Well… Paris was really nice. I can recommend going there to show your support and solidarity. There is a bunch of very nice people to meet and also a culture of protest that is interesting to wittness. You can go there safely if you don‘t throw anything onto the cops or light shit on fire and stay away from the civil police.

There was three blocades of public trainstations I took part of and a whole load of other events like an anti-repression protest in front of a paris jail and the attempt to blocade a highway which was beaten down by the police and also heavily tear-gased. The highway was guarded by several busloads of riot cops from the „crs“ and the „police national“. When kids started to throw a few things at them while we were already encircled by police forces, the pigs started to use their billies and also fired tear gas grenades into the masses. There was about a thousand something protestors by the time I would estimate. Then something happened that I will remember for my whole life. Whilst being a rather short-sightet action it was very brave and gave me courage to go on with protesting by knowing that there are normal kids out there (not even extreme left and far away from autonomous) who do something like this and risk their freedom for the cause. They hijacked a near-by bus and rolled it into the line of cops. They were arrested but still I have to admire their courage and their aggressiveness, not letting the cops shoot tear-gas at protestors because two or three threw bottles. The cops apparently felt that the threat of escalation was too high and started to push the people into a metro station which was totally contaminated with CS gas. After puking a lot and coughing our lungs out we were out of the danger zone and could go on with our plan for the day. Still I felt like we were winning for once. Being able to fight back the police, forcing them to let us go instead of them forcing us into giving up was amazing.

After another protest at night, running through the streets with a huge group of autonomous activists blowing up firecrackers and spraying political graffiti aswell as stencils and pasting poster-art, we took of after being chased by crs forces. They were enraged and out to kill. I was lucky not to get the crap beaten out of me because I was apparently faster then the robots but I saw a few others getting destroyed quite badly by their clubs and also shields which they were using to beat people down before busting their heads with their billies.

Next day I had to get on the bus back home. I really need to be studying for my graduation and actually didn‘t have the time to go to paris but I am glad now I did it anyway…
Now so much for the adventure, let’s analyze the situation and current state of the movement.

Many people in France are very unhappy with the current policies of the government and also their own lives and situation. Why is that? We need to know what the media does not explain in Germoney or anywhere else. To find the causes of misery we first have to know what the people think the causes are.

We can divide the movement and the agitators in the current events into the following groups: Students at university and highschools who protest especially the CPE and the general misery of people. They don‘t really suffer from social injustice originating mostly from families in better situations, the CPE will be a risk to their further career though as they might only be abused as cheap labour until they turn 26 and can be laid off for any reason before that and eventually never find a job again afterwards. Then there is the workers and the unions. They are generally suspicious of any change that affects social security and work. They also feel the need to show solidarity with the young people and the ones who are going to be fired because of the CPE. The CPE can enable employers to force a low wage and bad working conditions onto the new employees since they cannot talk back. They would be risking their job if they did. The social revolutionary parties in this conflict are the anarchist unions and a few radical communist unions aswell as the autonoumos activists who are mostly anarchists. They want to get rid of more than just the CPE. They want the systematics to change and not the system to appease. Then there is the people from the banlieus who we hear so much about. They feel badly treated and try to rebell against the authorities but not because of anti-authoritarian ambitions but because they feel that the police and the government is racist and the people are treating them like shit. This might be true to a certain extent.

Now the real problem is to find the common denominator. All the conflicting parties don‘t really like to work with each other. They overlap in parts of the unions and students but the unions are also conflicting inbetween and the autonomous and anarchist movement can be said to hate the unions for being structurized and hierarchically organized. The people from the banlieus don‘t get along with any of the said parties since they feel that they are part of their supressors and also they are not interested in politics too much. The common denominator for all the other parties is the CPE and the fight against it, the people from the banlieus are full of rage and hatred and want social justice in general.

Chirac announced that the CPE is not going to be signed and instead a new policy is going to be designed that is supposed to help young job starters instead.
Now what is going to happen? The common denominator for most of movement is gone. The social change has not happened that we were all waiting for, instead of that the movement has been demasked as a temporal and rather burgeoise call of protest that is now going to fall back into apathy. The students organisation FIDL has announced that they want more of the recent reforms to be stopped and undone. The unions are again accepting the government as their legitimate ruler and the anarchists and autonomous activists probably bang their heads because the nice spark of revolution has not evolved into a fire but rather into a fart or better farce.

Social revolution is not what the majority of the „movement“ wanted. They wanted to protest, they felt treated unjust but they obviously didn‘t realize what the real problem was. The CPE is dealt with, but what about the system that is behind laws like the CPE? Noone is going to questions that, instead, everybody is going back to their normal gear-in-the-machine-of-capitalist-machinery-mode. To cause social revolution and to improve everybodies situation the whole systematics have to be attacked. The capitalist is not a vague figure, a shady person who pulls the strings. IT‘S YOU! Everybody takes part of it. Governments cannot offer an alternative, especially neo-liberal governments. The EU is going to force more laws and policies onto us that that let the CPE seems like a cheap joke. If the people don‘t start to feel the desire to break free and start their own alternatives instead of letting the governments take care of them, nothing is ever going to change. All that is going to happen is appeasement.

so here we go again… right now I am sitting in an internet cafe in Paris and thought about writing a little report after finding out that there is not one pence left on my bank account! still it was a good idea to go. In a spontaneous craze I decided to follow two comrades to Paris and wittness the demonstrations against the CPE myself. I dont regret being here. The people have been very nice sofar and we have met a lot of anarchist comrades from the CNT that took us to the protests. After being lost for hours after the manifestation and having wittnessed the extreme brutality of the civil police we finally managed to find a place to sleep. A horribly drunk comrade who is a teacher at a local highschool and in the CNT took us out to a red skinhead bar and then to his apartment in the outskirts of paris. The actual plan was to crack at a squad downtown but after a rather hideous police attack took place there we werent able to get there anymore and were directed to anotherone. But the address we were given was wrong and so we were glad to have found the person we slept at tonight. After we got out of the cab he actually took us down to his flat in his car and we were almost dying of fear since he was so drunk. Surprisingly he only scraped along the sidewalk a few times and didnt kill us eventhough he was speeding as hell. apparently his driving skills were still functioning as opposed to his ability to speak. So for tonight we will stay in another squat with very nice people. A bunch of university students took us there after we visited one of the occupied campuses in Paris. The squat mainly consists of african immigrants who are sans papiere right now which means the dont have a permit to stay. We will see what the future brings. I will write more when I will get back to Germoney…