Os Cangaceiros was a group of delinquents with nothing but contempt for the self-sacrificial ideology practiced by “specialists in armed struggle”. This uncontrollable band of social rebels wreaked havoc on the French state by attacking the infrastructures of oppression, supporting popular revolts, stealing and releasing secret blueprints for high-tech prisons, raiding the offices of corporate collaborators, and creating their lives in complete opposition to the world based on work. This volume, translated by Wolfi Landstreicher, is the first collection of the writings of Os Cangaceiros in English.

Foreword

The book you are reading is a labor of love. I first saw a few translations of writings by the French group Os Cangaceiros about fifteen years ago. They were intriguing and I wanted to know more. It was clear that this was not another militant group of specialists in armed struggle. They had nothing but contempt for the self-sacrificial ideology and practice of militancy promoted by such groups. Several years later, I learned that Os Cangaceiros was a group comprised of delinquents who were caught up in the spirit of the French insurrection of 1968 — an insurrection that was not just a “student revolt”, as the media has tried to portray it , but that encompassed the whole of French society. The group came together in Nice in 1968. Taking the well-known graffiti “Never work, ever!” to heart, they began creating their lives in opposition to the entire world based on work and thus constantly risked prison. They traveled all over Europe, participating in revolts throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. By the mid-1980s, their experiences with the judicial and prison systems led them to focus attacks there. Most of the material here relates to their anti-prison activity. I find the ideas they express particularly interesting because they combine the best aspects of a non-dogmatic (and non-workerist) class analysis with a critique of civilization that is not at all primitivist, forming a fierce theoretical weapon for use in the social war against the ruling order.

Unfortunately, very few of the writings of Os Cangaceiros have been translated from French into English. Of these few translations, some seem rough, and others are mere excerpts, sometimes out of sequence. I do not know French, so I was pleased when some Italian comrades published Un Crimine Chiamato Libertà, a book which brings together a number of the texts relating to Os Cangaceiros’ anti-prison activity. In that book, it was mentioned that various anarchists had translated other material from Os Cangaceiros into Italian. I asked the Italian comrades to send me this material as well. The book you hold in your hands consists of all the texts that appeared in Un Crimine Chiamato Libertà (except the bibliography) and a few other texts that I felt would fit here. Some of the texts from the Italian already existed in English in rough and sometimes incomplete form. I used both the rough English and the Italian translations for the English versions printed herein. In addition to the material from Un Crimine..., I have included the “Editorial Notes from Os Cangaceiros #2” as translated from the Italian version that appeared in Anarchismo as “Francia. Os Cangaceiros”. This text gives some idea of social changes that happened in France in the late 1970s and early 1980s that explain why prison became a greater risk for the underclass at the time. I also included two texts that had already appeared in English, “Nothing Human Is Achieved in the Grip of Fear” and “Industrial Domestication”. The latter text helps to clarify some of the ideas already present in the anti-prison texts by examining the rise of industrialism, pointing out the prison-like quality of the first factories, which were designed for the domestication of the poor. I did some editing on these two texts to make them read more smoothly and fit the style of the others more closely. The endnotes that are signed WL are notes that I added. The rest of the notes were already in one of the other versions of the text. I have translated some writings by people in Os Cangaceiros about millenarian revolts as well. These will appear in a separate volume, also published by Eberhardt Press.

I didn’t translate these texts merely for the joy of seeing writings that have inspired me printed in English. I hope they will provoke discussion aimed at creating an anti-political practice of struggle against prison and the society that creates it, a practice that goes beyond the current charity and social welfare-style practice of prison support to genuine revolutionary solidarity. This would be the greatest joy.

Wolfi Landstreicher, November 2005

Introduction to Un Crimine Chiamato Libertà

For some time now, a renewed interest in everything that relates to prison and the living conditions inside it has been spreading within the so-called movement. Bulletins, websites, committees, actions and initiatives of struggle flourish. Beyond motives that are more contingent (judiciary investigations and arrests) and political (often, due to the lack of any projectuality through which to experiment with understandings and find accomplices, all that remains for comrades to share is the misfortune of prison, reducing differences to zero), the main reason why the anti-prison critique rouses such sincere attention is quite simple, almost a banality: it is easier and easier for anyone to get locked up within the walls of a prison. And not only due to a generalized repressive response that the state might make to the radicalization and growth of social struggles, since this is the outcome of the same social, economic and technological progress that manifests itself under this disquieting paradox: we could all end up in prison again because we all already live in a prison. Nobody excluded.

We could all end up in prison. The triumph of this society of money has caused the living conditions of millions of people to deteriorate. This throws them into a situation of precariousness where only worsening conditions await them. It destroys certainties capable of giving any measure of meaning to existence on this earth. It undoes every social link that is not economic. It arouses desperation, anxiety and rage. If in the past the coldness of an empty heart was partially compensated by the torpor of a full belly, today such an illusion can no longer be put forward. Growing emotional and material poverty has isolated the individual in the corner to which the process of social reproduction confines him. In such a situation it is no accident if more and more people demand to participate in the only existing community, that of capital, in the only way that is conceivable to do so, that of commodity consumption. The siren of advertising never sleeps, and it invites everyone to consume more, more and more. And one can easily imagine what happens when those who are nothing and possess nothing are incited without interruption to have with the aim of appearing: they stretch out their hands, tread on people’s toes, have no regard for anyone.

As if this were not enough, the institutional ambition of forestalling every possible way of escape from a world that is sold to us as “the best possible” has led to the criminalization of any behavior other than that of blind acceptance and defense of the social order (with all its rules, laws and morals). In its presumption of regulating and codifying every impulse and every human passion to safeguard the peace of the marketplaces and streets, the law has expanded the field of illegality considerably, creating many new crimes, and thus new criminals, new future prisoners. This is what has provoked the need for more police, more judges, and more prisons in a notorious vicious circle that feeds upon itself. It is now sufficient to merely breathe without order to incur the risk of being locked up inside four walls.

We all live in prison already. In the course of the last few years, the physical structure of the prison has been moved farther and farther from our eyes — into those outskirts where its gloomy presence doesn’t end up darkening the gaudy windows of the municipal center, but fits in perfectly with the squalor of those outskirts. At the same time, its shadow has started to weigh down more and more over all of us without leaving us alone for a moment. The merit, if it can be called this, is in the introduction of new technologies that have allowed an unimaginable leap forward in the sphere of social control. As with every other technological innovation, the technologies of surveillance, which were tested in prison in order to keep the most riotous prisoners at bay, have found a civil application. After all, security inside the prisons begins with security outside the walls. This explains the startling number of video cameras found in every corner of our cities (and even inside buses and trains), the obligatory routes we are forced to take for our movements, the magnetic detectors that inspect us at the exists of many businesses, the identification codes that replace our individuality, the innumerable prohibitions that it is necessary to respect as well as the variegated crowd of guardians put in place to safeguard the world, in short, all of these things that plague our existence. Thanks to the new identification cards, we will not have to be arrested any more in order to supply our fingerprints. Since we are all potential criminals, we are all treated as such. Step by step, the entire society is becoming a huge open-air prison from which it is impossible to escape. Aside from realizing the worst totalitarian nightmare — the one that doesn’t even need to send armored cars or patrols of soldiers into the streets because it has partially replaced them with tiny, less visible technological prostheses — all this obscures the difference that exists between those who find themselves behind the bars. Obscures it to such as extent that the very notion of freedom becomes merely a nebulous gradation and, on the other hand, submission to coercion becomes precise, scientific, concrete and above all normal.

As a contribution to the struggle against the prison society, we have decided to publish this collection of texts that the group Os Cangaceiros distributed in France. This activity of theirs — that lasted from approximately 1984 to the early 1990s — was important, because it managed not to limit itself to expressing a merely theoretical critique of the existent, but maintained and spread a consequent practical critique.

Named after the Brazilian outlaws who robbed rich property holders while ridiculing the police in the late 19th century, Os Cangaceiros was born and developed in a sphere that starts from social delinquency and flows directly into revolutionary action. (We recall that France is the homeland of the various Mandrins, Lacenaires, Mesrines...) They were authors of a self-named magazine of which only three issues were published. These were rich in analyses and documentation about the violence of the French periphery and the strikes unleashed to resist the industrial restructuring that was then going on, as well as about uprisings that occurred in other countries like Spain, Great Britain or South Africa. They published flyers and manifestos that stood out due to the unusual positions they took — we recall the one in defense of soccer hooligans, after the Heysel tragedy occurred in 1985. They were also the authors of two books, a broad anthology of writings about millenarianism and a diary about a fatal disease that struck one of them . And they published a dossier on the new prisons that were being built on French soil.

After observing that “Delinquency at the beginning of the 1970s expressed a desire for freedom, a wild turn, a game of bands” and how this “criminal freedom” was brought to an end in the very early 1980s as a result of extremely hard police repression and the blackmail imposed by the “reign of necessity”, to Os Cangaceiros, all that remained was to take note of the “end of an epoch” of thoughtlessness and to prepare for the advent of an epoch of desperation marked by the return of the “dangerous class” to the most uncontrolled rage. “We talk constantly about violence; it is our element (and we could even say) our daily destiny. Violence is first of all the conditions imposed on us, the police defense of them and, unfortunately more rarely, that which we throw back in their faces.” More gravediggers of the old world than builders of the new one, closer to the poor and their explosions of violence than to a working class that is ideologically assigned a redemptive historical mission, Os Cangaceiros have endeavored to give voice and reason to the refusal of all the conditions of existence, even when this refusal might assume especially ferocious forms, with an awareness that certainly couldn’t come from any political militancy, towards which they have always exhibited the greatest contempt, but rather from a genuine dimension of life outside the law, claimed with pride.

