Attack & Defence

There is no need to be a great strategist to know that in the war waged by the weak against their jailers, only attack by the former can lead to victory. Clausewitz points out, and this seems rather trivial than redundant, that only offensive can win the war. Now the enemy, State-commodity-information, uses attack as a means of its defence, it does not try to win the war, it tries to make it eternal, it does not try to eradicate us since it needs us. One of its propaganda’s weapon is to propagate the cult of defence, and the interdiction of attack. In this world, everybody is defending, according to this propaganda, and to defend is good. We say: in this world, our party is attacking and the enemy is defending ; the enemy is the one defending this world. Unlike it, we are trying to eradicate it.

Defence thus is the enemy attitude, enemy of our project. All and each of us, though, are defending ourselves, including among those who have nothing to lose, or so they claim. They defend their skin, or their money, or an idea. Some even defend, as groups, unions, organisations whose aim is revolution, militias, charities, what they think they have in common. But we argue that when we are reduced to defending, the enemy has already won. Defending is never fun, except for shopkeepers and bureaucrats, unlike attacking. Defence always is the preservation, the conservation of what is defended. And when the enemy forces us to conserve, may it even be our existence or that of our project, it brings us to adopt its pattern, which it owns and masters, as typically demonstrated by unionism throughout the 20th century. In short, whenever we defend ourselves, we usually do so, badly and without pleasure, as we do so without perspective.

So the project of a Riots’ Library [Bibliothèque des Emeutes] is to support the offensive by revealing it. We do not think of riot as the ultimate goal, on the contrary. Riot is the sine qua non, a necessary condition. Any modern riot is a start of an offensive. Any modern offensive starts with a riot, like a flame with a spark. We regret that today’s greatest flame is only the one of Iraq, but we get light from the remarkable number of sparks that are ready to set this world on fire. Riot, as we said, is always insufficient ; but it is the only current ground that contain the whole perspective. You speak of other “struggles”. But you do not name any. If this allusion does not refer to the old forms of defence of the wage workers, like strikes, if you are thinking of offensive “struggles”, let us know which ones, because, unfortunately, outside those articulated around riot, we cannot distinguish any, in these eventful times, although we are actually looking out closely, apparently more than anyone else, for each of their jolts.

(Excerpt from ‘Correspondance avec le GCI’ (‘Correspondance with the ICG’ [International Communist Group]), 1992.)

www.teleologie.org/OT/textes/txtGCI5.html

Excerpted & translated in 2009 by a third party – historyhereandnow@gmail.com