comes from someone who’d just spent five days in Rennes and picks up as they’re leaving a demo/march/riot:
As I left with the militants I had come with, yesterday afternoon, we saw a manif (=demo) of 1000 lycées (=schoolkids) The militants didn’t have a clue what it was about. It seemed to be heading to the centre comerciale (=shopping centre), where a blockade had been organised for the next day. But it was a day early. When people refuse to wait for organised days of action but just begin; when militants don’t know every demo’s time and place; when the cry of ‘vive la commune‘ goes up from 2000 on a spontaneous demo in Paris against the propagation of the CPE – we live in interesting times.
Again, if we see movements as things, then we need to know who’s ‘in’ and who’s ‘out’. But when we see movements as a verb, as the moving of social relations, then of course they have no boundary, no inside and no outside – which is precisely why they are social movements, not discrete lifestyle pockets (hmm, sounds like a fashion tip). And also why social centres is something of a misnomer: when things really start to happen, then those centres will be outflanked and outmoded (which is great). And finally, this reminds me of a discussion about Gleneagles/Stirling last week where someone complained that meetings made (at the camp) on the Monday evening “weren’t implemented” (on the roads) on the Wednesday morning – as if it’s some sort of conference where policy is discussed, ratified and set in stone. I can just see this fellow in Rennes trying to turn back a mob of schoolkids with the anguished cry of “No, no, no, I thought we had consensus on this – this isn’t planned for today, please go home…”
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