In short, these were social outlaws, some of whom had already been convicted of common crimes, all perpetually at risk of being given hospitality in homeland prisons. With such a premise, it is needless to say that prisons found declared enemies, while prisoners found loyal accomplices, in Os Cangaceiros. The revolts that broke out in May 1985 in several French prisons provided them with the occasion for demonstrating this. A month later, in June, Os Cangaceiros claimed the act of sabotage against some installations of the National Association of the French Railroad in Châtelet-en-Brie, the burning of the tracks of the Nantes-Paris rail line with tires and straw, and the blockade of the Paris-Brussels trains, the carriages of which were covered with graffiti in favor of prisoners’ struggles. As often happens in these cases, also due to the simplicity of the methods used, the idea made headway and started to spread throughout the country. Within a very few weeks, the railroad became the main target for actions of solidarity with the prisoners; aim was also taken at printing works where some newspapers were printed, at the metro, at the cars of some state functionaries, at a company that exploited penitentiary labor, at cars of Tour de France... Many of these actions remained anonymous or were claimed by other groups (such as the Support Groups of the Imprisoned Rebels, the Friends of Rebellious Prisoners, the Railroad Hooligans, the Support Committee for the Prisoners, Los Bandoleros...).

The national press, prey to panic, ran for cover, evoking the specter of terrorism and denouncing the mysterious group that was supposed to have been behind all these actions. For their part, Os Cangaceiros contemptuously rejected every connection between themselves and a “terrorism” (a term that they will use without the least trace of embarrassment to indicate the violence of various political armed groups, something so much stranger if one considers that they professed themselves to be enemies of the language of the state) in which they saw nothing but the continuation of politics by other means, a typical expression of gauchiste impotence. Their violence was of a very different nature since, as they explained, “Our tools of action are those that any proletarian uses: sabotage and vandalism. We don’t do symbolic actions; we create disorder, as workers in struggle commonly know how to do when they blockade roads and railroads, sabotage materials, television transmitters, etc...” Nothing to do with the armed struggle fetishism so dear to the militants of various combatant organizations.

Four years later in 1989, Os Cangaceiros took a further step forward in the battle against the prison institution. From active solidarity with prisoners, they would go on to direct struggles against the construction of new incarceration facilities. This time, the so-called “Program of the 13,000” would provide them with the opportunity. This was an ambitious project that the government launched to completely reorganize the French penitentiary system. A project that foresaw the closing of the oldest and least adequate institution. The restructuring of others and the construction of new, more modern prisons. All under the banner of absolute security to be obtained through massive employment of new technologies capable of constantly controlling the prisoner in each of his movements in a discreet and aseptic way. The declared aim was to create 13,000 new “spaces” for prisoners (from which the program derives its name) in order to alleviate overcrowding; the real one was to put the screws to those locked up inside the prisons and to support the mania for justice that was spreading in broad sectors of society.

Os Cangaceiros considered taking up the challenge launched by the French government and, starting in April 1989, began a long campaign of sabotage at the construction sites of the prisons that were being built, along with thefts of blueprints of the buildings at the expense of the Municipalities and the devastation of the offices of public labor firms that had obtained the contracts. Among the many actions spread throughout the national territory — that, despite being censored by the national press in the instance, were able to inspire other lovers of freedom — we want to recall the lessons taught to the architect Christian Demonchy, who was responsible for the construction of various prisons, on the public path. After more than a year of sabotage, Os Cangaceiros obtained 10,000 addresses of residents in the vicinity of future prisons to whom they sent extracts of a voluminous dossier containing dates and information (fruit of their “visits” in the locales of enterprises involved in the foul affair) about the institutions of punishment that were being built.

In November 1990, the complete dossier, Treize mille belles (Thirteen Thousand Escapes) finally came out. Its distribution provoked thousands of polemics and the ire of the French government, following the publication of various excerpts in newspapers of national circulation. Among other things, the dossier contains accurate technical documentation about the many prisons under construction or in the process of being restructured, with general outlines; information about materials used; fixtures; controls of access, doors and locks; electric and hydraulic systems; sanitation; roofing; and external installations. And, above all, there are detailed little maps of every building and its particulars.

The police, who had already begun to intensify their efforts to neutralize Os Cangaceiros in the summer of 1987, perhaps causing in this way the interruption of the group’s “public” activity, carried out searches in French subversive circles. It seems that the mere possession of Treize mille belles was sufficient to bring one under investigation, and even the editors of the journal Mordicus, who had dared to publish some excerpts from the dossier, had their legal troubles. In any case, it turns out that no one has ever been tried and condemned for the actions attributed to Os Cangaceiros, who vanished into nothing in the early 1990s.

In this booklet, we have collected some of the texts appearing in the second number of their magazine, published in November 1985, about the French prisoners’ revolt of May 1985 and the actions of solidarity with them that developed in the following months. Then we have added other texts from the dossier Treize mille belles, among them the chronology of actions carried out against the “Program of the 13,000” between 1989 and 1990 along with the letters that Os Cangaceiros sent to their “victims” claiming the actions, the introduction to the dossier and the letter that accompanied its mailing.

With no intention whatsoever of putting forth a new militant position, we hope that reading these texts can furnish ideas for reflection about possible and practical anti-political prospects for a struggle against the prison institution that is impossible to conceive apart from a struggle against the society that hosts it.

Chapter 1. Chronology

May 5, 1985:

In Fleury-Mérogis, the prisoners of the D4 wing riot and wreck the whole wing.

May 6:

Again in Fleury, 300 people from D1 wing refuse to return from their hour of exercise; sixty of them set fire to the infirmary.

May 7:

In Bois d’Arcy, about fifteen juvenile detainees (inmates under 18 years old, usually held in separate blocks or prisons) climb onto the roof, remaining there until May 9, supported and supplied by their fellow prisoners.

May 8:

In Lille, ten or so prisoners climb onto the roof. In Bastia, inmates refuse to eat prison food in solidarity with the other prisons. (The “refusal of prison food” is not exactly the same as a hunger strike, though this may be one way of carrying it out.)

May 9:

In Fresnes, 400 people climb onto the roofs and clash with cops, who kill one prisoner. In Compiegne, about ten prisoners climb onto the roofs following those of the morning “shift”. At Bonne Nouvelle in Rouen, about fifty juvenile prisoners climb onto the roofs while other prisoners wreck their cells; after apparent negotiations, about thirty climbed back on the roof in solidarity with Fresnes.

May 10:

From the 9th through the 10th, some prisoners went up on the roof in Douai. There was a brief clash with the CRS (French riot police). In Amiens, about fifty prisoners climb on the roofs. In Nice, about fifty prisoners climb on the roofs. In Nice, about sixty prisoners on the roofs join together with about twenty juvenile prisoners during a clash with the cops. In Beziers, 130 prisoners take three prison guards and one male nurse hostage for several hours.

May 11:

In Evreux, Saintes and Coutances, prisoners climb onto the roofs and clash with cops. The same thing happens the following day in St. Brieuc.

May 19:

Prisoners wreck Montpellier prison entirely (arson and destruction) and clash with cops. Outside, the crowd, consisting of prisoners’ relatives and friends, attack the cops from behind.

Moreover, numerous disturbances break out in various prisons, with the destruction of cells and attempts at arson (in Rennes, Angers, Metz, etc.) as well as collective refusal of prison food (Lyons, men and women in Fleury, Ajaccio, Auxerres, St. Malo, Avignon, Chambery, etc.). There are many suicides during this time. Rebels in Douai and Evreux are given heavy sentences on the pretext of damages committed.

June 17:

A barricade is set on fire on the Nantes-Paris railroad line near Nantes in solidarity with the prison revolts.

June 20:

Sabotage of the TGV (high speed train) railroad line’s installations in the south of Paris.

June 27:

A barricade is set on fire on the Toulouse-Paris railroad line near Toulouse.

June 30:

On the night between June 30 and July 1, the printing of the Paris daily papers is paralyzed by sabotage of the IPLO print shop near Nantes. “We decided to impose a half day’s silence on the national press in honor of the rebellious jailbirds...” The action is also dedicated to all the dead prisoners who were “suicide”. “All these papers are well known for their hostility to the recent movement of revolt in the prisons.”

July 1:

Sabotage of the railroad installations on the Nimes-Tarascon line.

Each of these actions cause prolonged interruptions of railway traffic and hours of delay for the daily trains. The demands were always the same:

A reduction of punishment for all condemned prisoners.

The release of all prisoners awaiting trial.

The definitive stopping of all deportation measures against immigrants.

The cancellation of sanctions for all the rebels.

July 2:

The Paris-Brussels TEE train is stopped near Compiegne; the four demands are spray-painted on it. Windows are smashed, and copies of the pamphlet “Freedom Is the Crime...” [see below] are thrown through them.

July 5:

Sabotage on the Paris-Le Havre line. Four people are arrested in Rouen two days later and imprisoned for three months in relation to this action.

July 8:

From the 7th to the 8th, prisoners in Chaumont climb onto the roofs, demonstrating their anxiety in the face of the forthcoming presidential amnesty of July 14 (Bastille Day) that promises to be particularly meager. There are conflicts with the cops. Four of the rebels receive heavy sentences.

