Then, at the margins of this paralysis, there is the “we really have to do something, anything” of the activists. […] Everywhere militantism has gone back to raising its rickety constructions, its depressing networks, until it is exhausted.
Anonymous, Call, p.3-4
Those who would respond to the urgency of the situation with the urgency of their reaction only add to the suffocation.
Their manner of intervention, of their agitation, points to the rest of their politics.
That it might take a generation to build a victorious revolutionary movement in all its breadth does not cause us to retreat. We think about this with serenity.
Anonymous, Call, p.9
We have known, and are still familiar with, the temptation of activism.
The counter-summits, the campaigns against evictions, against new security laws and the building of new prisons, the occupations, the No-Border camps; the parade of all of this. The progres- sive dispersion of collectives responding to the same dispersion of activity. Running after the movements.
Feeling our power on an ad hoc basis, but at the price of returning each time to an underlying powerlessness. Paying a high price for each campaign. Letting it consume all the energy that we have. Then moving to the next one, each time more out of breath, more exhausted, more saddened.
And little by little, through demanding, through denouncing, we become incapable of sensing what is supposed to be the basis of our engagement, the nature of the urgency that flows through us.
Anonymous, Call, p.9
Activism is the first reflex. The standard response to the urgency of the present situation. The perpetual mobilization in the name of urgency is what our governments and our bosses have made us used to, even when we fight against them.
Forms of life disappear every day; plant and animal species, human experiences and countless relationships between living beings and ways of living. But our feeling of urgency is tied less to the speed of these extinctions than to their irreversibility, and even more to our inability to repopulate the desert.
The activist mobilizes herself against the catastrophe. But only to prolong it. Her haste con- sumes what little of the world remains. The activist answer to urgency remains faithful to the regime of urgency, with no hope of getting out of it or interrupting it.
The activist wants to be everywhere. She goes everywhere the rhythm of the breakdown of the machine leads her. Everywhere she brings her pragmatic inventiveness, the festive energy of her opposition to the catastrophe. Without a doubt, the activist gets shit done. But she never devotes herself to thinking about how to do it. How to hinder concretely the progress of the desert, in order to establish inhabitable worlds without waiting.
Anonymous, Call, p.9-10
We desert activism. Without forgetting what gives it strength: a certain presence within the situation. An ease of movement within it. A way to apprehend the struggle; not from a moral or ideological angle, but technically and tactically.
Anonymous, Call, p.9
What we desert in militantism is this absence from the situation. Just as we desert the inconsistency to which activism condemns them.
Activists themselves feel this inconsistency. And this is why, periodically, they turn toward their elders, the militants. They borrow their strategies, terrains of struggle, slogans. What appeals to them in militantism is the consistency, the structure, the loyalty they lack. And so the activists revert to old-new disputes and demand — “citizenship for all,” “free movement of people,” “guaranteed income,” “free public transport.”
The problem with demands is that, by formulating needs in terms that make them audible
to power, they say nothing about those needs, and what real transformations of the world they require. Thus, demanding free public transportation says nothing of our need to travel rather than be transported, of our need for slowness.
Anonymous, Call, p.10