Face the players, fight the game
M18: Let´s crash the Opening-Party of the ECB

The spring of 2015 will see another symbolic landmark in European crisis policy emerge with the opening of the new European Central Bank (ECB) in Frankfurt. The ceremony will allow the representatives of the European member-states to pat themselves on the back for their crisis-solutions whilst using the celebrations to prepare themselves (and us) for the next round of austerity programmes. They want to institutionalize the state of exception.

But a lot of people are going to crash the party – because the solutions for the crisis that is capitalism are a catastrophe for the people. Hence the spring of 2015 will hopefully also see a landmark of resistance against the European crisis regime as thousands of different people from all over Europe and beyond travel to the action days against the ECB-party. We call for the antiauthoritarian movement to participate in these actions and discussions. Let’s use this possibility to promote transnational self-organisation in the fight against state and capital and turn this party of domination into our party.

The ECB as symbol and transnational state-apparatus:

The Governments of Europe are implementing rigid policies of austerity through the ECB. It has already wreaked havoc on the social fabric, especially in the south of Europe. Yet no end is in sight, because both a forced cut back in state spending and an increase in money-flow have not been able to revive or even stimulate the economy: unemployment and underemployment are at an all-time high whilst profitable investments are hard to be found. The crisis will persist and the policies of crisis will become permanent. The ECB is the transnational state-apparatus institutionalising the crisis-policies through which less and less people get increasingly richer whilst more and more people are forced into crass poverty. The ECB has become a clear symbol of capitalist domination in Europe.

Kicking the habit: breaking complicity with capitalism

Capitalist domination controls every aspect of our lives. Through it traditional relations of dependency and control, but also of solidarity, are being dissolved: how we work, what we eat, who we love, where we live and what air we breathe is constantly determined anew. Our livelihood depends on the daily reproduction of capitalism and we are as much a part of its machinery as those that rule us. This also promised and promises new freedoms, and as such is not only implemented by the ruling classes but also embraced by the exploited. But it is also here, in the everyday, where conflicts and contradictions within this system of domination appear: for example; when wages and pensions are cut; tenants thrown out of their flats; welfare and healthcare torn apart; the environment is destroyed, with a shrug, in the name of private profit; and conditions of (over-)exploitation are institutionalised by
the deadly border regime against refugees and migrants. These struggles are our point of departure. We are determined to break with the concrete domination brought about by the abstract principals of capital. Capitalism is made by us all, together we can overcome it.

Self-organising beyond State, Nation and Europe

Nobody can do this for us, no state and no party. Bourgeois politics – in the end – is always confined to the management of capitalism’s necessities. It can’t challenge the basic terms of capitalist
domination: economic growth (capital accumulation) as an end in itself and thus the necessary separation of work (labour) and the means of production. We’ll have to take control of our lives – and aim for anti-authoritarian self-organisation. Within Europe, transnational institutions like the ECB have been created outside of the realm of the old national processes of parliamentary deliberation. Granted, we won`t shed any tears for the old days. But, to avoid being pitted against each
other across state borders, our struggle must be on the European level at the very least! The choice between the old nation-state and Europe – as it is being presented to us by the populist right – is no choice: Europe is and always has been the framework in which the competition between nation-states is organized. It is the framework, with the ECB as its agent and materialised symbol, that produces winners and losers, reproduces national divisions and strengthens nationalist formations. A liberated society will only be won against and beyond both the nation-state and Europe.

Let us deepen the process of transnational exchange. Let us bring our common struggles, our common anger together and tackle the ECB as a symbol of capitalist domination in Europe. Join the antiauthoritarian block on the anticapitalist demonstration and take part in the blockades of the ECB-party in Frankfurt.

Face the players, fight the game! Come to Frankfurt and crash the party.