July 9:

An anonymous act of sabotage is carried out against the Paris-Strasbourg line which passes near Chaumont.

July 12:

In the early morning, two Paris subway lines are blocked for several hours after heavy objects are thrown on them in solidarity with the Rouen 4 and the rebels of Chaumont; the four demands are once again publicized.

July 13:

In Lyons, two official cars are set on fire in solidarity with the city’s prisoners. Even before the details of the concession are known, various disturbances resume in various prisons (Fleury, Loos-les Lille, Toul, etc.).

July 14:

At St. Paul prison in Lyons, about twenty prisoners of the “psychiatric” unit rebel, destroying and burning. The pathetic presidential amnesty is announced: a one to two month reduction of short-term sentences. The JAP [Judges for the Application of Penalties] will get out in the next few days. Numerous disturbances will accompany the news in the country’s prisons.

July 15:

During the night between the 14th and the 15th, tires of the convoy that accompanies the Tour de France are slashed (immobilizing about one hundred vehicles) in solidarity with the condemned rebels. In Toulouse, a business that employs prisoners is destroyed by fire.

August 18:

In Lille, dozens of prisoners climb onto the roofs.

August 18:

In Lyons, the ROP print shop for Parisian daily newspapers is wrecked. Publication and distribution are seriously effected. Once again the aim is to castigate the papers for their lies and hostility toward the rebels. The text, “The Truth About Some Actions” [see below] is left on the premises. To report once again, during disturbances in Guadalupa, the escape of about thirty prisoners from the Pointe-à-Pitre prisoner following a revolt.

Chapter 2. Editorial Notes From Os Cangaceiros #2

The function of unions in the impending class conflict.

The poor in their struggle for the most elementary survival.

The destruction of domination as the main aim of the oppressed.

Violence and amazement.

For an early detection of the emerging conditions of subversion.

Slip the moorings!

Our epoch is marked by the return of the poor to the initial ferocity. A workers’ movement, dominated by reformist and Stalinist ideas and organized by bureaucratic mechanisms, had managed to civilize the proposals of the poor almost everywhere (the Popular Front was the most important moment of this process). The integration of the old workers’ movement into civil society is thoroughly completed by now.

In the 1970s, workers in revolt never pushed themselves beyond the limits of the system. Their struggles continually surpassed union orders but nonetheless almost always remained in line with union mechanisms themselves. The unions were thus able to maneuver and pacify with sufficient force to finally win this war of attrition. The boundless demands that rebelling workers then put forward seem to have ebbed for the time being. The greater portion of the most important conflicts of the last few years, within the enterprises, were mainly defensive, carried out against the effects of recent industrial modernization.

In the 1970s, unions could not allow themselves to openly disavow the excesses of rebelling workers without risk. In the 1980s, they cannot allow themselves to uphold them. In Poland, in 1981, the leadership of “Solidarnosc” ended up denouncing the wildcat strike movement and disavowing the endless demands of the workers in the name of the national interest. In Great Britain, the TUC (the miners’ union) used every means to prevent attempts at practical solidarity with the striking miners, organizing their isolation in this way and managing in the end to guarantee their defeat. In France, in December 1983-January 1984, in Talbot, the CGT and the CSL (general union and trade union, respectively) fought against striking immigrant workers, one of the unions internally, the other externally; the workers were defeated in isolation. In Spain, the attitude of the UGT (general union) and CC.)). (trade union), particularly in recent times when they fought against the practice of self-organized assemblies, springs from the same redistribution of police functions. Everywhere, these workers’ revolts were sold off in the name of the same principle. Earlier the unions appealed to an end. Now they appeal to the interests of the company. In this period, the bureaucrats have reached the point where they can discuss the 1970s. Today these union apparatuses are involved, in a systematic way as managers, in meddling in the affairs of the companies. The reformist conception of “self-management” has entered into union practice that is now mainly dedicated to co-management. What wasn’t yet obvious in 1968 has now become so.

The workers’ movement defined itself in this way: it was about making a collective legal subject out of the mass of workers, a subject that defended its interests in civil society. The struggles of the 1970s made this all collapse. At the time, the poor, who were still united in the factory by identical working conditions, could form a single force that expressed itself in the demand for an anti-hierarchical wage and in the refusal of work itself (absenteeism, slow-down of the rhythms of production, sabotage, etc.). Against this force, capitalism reacted like this: it reintroduced market forces as the only reference point and also undertook the complete reorganization of the exploitation of labor, increasing competition among the poor. Unions, based on wage hierarchy and the identification of the worker with his company, participate completely in the organization of this competition. In the same way, they have broken with the language of the old workers’ movement, replacing it with the more empirical jargon of managers.

As one expert recently stated: “companies sometimes discover that they are facing negotiators who, surprisingly, speak the same ‘economic language’ they do.” The main concern of the unions is simply to legally ratify, together with the bosses and the state, what has already been going on in practice for some time — for example, all the chatter about “work flexibility” or the Guaranteed Inter-occupational Minimum Wage. It is now openly admitted that unions, businessmen and the state all speak the same language (only a tiny minority of union activists still cling desperately to the language of the former workers’ movement, the praises of which they continue to sing). The period is over in which workers could get anywhere in their struggles by placing themselves behind union cover, forcing their delegates to follow them in order to avoid open dissent.

For the first time, in France, strikers have been individually sentenced to pay compensation to scabs and not to their unions. It happened at the beginning of 1985 in the Delsey establishment near Calais. Then, it happened again in the transport industry where fifteen drivers, who were fired following the strike, were sentenced by the Arras court to pay 52,600 francs out of their own pockets to seven non-strikers brought together in the “Association for the Freedom to Work”!

Mediations, which have the task of integrating workers, have now gone through an entire cycle. It is now assumed that workers should follow the same logic as their union representatives and identify themselves completely with the operation of the company. In Great Britain, for example, the American and Japanese businesses that are being reintegrated into the automobile and electronics sectors impose their conditions. Managers define the new rules for the management of work in close collaboration with the unions, entrusting them with imposing the rules on workers (in some cases, it is a stipulation in which the subordinate voluntarily gives up the right to strike!).

But this progress in the exploitation of labor has had to be accompanied by a conditioning of the labor force, as is done in Japan and South Korea. If factories over there are true barracks where work is militarized, it is still necessary to impose a religious cult on the workers. Need and terror are not sufficient to rally enthusiasm for work in wage laborers, even in Asia. Managers of Japanese enterprises, who act like genuine cult leaders, have understood this. The enemy cannot organize new forms of labor with nothing but a barracks regime. It responds to this problem by adding a religious or secular lie. This is what a dynamic entrepreneur in France was expressing when he declared, “business is lacking a creed”.

Capitalists can freely impose the most draconian conditions on the poor insofar as the unique strength of workers in revolt was broken at the start of the 1980s, in the name of the crisis. It is a return to the principles of 19th century capitalism: seizing people through hunger by organizing the spectacle of misery (as happened with the phenomenon of the so-called “new poor”). In this way, people have had unthinkable wages and working conditions imposed on them for nearly ten years. The labor force is kept completely at the disposal of employers (the unions euphemistically call this “work flexibility”), through related additional unpaid hours, Sunday work, wage decreases imposed through the blackmail of firing and so on. And some enterprises that are going through difficulties even go so far as to appeal to the workers for voluntary participation so that capital is formed from their donation of all or part of their wage! The extreme case happened in Lyons at the start of 1985, when a panel, appointed in extremis as the head of a factory in difficulty, put forth the donation of two months wages by the employees as the condition for saving the enterprise. The few that refused did well. After the payments were made, the new manager ran away overseas with the cashbox.

All that crawls upon the earth is subject to being crushed!

The Universal History of Desperation

Even under the reign of the spectacle, the principle of money had manifested itself up to this point as pure necessity. Individuals have never been so firmly brought back to their destitute condition. It’s a matter of putting the poor back in their place; it is necessary to make them drool before the omnipotence of money. In Poland, for example, it isn’t so difficult to make money by trafficking in the black market, as many people do. But it is much more difficult to get ahold of goods. Warehouses are empty. For us, scarcity is organized in the reverse manner. Warehouses are full, but it is quite difficult to get ahold of money.

We have met Polish people in France who are amazed by the zeal of the French for work. In Poland, there is none of this, quite the opposite! It’s just that in our damned country, for many people, the mere reality of having a job, no matter how disgusting or badly paid, seems like a diving favor. All the same, there are those who spit on the offer. The now irreversible increase in those unemployed for life is certainly a direct consequence of the more rational organization of exploitation. But it is much more than a quantitative result; it is something qualitative. To a great extent, it is the young who cannot accept submission to the new conditions imposed on workers. If many young people don’t have work, it is because they don’t want it. And as the conditions of wage labor become more and more vile, the conditions of existence for the unemployed are become more and more stifling.

At the beginning of 1984, the French state attacked voluntary unemployment by reducing the welfare system to a minimum. Starting from this reduction, it consequently introduced voluntary, underpaid work (Jobs of Common Utility). For more than six months, we have been watching young imbeciles declare on TV that even though this work was badly paid, it was better than being left with nothing to do. A dual advantage for the state: it manages to make them say that outside of work (even when it’s badly paid), they wouldn’t know what to do with their youth. Working is having nothing to do! Those who buckle down, lowering themselves to this level, can joyfully accept any badly paid job. If it becomes increasingly unbearable to work due to the conditions of greater submission that keep coming on, it is also increasingly difficult not to work. Today it is becoming impossible to devise something for one’s immediate subsistence by only working occasionally or collecting unemployment benefits.

