Since the beginning of the Yellow Jackets movement, these mysterious Yellow Letters have been circulated at roundabouts and through social media. This is an extract from the 15th missive.

It is time that we create a real social organisation with a local base and global reach. The problems of those from below in Congo, in Thailand or in Brazil are also our problems.

While we are encouraged to soothe our frustrations by emptying the shelves of shopping centres during the winter sales, let’s try and imagine a 20-year-old in Vietnam, uprooted from the native soil where his family has lived for generations, heading out at 6am, alone, to a cotton field or to huge cold metallic blocks to produce a miserable item of clothing!

Let’s imagine the same company congratulating itself on its great quarterly results!

Now imagine us Europeans demanding consumer credit to buy this very same object!

Can we imagine how wretched that is? Can we actually imagine the world that we live in? Our faces, a reflection of our daily miseries. This world, our world. The one that we are have rendered so intolerable, detestable, suffocating, and unliveable that we must seek refuge in the citadels of our screens, our illusions, our denials…

On the other hand, imagine if we could establish other ways of producing and consuming things in our apartment blocks, in our neighborhoods and villages.

Can we imagine one washing machine per building? Can we imagine spending the morning fishing, the afternoon doing childcare, and the evening preparing the local festival, or tomorrow’s football match?

Can we imagine conserving our food in old-fashioned jars and shared spaces?

Can we imagine shattering the private property that pens us in, forces us out, isolates and evicts us?

Can we imagine the 25-year-old pregnant woman whose needs are distinct from those of a sturdy 35-year-old man? Can we imagine a night watchman working 40 hours a week in the freezing cold, while a banker works the same hours in an air-conditioned office with a cup of coffee and fine cookies? Can we imagine these really-existing sadnesses?

Can we imagine a real inequality, and not this abstract equality, that of an abstract labor in which work is no longer judged according to real, vital needs but according to fictive and imaginary ones?

Can we imagine real work, meaningful work? Might we, finally, imagine a human face?

First published in lundimatin#173, Jan. 7, 2019

Translated by Ill Will Editions who give a hat tip to Winter Oak, for their draft translation.