"They call it a celebration?" communiqué from the pre-Olympics rail saboteurs

They call it a celebration? We see it as a celebration of nationalism, a gigantic staging of the subjugation of populations by states.

Underneath their friendly, playful guise, the Olympic Games provide a testing ground for police crowd management and the generalized control of our movements.

Like all major sporting events, they are also an opportunity to worship the values that underpin the world of power and money, generalized competition, performance at all costs, sacrifice for the sake of national interest and glory.

The call to identify with an imaginary community and to support the side to which one supposedly belongs is no less harmful than the permanent incitement to see one’s salvation in the health of one’s national economy and the strength of one’s national army.

Today, it takes ever greater doses of bad faith and denial not to see the full horror generated by consumer society and the pursuit of so-called “Western-style well-being”. France would like to make this great mass a showcase for its excellence. The only people who will be able to delude themselves about its virtuous role are those who have decided to put on blinkers, and who are content to put up with it. Our deepest contempt goes out to them.

France’s influence is based on its arms production, whose sales volume makes it the world’s second largest exporter. The French state is proud of its military-industrial complex and its “made in France” arsenal. Spreading the means of terror, death and devastation around the world to ensure its prosperity? Cock-a-doodle-doo!

To the displeasure of the gullible who still believe in democratic fables, the French state also employs its repressive panoply to confront its own population. Whether to quell the riots following the police murder of Nahel in June 2023, or to try and stop the anti-colonial uprising in Kanaky recently. As long as it exists, the state will never stop using it to combat those who challenge its authority.

The activities of French companies around the world make ever more obvious the social and environmental devastation wrought by the capitalist system. Those necessary to reproduce the current social organization, and those inherent in scientific and technological progress. Progress that sees the chain of past, present and future disasters only as an opportunity to leap forward.

TotalEnergies continues to plunder and despoil new regions in search of oil and shale gas (East Africa, Argentina, etc.). Under the guise of its new green label, the nuclear industry and the export of French know-how in the field ensure that, sooner or later, our planet will be irradiated and therefore literally uninhabitable. Nothing more than another crisis for the atom’s promoters to manage. They can’t do without cooperating with the Russian state through its giant Rosatom and the support of its army to crush the uprising in Kazakstan in 2022, a major supplier of uranium. The ore that powers France’s 58 reactors.

So, what is the human, social and environmental cost of a privileged few traveling fast and far by TGV? Infinitely too much. The railroad is not an insignificant infrastructure. It has always been a means of colonizing new territories, a prerequisite for their devastation, and a ready-made path for the extension of capitalism and state control. The Tren Maya line in Mexico, on which Alstom and NGE are collaborating, is a good illustration of this.

What about the electric batteries essential to the so-called “energy transition”? Talk to the workers at the Bou-azeer mine and the inhabitants of the oases in this Moroccan region, for example, who are paying the price for this 21st century gold rush. Renault extracts the minerals needed to ease the conscience of the ecologists in the metropolises, at the cost of sacrificed lives. Talk to the “forest people” on the island of Halmahera in northeast Indonesia, the Hongana Manyawa, who despair of seeing the forest where they live destroyed on the altar of “ecological transition”. The French state, via Eramet, is participating in the devastation of previously untouched land. Nor does it want to let go of the Melanesian rock in order to continue extracting the precious nickel.

We won’t go into the impossible inventory of the mortifying and predatory activities of every state and capitalist economy. It would be no help at all to break away from a dull and depressing life, a life of the exploited, and to confront the violence of states and religious leaders, family patriarchs and police patrols, patriots and employed militias, as well as that of shareholders, entrepreneurs, engineers, planners and architects of the ongoing devastation. Fortunately, the arrogance of those in power continues to clash with the anger of the rebellious oppressed. From riots to insurrection, in offensive demonstrations and uprisings, through daily struggles and underground resistance.

Let the sabotage of TGV lines linking Paris to the four corners of France, the cries of “femme, vie, liberté” (woman, life, freedom) from Iran, the struggles of the Amazonians, the “nique la france” (fuck France) from Oceania, the desire for freedom that reaches us from the Levant and Sudan, the battles that continue behind prison walls and the insubordination of deserters the world over, all resonate on this day.

To those who criticize these acts for spoiling the stay of tourists or disrupting vacation departures, we reply that it’s still so little. So little compared to the event in which we wish to participate and which we call with all our hearts: the fall of a world based on exploitation and domination. Then we’ll have something to celebrate.

Une délégation inattendue [An unexpected delegation]