In our opinion, the delinquency at the beginning of the 1970s expressed a desire for freedom, a wild shift, a game of mobs. Though the search for money was part of it, it wasn’t the main goal. In the 1980s, this carefree atmosphere was exhausted. This criminal freedom reached its peak in the autumn of 1981, with the corralling and burning of cars in east Lyons. From then on, the state and this society’s defenders have taken action to make such excesses impossible; the reign of necessity did the rest. A young man told us that in 1981 they stole cars to amuse themselves. Now, they must first of all have a useful function and at least serve for a few thefts and robberies — after which one can amuse herself with them. Thus, it has become difficult to steal a high-powered car! The ferocity of police and judiciary repression, as signaled by an unprecedented wave of summary executions , has brought about the end of an epoch. All these individuals who were unemployed for life thus fill the prisons, giving rise to an automatic overpopulation. Workers are not spared and have to deal with the police more frequently. Debts, the impossibility of paying rent and other bills, bounced checks, thefts in the supermarket, and so on, lead an ever greater number of people to risk prison.

This return to the most brutal reign of necessity has effectively exacerbated the hostility and competition that regulates relationships among the poor in society. Isolation and atomization dominate everything without contest. An atmosphere of anxiety and oppression never before known comes out of this. It has reached a point that in some big cities of the USA, there are people who die suddenly in solitude. The spread of drugs, which has very nearly annihilated the rage of so many young people, is obviously one of the more direct consequences of this state of things and helps to augment it. Now, no mediation is possible between people’s misery and civil society. The revolts that have occurred since 1968 forced the enemy to modernize oppression and thus make the world even more unlivable and poverty even more visible. The old principle of 1789 returns to the first position in hostile preoccupations: filling the chasm that has been so dangerously produced between the ruling class and the poor over the last few years. This is what an entire generation of reformists under state orders are concerned with. Obviously, they only speak the language of the state and preach the democratic lie to the mass of the poor. The bourgeoisie is brutally confronted with the thing that defines it: the absence of community pushed to its fever pitch by renewed social conditions.

The violence that reigns among the poor, which is sometimes practiced openly among them, is equal to the violence of the conditions that constrain them. At the same time that all the poor fully submit to the rules of the war of all against all, they can no longer aspire to a civilized existence and so become decidedly dangerous. This moment when separation has invaded everything also shows us that the poor cannot constitute a collective legal subject like in the period of the former workers’ movement. Their dissatisfaction returns to its original basis, i.e. the ferocity that characterized their rebellion before society tried to civilize them. Thus, during the last miners’ strike in Great Britain, strikers made use of criminal forms of action that are reminiscent of the punitive expeditions to which English workers abandoned themselves at the beginning of the 19th century. The very ones to which Engels referred in “The Situation of the Working Class in England”, that is to say, before trade unionism had civilized the poor and crushed their rage.

Fanatics of the Apocalypse

In Heysel, people going to see a soccer match of some importance did not have specific reasons for dissatisfaction. On the contrary, they basically went to have a fine evening. The organizers of the spectacle never imagined that the misery of the crowd could explode like this inside the stadium. They had said that there was no reason for violence. In Heysel, the spectacle had to demonstrate its function of manipulation of the lonely crowds, in live broadcast, play-by-play, to millions of people, at the very moment that this manipulation escaped from their hands. In live broadcasts, the rulers lost their heads. And the thing that shocked spectators so much was not the thirty-eight deaths, but the fact that they witnessed such violence on a live broadcast, that the spectacle wasn’t able to spare them this time. They were embarrassed that they had seen it. The scandal was so great that in West Germany they simply blocked the press report. A journalist from Le Monde asked in dismay, in an article about the affair, “What effect might all this have among black African people upon whom we once tried to impose our civilization?” (The match was broadcast live to several African countries.) Since that time, we have seen a reggae concert in Guinea take a turn for the worse due to the excitement of the spectators who finally destroyed the show facilities. During the same period, in Greece, concert organizers gave orders to security guards to play with the sole aim of calming the riotous crowd. Even so, the crowd treated the singers as wicked servants incapable of relieving the dissatisfaction and broke everything. Wild ones are everywhere in the world.

The mere fact that we came to the defense of hooligans against slander and repression caused scandal everywhere, even among people close to us. The arguments that have been used against us all originate from the same moral judgment that sees only an irrational and gratuitous violence in these actions. There are no gratuitous acts in this world; there are those who learn this at a great price. Hooliganism is an immediate expression of dissatisfaction that is not at all surprising after a week of boredom and work. Misery is always somewhat shameful, somewhat sacrilegious, to reformists. First of all they don’t understand what everyday misery really is, and therefore they don’t understand the violence that it generates. We affirm that the poor are united only in the breaking of all social controls and the annihilation of all laws; otherwise, they do not in any way form a community. The poor can only recognize each other in the expression of their dissatisfaction. Through this, the overturning of the situation takes place and they find themselves united in confronting a common enemy. The day after the beautiful uprising in Handsworth, an English police chief deplored the fact that the people looked upon the thing as entertainment, just like soccer hooliganism. In any case, the Heysel “affair” has created new conditions for hooligans, with the military patrols of the stadia that followed from it. Now anyone who goes to a match to let off steam will be obliged to attack the huge number of police present in the place rather than fighting with the fans of the opposing teams. This already happened in Leicester on October 9, 1985.

The moment that the bourgeoisie and the state finish organizing the separation that defines the poor and makes their existence utterly unlivable is also the moment that creates the conditions for an overturning of the situation. What separates people and precisely makes poor people of them, is also what identifies them. The poor don’t know each other; they recognize each other. In Marseilles, at the beginning of September 1985, after a pursuit following a failed robbery, police shot down one of the young robbers near the La Paternelle neighborhood. The inhabitants of the area rose up in revolt and attacked the cops, who had to retreat after a vigorous exchange of rocks and grenades. Police and journalists were surprised because the unfortunate victim was not from the area or even an Arab (if he had been from the area, police would have had to confront an upheaval as violent as those of Brixton and Tottenham). The young people who live in La Paternelle are almost all Arabs and immediately recognized themselves in the fate that the police reserved for the unknown youth, since they suffer exactly the same harsh and painful conditions. Even in the Les Halles neighborhood of Paris, which is psycho-geographically the opposite of the suburban neighborhoods of Marseilles, the arrest of a small-time drug dealer led four hundred people to gather and attack the police and the rich area at the center of Paris (this happened last year in September). Here an attempt was made to overcome the contradictory reign of indifference and futility in Les Halles. We are satisfied by this.

We, the Cangaceiros

We speak a lot about the violence on the outskirts of the cities. However, there is no need to think that this is the only place that anything is going on. It’s just that many people who share our conditions live there, as we do ourselves at times. We speak of nothing but violence. It is our element, and we could even say, our daily destiny. Violence is first of all the conditions that are imposed on us. Then there is the violence of the police who defend these conditions. And, unfortunately more rarely, there is the violence that we throw back in their faces. We don’t know all of our enemies, but we know what they defend. Our allies are not all obliged to be our accomplices, but at times it happens that some of them are. We do not have relations with all of our allies. The unemployed who fight against poverty are our allies, as are the workers who rebel against work and escape the control of the unions. We don’t think that we possess a universal truth, but we intend to communicate what we think. Universal truths are the ones that are communicated, not the ones that are possessed. We tell those who ask if we are assemblyists or councilists that we are interested in knowing how people establish and organize dialogue. We are not “terrorists” because we support underground activity: it was once said that the old mole digs. In our times, people who affirm revolutionary demands pass for dreamers. But the human being is made of the same material that his dreams are made from. We are revolutionaries. “Os Cangaceiros” means “Everything is possible”, “We are at war”, “Nothing is true, everything is permitted”. There are many of us relative to the reigning atomization, and we have allies everywhere.

Our program is very old: to live without dead time. We propose to make it known through scandal; there are no other means worthy of such a program. Our existence itself is already a scandal. We are clearly not indispensable, but on many occasions we have had to be so. In social war, no one can be exonerated. We are also very suspicious — experience shows that one is never sufficiently so. Distrust is never enough. Distrust is judged by the trust that is placed apart from what we call “the world of work”, since we have escaped from this very world. But when struggles deserving of the name take place, they are against the world of work and unleash a rage against that which forces the poor to work, the need for money.

We explain the fact that there are no other groups like us in Europe at this time with this thought: we are simply the first. Of course, our writings have a negligible distribution when compared with our enormous ambitions. But we count on the strength of spirit of our readers to pose a remedy for this, and this does not call our ambition into question. The distribution of our writings obviously has nothing to do with the massive, daily distribution of lies in the press. If few people read our writings, they are addressed to potential correspondents, not to a mass of spectators. Better to have selected and combative people with us than amorphous masses. This favors our enormous ambitions. We are against all hierarchy and consider our association egalitarian insofar as everyone is capable of making decisions within it. The fact that we make reference to intellectuals like Marx and Hegel doesn’t bother us: in their time one could be an intellectual without being an intellectual whore; now this isn’t possible anymore. Furthermore, they were not just intellectuals in that they had an effect on reality. We consider it possible to have continuous contact with other groups on this basic condition: that it goes beyond every form of agitation-propaganda in the way it goes into action. What we criticize in politics is the state.

