[g8-sheffield] Fwd: Statement from French occupations

[Anthony Mullen]

I have just received this from France,


> 
> Dear english-speaking friends,
> 
> I have written this text with a group of friends a
> week ago....and I just found it translated in
> english
> on an british website... 
> 
> http://indymedia.org.uk/en/2006/03/337184.html
> 
> FRENCH ANTI - CPE PROTESTS: Last week, the Sorbonne
> Students joined the EHESS (School of Higher Social
> Science Studies Paris), students on Monday 20th to
> occupy their school and were evicted on Friday 24th.
> Before being evicted, they issued a "Raspail Appeal"
> (see bellow) calling for a wider opposition to
> capitalism and industrialism. The evicted student
> protesters have now joined the Tolbiac students for
> the occupation of this University. 
> Although this text is several days old, it has only
> now been translated into English and is a concise
> critique of the CPE protests. 
> 
> THE RASPAIL APPEAL 
> To the students, the unemployed, the more or less
> casual workers, of France and Navarre, to all those
> who are struggling these days against the CPE, and
> maybe much more than that
 
> ________________________________________________ 
> Since we can more and more precisely foresee the
> time
> when the Earth will be entirely consumed by our way
> of
> life, Since scientists are reduced to promises of
> colonising others planets to consume, 
> We, stable or casual workers and students, from the
> Paris region or elsewhere, occupying the CEMI (1) on
> the 4th floor of the EHESS (2) on this first day of
> spring, want to have a reflection on what could be a
> sustainable and desirable life in a finite world. 
> It seems impossible to us to raise the issue of the
> precariousness of work and money income without
> raising that of the precariousness of global human
> survival. In these times of very advanced ecological
> disaster, we think that no political position and no
> demand not taking into account that economic
> development and growth is a dead-end can have any
> value. 
> We are both fantastically utopian and radically
> pragmatic, much more pragmatic in fact than all the
> “credible” managers of capitalism and social
> movements
> (UNEF rhyming with MEDEF
). 
> We want to destroy the worship of wealth and job
> creators, restored with the help of the left in the
> 80s. No talk of exploitation and casualisation has
> any
> sense and usefulness if it refrains itself from
> criticising these “benefactors of the community” the
> way they deserve. 
> We also want to put an end the anti-CPE movement
> taboo: the prospect of full employment, which
> underlies most demands and claims, is neither
> realistic nor desirable. 
> Human labour, in the Western world, has been
> massively
> cut down by machines and computers for many decades.
> It has indeed never been anything else than a
> commodity for the capital, but there has been a
> change
> in that in the current stage of technological
> "progress" money accumulation requires less humans
> to
> be exploited than before. It has to be kept in mind
> that capitalism can no longer generate enough jobs
> for
> all. And it has to be admitted that in addition to
> that, the jobs it still struggles to create are more
> and more meaningless and disconnected from our
> fundamental needs. 
> In this system, material production is delocalised
> to
> "developing" countries, where the ecological
> disaster
> is thus concentrated (although we are not so far
> behind
), while at home, in our supposedly
> immaterial
> services economy, menial jobs are flourishing:
> slaves
> to robotic rates, “personal services" domestics (see
> the recent Borloo plan) (3), soldiers of business
> management. 
> This movement will only be strong and have a future
> if
> a lucid criticism of modern labour can get through
> and
> if it can definitely be acknowledged that there will
> be no exit from the crisis. Far from letting it wear
> us down, we want to view this as a chance. We think
> that a consistent social movement should aim at
> helping the economy collapse. There is no outside to
> current world, no hope of escaping from it. We thus
> have to patiently build living spaces within where
> we
> can support our lives without the help of the
> industrial machinery, places freed from it where new
> human relationships can emerge. In parallel, the
> dismantling of whole useless or harmful sections of
> the existing production apparatus has to be
> undertaken. Of course all this requires, in both our
> speeches and practices, a determined rejection of
> the
> state and its representatives, as they are almost
> always obstacles to our plans for autonomy. 
> Let us not demand a stable job for everyone any
> more!
> (even though we all occasionally look for work or
> money) 
> Let the crisis get worse ! 
> Let life prevail ! 
> The CEMI occupiers (at the EHESS, on Raspail Blvd in
> Paris), constituted in a Committee for World
> Deindustrialisation (4), between the dawn of March
> 21st 2006 and the middle of the following night. 
> TRANSLATION NOTES 
> (1) CEMI = Centre d’étude des modes
> d’industrialisation (Centre for the Study of
> Industrialisation Modes) 
> (2) EHESS = Ecole des hautes études en sciences
> sociales (School of Higher Social Science Studies) 
> (3) The Borloo plan is yet another recent French law
> creating further casualisation. 
> (4) Comité pour la désindustrialisation du monde. 
> 
> 
> Students occupying EHESS Paris 


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