We must bring something new to this epoch, and we even have the means for doing so. When we met at various times with some striking miners in Great Britain, they asked us these elementary questions: “What force do you really constitute? What can you do with the information we give you?” We need to be able to answer such questions clearly, especially since not everyone can understand a group like ours. In Poland they asked this as well: “But who are you then? What is your movement?” We need to be able to demonstrate the universal nature of our existence. The interest we have in the revolts of those like us goes beyond the interest that an isolated poor person, without means, has for the world. Although we occupy ourselves with what interests us, it is quite clear that we do not intend, in any case, to furnish aid to other people’s struggles. We merely intend to meet people and take part in their joy. Most of the rebel workers that we meet are influenced by the militant attitude that comes out of the former workers’ movement. In the current state of things, we can count on having encounters with individuals on their own, but sometimes we also get in contact with various organized groups that still hold to some illusions about unionism, with rebel workers. Though the activism of these groups leaves us indifferent, we know people in these groups who are quite close to us due to their refusal of work. Young people of the urban outskirts are in the habit of meeting isolated people or those who have come together in local gangs; when they meet us, they are always a bit surprised to see a well-formed and organized group. On the other hand, when workers in struggle, who are in the habit of seeing people who act as members of an official organization, meet us, they marvel at seeing individuals who seem to act on their own. In Great Britain and Spain, many workers in revolt have continued to be amazed to see a group of those unemployed for life, that is organized, with contacts and information on an international scale, and capable of making use of certain means for being independent of any political or union apparatus. In the end, we arouse the interest of others through our very existence.

In every way, the only serious risk that we incur is that of dying of poverty.

OS CANGACEIROS

Chapter 3. Prisoner’s Talking Blues

It is impossible to separate the fate reserved for prisoners inside the walls from the conditions reserved more generally for the mass of poor people in society. This is what the wave of uprisings of May 1985 has shown, uprisings carried forward especially by the accused awaiting judgment and developed solely in judiciary prisons. The penitentiaries did not stir, but among the prisoners awaiting judgment, quite a few are certain to be sentenced to “long punishments” and will end up there. The majority of the insurgents are part of the category of the accused who will end up being sentenced to at least as much time as they have already served before sentencing. These are “petty criminals” who we have the greatest chance of meeting outside. The revolt that resounds inside the prison walls is a continuation of the one that resounds outside, in the neighborhoods on the outskirts, and is a consequence of its repression.

In France, 1985, only prisoners have still continued to have rebellious hearts and spirit.

Those on the outside who still avoid the general annihilation recognize themselves, due to the force of circumstances, in the rebellion of the prisoners. Due to the contents of this revolt, they can only attribute a universal significance to it. One thing is indeed certain, the revolt against prison is now flaring up on the outside as well.

The wave of revolt was directed in the same way against prison and justice. Up to that time, prisoners attacked the penitentiary institution; now they also attack the judiciary institution. Before they rebelled against the execution of punishment, now they also protest against the way in which they are treated by a society whose general interest is represented by justice. Supporters of the state consider the insubordination of prisoners more dangerous, the more it threatens to blow up the entire system of law, which constitutes the keystone of the state apparatus and the safety valve of bourgeois society. This is why it was logical that prisoners’ revolt would find an echo outside.

Tour aim is not exactly that of supporting on the outside the demands formulated inside for the improvement of some details of the prison regime. It is not that we turn up our nose at such demands, since we know how things go in prison. Above all, we seek to fight against the idea of imprisonment itself. We want to succeed in the destruction of these damned institutions. Therefore, we can encourage and take up every sort of demand that contains the only vital demand: “Air!”

Being among those who risk prison, we completely reject its fatality.

For us, poor people who aspire to practical wealth, it is difficult to find words to express our rebellion and our aspirations in a clear way — i.e., works for understanding each other. The enemy’s strategy is two-fold: making sure that the poor are distracted from questions of primary necessity and go to tilt at windmills, and in the way preventing them from meeting and discovering common tensions.

The majority of explanations that one is permitted to hear about the prisoners’ revolt are false simply because they speak the language of the state, the law. The function of this chattering is so that the poor, in the case prisoners, are no longer even able to find the words necessary to express their dissatisfaction and rebellion, so that they are not able to dialogue, because they only know how to express themselves in the language of their masters. The aim of the supporters of the state and the defenders of the present society is to cause the poor to no longer know how to talk unless they are addressing their masters. Anyone who speaks the language of rights speaks to the state and only to the state, solely on the basis of its reason. This lie, which doesn’t just date back to yesterday, has the purpose of once again civilizing the insubordination of the poor.

The fact is that a modern capitalist country cannot be governed with pure force, putting tanks at every street corner. The same is true for the maintenance of order in prisons. A modern state is constrained to guarantee all the formal liberty necessary to the smooth functioning of business. Two important capitalist countries, Argentina and Brazil, recognized this last year (the South American bourgeoisie is also on the verge of realizing it). A capitalist country cannot prosper by shooting the poor as soon as they get restless. To make them participate with their labor in the wealth of society, it must make them speak only its language and fill their heads with universal and abstract concepts that are really those of bourgeois society. It is necessary for them to identify with the general interests of society, and this is precisely the historical enterprise of the bourgeoisie: to be successful at doing this.

Every modern state has the imperative to civilize the wild ones, the poor, including those who it has isolated from society in its prisons. The battle of ideas therefore rages on this front. The supporters of the state known that they will gain the upper hand over the prisoners’ revolt not so much due to mere force, which they are compelled to make use of at an early time with the risks that entails, but rather through pseudo-dialogue, through deception. This is why we must make supposed questions of legal right become social questions, causing the operation currently tried by the most modern supporters of the state to fail.

As a former prisoner recently said about penitentiary administrators, “they always try to make you participate in your own punishment; this is dialogue, there are no other possible forms of it.” There is even a figure who specializes in the matter — the social worker. The thing called “social work” has its origins in the practices of the Church. Historically, it is born from the exchange of charity for penitence. Social workers are secular priests who preach for the state. All the thought that currently dominates the judiciary and prison system goes in this direction. They even dream of giving prestige back to the condition of prison guards, conferring upon them the label of educator. Once the penitence inflicted on the prisoner was not nearly so ambiguous; it was physically very hard (it is enough to read the frightful accounts made by survivors of the punitive bath). Now it is claimed to be moral and also, so to speak, spiritual, although it conserves the basis of the prison system and the violence that entails (many die in French prisons). The repressive system is weighed down with a moral content; it is even supplied with justifications. Its aim is moreover that of filling people’s heads and preventing the people involved in rebellion (that is now chronic in prisons) from being able to find their own words.

The people currently responsible for repression seek to provoke and feed an endless pseudo-dialogue about multiple improvements that could be introduced into the prison regime, all in order to justify it. It is an indirect way of convincing the prisoners of the validity of punishment. The state is convinced that it has greater chance of managing this by combining pseudo-dialogue with repression, the physical violence of which is no longer enough in itself.

By refusing the very concept of punishment, the imprisoned delinquents start to openly accept what they are in society. The prisoners are aware that a penal code belongs to its time and to the state that corresponds to the current society; the same goes for the penal procedure.

Reformist consciousness is always expressed in the form of justification. Contrarily, the behavior of the rebels appeared unjustifiable (like the destruction carried out in Fleury on May 5), as does its only declared reason (“air”), which cannot be negotiated with the state. When prisoners start challenging the justice of which they have been the object, prison ceases to be suffered as a fatality. Leftist educators who try to justify delinquents, finding some excuse for their crimes, just make us sneer with scorn. One is already forced to justify oneself as a defendant before the judge (besides, it is understood that if one tries to explain oneself too much one ends up losing, the same thing that happens when one is stopped by the police). And perhaps it is still necessary to be justified as prisoners! The rebels know that they have no admissible reasons from the point of view of those who judge them. Before the state, silence is truly the weapon of the poor.

In prison, there are all kinds of individuals. But prisoners are most of all delinquents that society has decided to isolate. The term delinquency should not lend itself to confusion. It is chronically used to describe a set of behaviors that share the ephemeral shattering of social restraints and contempt for the law as well as other people’s property. Society uses this term to identify the youth who goes dancing on Saturday night in order to fight, the housewife who steals at the supermarket, the kid who turns into a robber, the worker who takes materials away from his factory, or who, more directly, sees no way to survive but to steal — all the people who, on varying levels, it can no longer completely integrate. It is a time in which work and the law are no longer sacred in the eyes of many poor people.

“Delinquent, from the Latin delinquere, to take away (as one’s due), de linquere, to leave out. Delinquent XIV, from the present participle delinquens. Delinquency XX.” (Larousse Etymologique).

If the individual has rights, it is because she has duties. If she fails in these, she cannot seriously demand her rights in society and before the state. Except in view of repentance on her part, paying her debt (in a specific fashion, by working for a few coins while suffering her punishment) and giving evidence of her desire for rehabilitation (by having conditional or partial liberty, the individual is judged a second time, this time on the basis of her concrete desire for rehabilitation). If she decides to work for rehabilitation, she can hope to be exempted from a portion of the misfortune that strikes prisoners, conserving whatever effective right. The state understood quite quickly, since the first uprisings of 1971 and 1974, that it was not necessary to isolate imprisoned individuals completely from civil society. If necessary, it forces the condemned to earn the right to reenter it anew. This is not the least despicable thing!

Anyway, civil society already has its entrances into prisons: prisoners often work. But it enters prisons on the basis of the particular methods reserved for socially unworthy individuals. Since prisoners are outside of the mechanisms of integration into this society, the rate of exploitation of their labor can be permitted to be especially high, and their wages especially low.

All sorts of people claim to be interested in the insubordination of prisoners. Many of them, the reformists, demand that society acknowledge the prisoners’ assertion of their rights. But what are these rights? Rights of defense? But these only apply to the object of judgment, not to the execution of the sentence. Prison is a closed universe in which there can be no place for “contradictory debate”. Human rights and citizens’ rights?

Human rights are the recognized privileges and safeguards of the atomized individual of bourgeois society, in which there is room for only two kinds of individual: those who make money and those who work. How could we, who do not enrich society but rather cost it money, think of benefiting from these privileges and safeguards? By virtue of what social activity in which we could take pride?

Citizens’ rights? The citizen is the political individual, i.e., an abstract individual. The prisoner is not a citizen.

On the one hand, there is the effective member of bourgeois society, the isolated and limited individual that this society considers the essence of the human being. On the other hand, there is the moral person, the citizen. It is important to distinguish, methodologically, between the moral person (the accused, the condemned) and the real individual who is imprisoned. Here the member of society is the individual who has not fulfilled her duties toward the rules that society has democratically established; the moral person is the accused, who is given the honor of recognizing a right to defense. The accused is a citizen.

As judged and condemned, nothing remains to him except to suffer his fate, in prison. He cannot then take advantage of any right, since he doesn’t contribute to the wealth of society with any work (except for that which he is obligated to perform, forced by poverty and regulation). The state is logical when it refuses to permit the possibility of prisoners’ unions. It only offers one road to prisoners: this is to pass through its hell on earth; enduring; accepting punishment, suffering and humiliation, in silence — and completely mending their ways through prison labor. Secular in theory, religious in practice, justice and the prison system are made in the image and likeness of the bourgeois class. Rehabilitation from that hell on earth is granted to the prisoner who passes through it in silence, without having anything to say, neither raising his voice, nor complaining, much less protesting. The Christian ideal is still interiorized by many people in prison.

The worst thing that one must endure in prison is this feeling of complete dependence on the rules, clearly aimed at taming the individual. Prison has a semblance of “re-education”; it is school and barracks at the same time (as is very obvious, for example, in England, and even more in the sadly famous camps of some stalinist countries). The jailers’ abuse of authority is just an expression of the authority of the regulations. In this sense, the state tries to completely recuperate a few individuals over whom, at a certain point, the control of civil society did not serve adequately; therefore it needs to impose rules on them by force. In this sense, the prison evokes the barracks, where the individual ends up being bent to the primary rules of society, obedience and discipline. The condition of the soldier and that of the prisoner have this in common: they are individuals whose fate depends entirely upon the state, to the point of having to suffer the abuses of hierarchy without complaining. Despite all the privileges and concessions the prison administration might concede — and it is well known to be rather stingy in this — there will still be spontaneous rebellions of prisoners in the face of regulation.

As for the accused awaiting trail, she has not yet been the object of moral judgment. She is kept in a safe place, completely at the disposal of the state. It can never be repeated enough that to this extent the condition of the accused is like that of a hostage. Furthermore, it should be mentioned that england, which made French reformists drool with its habeas corpus, introduced temporary detention into its penal procedures in 1980, i.e., when the social war had taken a few steps forward.

One could note in passing that, no matter what the humanitarians of the left claim, prison will always remain a place of absolute unworthiness, as is shown by recent government regulations that try to bypass it for the petty criminal, the one who is not completely excluded from society, because for now she has only committed crimes of little significance and is capable of reintegrating into the social system thanks to her job. It is up to her, however, to give proof of this by carrying out X hours of work “in the general interest.”

The state will always be able to grant some improvements in the particulars of the daily life of prisoners, but it will never be able to grant them the least bit of dignity. Prison discipline will always have the final word. The demand to grant the prisoner the same rights as the accused (such as that of getting help from his lawyer before the tribunal inside prison) has no possibility of being granted, inasmuch as the prisoner is not a moral person like the accused. The prisoner is a real individual, unworthy of society.

Reformists demand that prisoners be granted social dignity, in other words human rights. But of what does this dignity consist? It is what bourgeois democracy recognizes in the worker. Of course, prisoners are sometimes workers and are paid very poorly. The prison administration is in charge of selling their labor power to various contractors and makes money from it. After all, the prisoner is its burden, and is quite expensive. If a normal wage were granted to the prisoner, then the greater part of it would be held back from him for maintenance expenses, withdrawn by the prison administration for legal expenses, fines and the compensation he would have to give to the victims of this crime as well!

To what extent do the poor have any rights, civil or political, in civil society? To the extent of their duties. Civil society describes the totality of the “system of needs and jobs”. The poor participate in it only because, due to circumstances, they are forced to concede the exploitation of their labor to others who make money from it. The true need that the social system produces and reproduces for everyone is the need for money. The poor experience it exclusively in the form of lack, due to necessity. Only the bourgeoisie have a positive relationship with this essence of society. The relationship of the poor to it is work. Of course, bourgeois democracy proclaims that everyone is free to profit, acknowledging anyone’s right to do business. Thus each one can make his way in the world, but only one world exists, that of business. And modern bourgeois society, which we see in Europe, the USA and Japan, allows many poor people to be fooled into thinking that they are profiting. The constraint that is exercised over the wage worker and the necessity that defines all his needs within the same limits are thus transfigured in the language of society. The most savage reign of necessity is magically transformed into its opposite, and this is how motivated workers, satisfied and reimbursed consumers, responsible voters and even prisoners who pay their debts to society exist...

The necessity of money reigns through a multitude of legal relationships that clearly perpetuate themselves through constraint. And every form of dissatisfaction that expresses itself constitutes a violation of these relationships. Society responds to this with more extreme constraint, prison. One who doesn’t work is a damned one.

Prison isolation is added to the isolation that already defines the atomized individual of civil society. The imprisoned delinquent is thus made the object of a real social damnation, which is also expressed in the relative indifference witnessed in the face of prison revolts. If, at minimum, all former prisoners and those who have imprisoned relatives were to start supporting the revolts by attacking cops from behind (like someone tried to do in Rouen and in Montpellier in May 1985)... All these people are unaware of being a social danger, and sometimes all they would need to do is comprehend this in order to truly become so. The state treats delinquents en masse as a social danger, but demolishes them one by one. The law knows only the single individual that it crystallizes as an abstraction before society. But it is really because he is concretely in society that a poor person is judged.

But if the delinquent is judged as an isolated individual, prisoners rebel as a collective subject. Once inside the walls, the reason why one has ended up there is of little importance. All are there together, in the same shit and treated in the same way. Prisoners rebel against a common fate.

Whatever the specific reasons for the revolts may be, they will not be exhausted in any reform or improvement of details, because in prison it is always necessary to demand the smallest thing that one could work out for oneself on the outside. And in such a desolate universe, the smallest thing takes on an enormous importance and can furnish the occasion for a rebellion; the occasions will never be lacking. It is understood that the prison administration is able to impose calm for a time, as a consequence of repression combined with some improvements, but the calm is not destined to last for long.

This social critique of rights could only arise from inside the prison since, even though justice condemns individuals one by one, the fate of each one being her own private affair, it then locks them all up together. And it is there that the conditions are created for a revolt directed specifically against the authority of the prison administration, the conditions of imprisonment, and more generally against a social system that is based on prison. It is from there, and in relation to this collective rebellion, that a movement can emerge outside that not only recognizes itself in this human protest, but extends its development, something that is not in one-sided opposition to the consequences, but rather in open conflict with the presuppositions of the state itself.

Workers in struggle can fight to demand a wage increase. In the same way, prisoners can manage to obtain reductions in punishment through their actions. Prisoners don’t struggle for a general reform of prison conditions, just as workers on strike don’t concern themselves with a reform of work. They leave those concerns to union bureaucrats. The only thing that prisoners in revolt can reasonably demand within the limits of the existing system is a bit of air. Reforms are made anyway, always in order to quench the smoldering fire. What has been obtained for improving the prison regime has always come at the end of a test of strength with the state. Prisoners also know from experience that the advantages extracted under the threat of the worst are often quickly transformed into a further disgrace once calm has returned.

The insubordination of prisoners always takes on the character of a universal threat since it has to do with individuals who have been locked up in the name of the general interest of society. This is what transforms it into a significant political event every time. Each wave of rebellion leads to some project of reform of the laws and codes.

The left, which had promised to modify the entire prison regime, hasn’t even risked trying it. Once it came into power, it immediately understood that if it had done so, it would have been playing with fire. There is no improvement possible in the regime of imprisonment except that of granting air to prisoners. The left knows that the smalles opening risks provoking disorder. Any type of government is sure to have hassles with prison. No matter what side one takes it from, he ends up getting his hands dirty.

The notion of general interest is at the center of the entire system of legal rights against which the rebels fight. The state and its supporters continually refer back to this general interest, in contrast to the latent state of war that rages in real society. They are able to make people identify themselves with this supposed general interest, to the extent that, in the France of 1985, any line of demarcation between the poor and civil society seems to be erased, and delinquency often takes its victims from among the poor. On the one hand, the places where money and goods always circulate in abundance are being transformed more and more into impregnable fortresses; on the other hand, the conditions to which those who work must submit are becoming more and more intolerable. Decidedly harsher conditions arise from this for those poor people who don’t work, increasing the isolation of each one in her search for money (and the spread of heroin among the youth aggravates this process even more). The state and the bourgeoisie erect a system of military defense of private property, of the circulation of money and commodities, unleashing at the same time the war of all against all, the fiercest conflict of isolated interests. The authority of the state thus finds its basis again in the confused hostility that reigns over society in its totality.

Then the prisoners’ revolt appears as a possibility for overcoming this state of affairs. The protest against justice and prison crystallizes the general interest of all the poor, subdued by necessity and what they must bear under various forms, the repression practiced in the name of the general interest of society.

Solidarity with the revolts doesn’t appeal to sentiment any more than it speaks to so-called public opinion. We have simply wanted to speak to the prisoners. And the fact that their rebellion has been strong enough to find such a response outside is not the least of its merits.

Yves Delhoysie

Chapter 4. Freedom Is the Crime That Contains All Crimes

We have many friends in prison; we ourselves have been among the fucked jailbirds. This is why we have felt the wave of revolt, which began on Sunday, May 5 with the mutiny of a part of Fleury-Měrogis, coming for some time.

Prisoners could no longer tolerate the crap to which prison guards more and more openly dedicate themselves. Two specific events were probably too much:

In March, the murder of Bruno Sulak by guards after a failed escape. The liars that talk on television and write in newspapers have presented it as an accident, despite the fact that a few guards in Fleury have bragged about killing him.

At the beginning of April, a guard was punched during an escape attempt at a prison in Lyons. His colleagues responded by proclaiming a strike. A few days later, still in Lyons, some prisoners reacted to this arrogance by beating two of these shits. A national strike of all prison guards followed this. It further aggravated the unbearable conditions by eliminating the hour of air, visits and leaves (multiplying the discomforts, daily vexations and beatings that were already part of ordinary administration).

Those who speak to us of overcrowding in the prisons are the very ones who have filled them until they burst! Obviously they are turning the question upside down. For us, it is not a question of building more prisons, but of emptying those that already exist.

The need of prisoners in revolt is obvious: freedom! They don’t negotiate this with the prison administration, but rather start to take it for themselves: climbing up on the roof is freedom snatched from the state. “Let’s take air,” they exclaim. For a few hours they can chat, protected from indiscreet ears, dialogue with their comrades outside over the walls, insult and throw roof tiles at the dirty skunks who oppress them, and finally talk about themselves. Here they are, the real free conversations!

The prison administration and the media attribute the revolt of Fleury-Mérogis to a handful of political militants (specifically of Action Directe) who, preoccupied with their notoriety, have always participated in this lie, not stopping these statements. All these liars had already done the same thing during the hunger strike proclaimed in Fleury at the end of 1984. Let’s abandon the militants to their lying, wooden language...

But there has been real solidarity among prisoners (at Bois D’Arcy, prisoners in the cells were ready to wreck everything if those on the roof were evicted. This is why the GIGN did not intervene and the others were able to remain in the open air for about forty hours, fed by their comrades in confinement. Meanwhile in Bastia, a hunger strike was announced in solidarity with the rebels in other prisons). The same solidarity has been expressed outside as well. On May 19 in Montpellier, a group of people lined up on the side of the prisoners in revolt and attacked the cops from behind. The cops dispersed them by unleashing dogs on them. The main concern of the prisoners has been that of communicating with the outside, shouting their protests against imprisonment, the daily terror that is exercised against them. “They want to kill us.” “They gas us, they cudgel us.” These are the things that could be read on the banners at Bois d’Arcy.

Prisoners take an enormous risk when they rebel. Everyone knows beforehand that the prison administration will immediately make them pay dearly for this: with custodial sentences, the suppression of sentence reductions , transferals, beatings, murders disguised as suicides. In Douai, three prisoners (one of whom was supposed to be released in June) had climbed onto the roof and demonstrated their rebellion by throwing down roof tiles. As soon as the came down, an emergency tribunal condemned them to 15 months and 6 months additional time without parole. This sentence was intended to be exemplary.

The anxiety engendered by repressive terror, and the despair of returning to the oppressive isolation of the prison, are so present even in the moment of rebellion that some of the prisoners turned against themselves, mutilating themselves. In Fleury and Montpellier, some prisoners took possession of some barbiturates and gulped them down, smashing everything in their path. Twenty-five of them were seriously poisoned. Others slashed their wrists, calling on their comrades to do likewise. One of them died. Meanwhile several prisoners in different yards hanged themselves. At this very moment, in St. Paul in Lyons, some prisoners try to mutilate or hang themselves every day.

“Freedom is the crime that contains all crimes,” and it is against this crime that the old world defends itself. The state is physically eliminating all the beautiful young people who aren’t resigned — the same young people who die, murdered by cops or reactionary pro-cop vigilantes. The state buries those that the law can trap alive in its prisons as long as possible while terrorizing those who manage to stay outside. For these, it pays educators and other pests to demoralize them and make them forget their comrades in jail...

Poor neighborhoods on the outskirts are emptied of their youth, while prisons fill up. This is the secret of overcrowding. The state’s lackeys would like us to believe that it is a budgeting problem! Overcrowding is supposed to be caused by a malfunctioning of the prison system, but it is actually a result of the optimal functioning of the judicial system.

Obviously, the only way to deal with overcrowding in prisons is to empty them, as the rioters in Fleury maintained — on this point they couldn’t have been clearer. In a declaration signed by “the six hundred leaders”, they opposed the building of new prisons. On the other hand, the prisoners in Montpelier furnished a concrete solution to overcrowding. They destroyed almost all the cells!

The prisoners are rebelling against the justice system and, more specifically, against the kidnapping that is portrayed and preventive detention — which officially condemns people to an indefinite confinement that is later confirmed if not increased at the trial. Moreover, we are reminded of the movement that sent collective demands for provisional liberty in Lyons at the beginning of summer in 1984.

As long as there have been prisons, everything prisoners have gotten they conquered by risking their lives in revolt. In some instances, they were able to impose a breach in the prison regime.

What prisoners manage to grab by force and at the cost of blood, the prison administration later gnaws away again, using improvements of prison conditions as a means of blackmail.

The guards have the task of persecuti8ng the least bit of freedom in every gesture of daily life. The deprivation of freedom is refined every day in the constant, sadistic abuse of these pigs. In prison, freedom is even the choice to remain seated, asleep or standing when one wants to.

Since the time of Peyrefitte and Badinter , if the state proposes a program of reform, it is solely to prevent the risk of an explosion and certainly not for humanitarian reasons.

Prisoners no longer demand reform; they have suffered its reality. The application of each reform depends on the good will of the prison administration and the guards. What was presented as a benefit becomes a further degradation.

“Free conversations” are even refused by some, because what one has to submit to in order to get these visits is so humiliating.

Though in appearance the death penalty has been abolished and no longer is part of the legal code, it has in fact become more common and democratized. It is now carried out by a mob of reactionary vigilantes and cops, while in prisons the guards do it.

In the same way, the suppression of the QHS (maximum security wings) was a humanitarian bluff (supported by the left). The best example of this opportunistic attitude was when they used a humanitarian campaign to release Knobelpiess, who had denounced the horrors of the QHS, and then, when they were done using him, did not hesitate to lock him back up.

As a special regime of isolation, the QHS was never suppressed. They simply changed the name. It is now called QI (isolation quarters). In 1983, a new prison called “Les Godets” opened near Nevers. It is intended for imprisoning convicts who are considered particularly dangerous. It can hold eighty prisoners in an extremely harsh surveillance regime.

Furthermore, the administration and the guards want to extend QHS conditions to the entirety of the prison. The number of isolation cells has increased. The DPS (specially watched prisoner) statute is applied more and more. Punishment cells are increasingly filled. With greater frequency, the prison administration reserves the right to inflict more special punishments and sanctions on the basis of the tension that reigns in prison. Abuse and beatings are the order of the day. It drives prisoners to suicide or allows murder to pass for suicide. There are no natural deaths in prison; those who succumb, die of prison. Murder is called “accidental death” — like Mohammed Rhabi in Rouen and Bruno Sulak in Fleury, who guards killed during an escape attempt; like Alain Pinol in Fresnes, killed by the cops. Prisoners’ suicides are all murders committed by the prison administration that gladly provides you with the rope for hanging yourself. And if there are more and more suicides (at least twenty since the beginning of the year), it means that living conditions inside are increasingly intolerable.

An additional pressure is exercised against condemned immigrants. Along with prison, they can suffer a second penalty: deportation. And it even goes so far that, after having served their sentence, they continue to rot in prison for months before the deportation procedures are completed.

To finish with Badinter’s famous reforms, his latest gift, the TIF [a work program mentioned above] has been a fine load of shit. One can already predict that new accused prisoners awaiting trial will quickly fill the cells emptied by the TIG. This modern version of forced labor is not at all preferable to prison — so little so that some of those convicted have refused it.

All those who demand rights in prison (prisoner’s unions) are far behind the prisoners’ movement of revolt, because prisoners can only impose their demands through violence, risking their own lives. “Union battles will be carried out within the law and through the law, by prosecuting all abuses before the qualified authorities”: this is the program of prisoner’s unions...

We have already seen what unions are on the outside. They only serve to channel and domesticate people’s rebellion, in reforms aimed at prettifying misery. Furthermore, they are used to stifle the real demands that the poor spontaneously think up in their struggle.

Prisoners no longer fight for reforms that they now know were mere illusions. Rather than placing themselves on the abstract terrain of rights, they can demand something that will at least have a concrete result — a general reduction of punishments.

It’s a question of demanding:

A Reduction Of Punishments For All Those Convicted.

The Release Of All Prisoners Awaiting Trial. The Definitive Stopping Of All

Deportation Measures.

And, of course,

The Cancellation Of All Sanctions Against The Rebels

The demand for the release of those awaiting trial is more than a specific demand relating to prison. It is not so much addressed to the state or the prison administration, as to all the poor for whom preventive detention is a sword of Damocles hanging over their heads every day. It is a challenge launched against this society that resounds in the minds of all those who have decided not to submit.

Judicial and prison questions almost always remain private matters in which each one is powerless in his isolation. Both the one on the inside, awaiting her trial, and the one outside, who has a friend in prison and can often do nothing more than to help out financially or pay her a visit. The rebels have put forth some practical demands that aim, at the minimum, at getting the greatest number of people out. These demands form a prisoners’ offensive against their isolation and an appeal to those on the outside to act concretely to break it. It’s a question of bringing pressure to bear against this society, of shitting on this world with its prisons that would prefer not to hear about them.

OS CANGACEIROS Beginning of June 1985

Chapter 5. The Truth About Some Actions Carried Out In Support Of the Prison Revolts

For the first time in this rotten country, a movement of concrete solidarity with prisoners in revolt has appeared on the outside. This was a twist of fate that neither the reformers nor the complainers — those who believe that they can shamelessly make use of the suffering of prisoners to justify their cowardice and their interest in maintaining the status quo — ever expected. Above all, it was a cruel trick against the state.

On the outside, there is a mass of imbeciles who allow themselves to flap their lips, endlessly debating about what they modestly call “the problem of detention”, even though they don’t have the least bit of personal experience in the matter and would do better to shut their trap. Their pretentious hot air contrasts with the silence that is imposed by force on the prisoners in revolt (and with the total censure that their communiqués have received).

Inside a prison, it is public and underground rumor that makes news circulate. From one prison to another, however, things happen differently. This is why the written press is considered to have a certain importance beyond just being a way to kill a few hours. Boredom and isolation are the only two things that cause prisoners to take any interest in the press and two things that make every one of its lies more harmful.

The hostility of the press towards prison revolts is unanimous. When it doesn’t pursue the politics of silence, it follows the path of slander. All its commentary is stuffed with the same stupid questions that only intellectuals could pose, with the clear aim of sowing doubt and confusion. The only thing that distinguishes them is the way in which they ask the state to crush the revolt. At one extreme, Le Figaro calls for clamping down more harshly on the prisoners and never stops expressing its indignation about supposed government inaction. At the other extreme, Liberation happily supports a government that talks of reform, extolling the cultural gadgetry through which the government hopes to cool the jailbirds’ rage.

The hostility of all these liars is even more obvious when they report some of the acts of real solidarity towards the prisoners that give the lie to their prose.

We are not among those who specialize in writing and speaking about prison (and we are not even among those who try to organize demonstrations in Beaubourg or go to converse for a couple of hours with the warden of Fleury-Mérogis, as some did shamelessly last year).

As it happens, the risk of ending up in prison, and the fact that many of us have spent time there, conditions our lives to a great extent. Let us be clear that when any of us have been condemned and imprisoned, it has been for common crimes. We have no affinity whatsoever with “political prisoners”.

Prisoners’ struggles thus are utterly important to us. At the beginning of June we distributed a foldout that gave voice to the demands of the rebels, amplifying them, in the spirit of the rebellion itself. As far as we know, this is the only document created on the outside that has clearly sided with the revolt without making any concessions to the embarrassed excuses of militants of every stripe. The four demands that concluded it were simply a restatement on the outside of what the rebels on the inside had expressed, in the rare writing that managed to filter out and especially in their actions. In consequence, a certain number of people created a tumult, particularly by disturbing rail traffic in different parts of the country. These actions gave the demands the notoriety that up to then had been denied. Thus they have given the reality of the revolt what is due to it.

The hostility of the media was immediately systematic. At a minimum, they have all spoken of these actions as attacks from the start. Defining a blockade of a railroad track or the breaking of a signal light as an attack is not only incredible nonsense, but is also a way of invoking repression by intentionally confusing every act of concrete solidarity with the rebels, with terrorism. With greater reason, speaking of “railroad terrorists” as some newspapers have done is decidedly despicable. One paper went so far as to talk of “kidnapped travelers” following an action against the Trans Europe Express. (Speaking of hostages, what about the 25,000 prisoners awaiting trial?!) If things were reported in their correct dimensions, they would talk at most of “organized vandalism”.

Our tools for actions are the same ones that every proletarian uses: sabotage and vandalism. We don’t carry out symbolic actions, we create disorder, like workers currently in struggle are able to do when they blockade roads and rail lines, sabotage materials and TV transmitters and so on.

The thing that characterizes the style of the actions carried out from mid-June to mid-July 1985 is simplicity. The Paris-Brussels TEE was stopped thanks to a simple pair of pliers that, by connecting two tracks, allowed the simulation of the passing of a train, automatically making the signal turn red. A group of fifteen people was all it took to block this important train, spray-paint it with the demands of the May rebels and break its windows in order to throw some flyers inside (while the customs officials and plainclothes cops, always present in the first car of this train, didn’t move a finger). The signal posts of the high speed TGV was sabotaged with a simple hammer. On various lines, electrical boxes were burned with a little gasoline.

Straw burns well in the summer, as a Toulouse chair manufacturer who had profited off the sweat of prisoners discovered. “Bandoleros” reduced his business to ruins! In Nantes, the printing press that prints the newspapers for the western region was sabotaged by putting sand, gravel and nails into the compressors that feed the printing cylinders. In Paris two subway lines were shut down in a simple way: by throwing material from a construction site onto the tracks.

In each instance, every precaution was taken to see that the safety of travelers was not endangered. This is why we didn’t stop the high-speed train (TGV) as we did the TEE. It seemed far too dangerous to brutally stop such a fast train, so we contented ourselves with the sabotage of materials to interrupt traffic.

At the beginning of July, the specialists in lying, emboldened by the arrests of four people in Rouen, outdid themselves in vileness, insinuating that the four might have been responsible for the derailment that took place three days after the action of the “Hoboes of the Val-de-Seine” on the Paris-Le Havre line. The press announced that the four had burned some electric signal boxes, which would have caused the irregular functioning of the apparatus. But as the SNCF (the French national railway company) stated repeatedly, this action could not have consequences for the safety of the passengers because such damage to railroad signals automatically activates the red signal so that all trains coming into the sector stop, and then resume travel at a reduced speed (about 20 mph) that allows the engineers to operate by vision alone.

There is no way that the “Hoboes of Val-de-Seine” could have been responsible for this accident. Nonetheless they have been accused of “The destruction of material with possible endangerment of persons”, which puts them at risk of a criminal charge in the jurisdiction of the Court of Assizes. Antenna 2 , France-Soir and Paris-Normandie have pushed these slanders to the limit! All with the aim of horrifying and intimidating possible admirers of this sort of action.

In Paris, on Friday morning, July 12, the subway was interrupted in two places at the same time. That evening, Le Monde and France-Soir announced in their news reports that the saboteurs left flyers signed “Black Order”. This is a falsehood. It is obviously a provocation by the cops who, as the first on the scene, then presented things in their own way. “Black Order” is known to be a name used by the Italian secret services that several years ago set off a murderous bomb in the Bologna train station. The comparison that the cops are trying to suggest is thus pretty obvious.... Despite a denial that occurred that evening, France-Soir still repeated this bizarre fabrication in its edition of the following day.

After having asked at first whether we were terrorists or practical jokers, the specialists in lies went from insinuation to snitching. This is no surprise in a social system that maintains itself with police and deception. Thus they have evoked a “mysterious group” that is supposed to have orchestrated all this. A pretentious ignoramus stated in France-Soir that, “these groups come from left anarchism, on the border between criminality and terrorism.” Let us point out immediately, once and for all, that we cangaceiros do not come out of the left, anarchist or otherwise; there isn’t a single ex-militant among us. And none of us has ever had anything to do with any political racket whatsoever. We have only one form of relationship with political groups and organizations: war. They are all our enemies; there is no exception. We aren’t “on the border of delinquency”; we are delinquents. And this doesn’t mean that we have made our “condition as delinquents a profession”, as a well-known Marsellaise police chief would say. We have nothing to do on any level with terrorism. The poor devils that let themselves get regimented into that are nothing but robots acting out a stinking ideology in the service of an apparatus with a cop mentality and hierarchical structures. As we said before, we despise militants.

Other liars insinuate that we have great financial resources on hand, presuming that all this would be “supported by more important organizations”. Which ones, pray tell? The Mafia? The KGB? The Red Brigades? Or the Opus Dei? Finally, in order to explain the fact that we are well organized, they state that we are “strongly structured” (the horror!). They find our texts too well printed; anyone knows that you don’t need to be covered in gold to get a few thousand magazines properly printed. Yet they insinuate... They slander and mix things up, hoping that something might end up on a judge’s desk...

In one of the most ridiculous of these slanders, the press and TV have said that one of the four people arrested in Rouen is a professor of philosophy! The Ministry of Public Education had to correct this a few days later: the insulted person had actually only been a tutor in a school ten years earlier! This is that same old police reflex: a thinking head is pointed out, and to these cretins it has to have a uni