Hidden inside a quiet business park in Portishead, just outside Bristol, is a UK Border Agency office from where an immigration crime team work with police, including launching raids in the south-west. We visited Thursday night into Friday (with the death of anarchist Carlo Guiliani in combat with police during the G8 summit 12 years ago still fresh in our minds) to set fires that damaged the building and burnt 6 vehicles stationed there - 3 cars, 2 blacked-out people carrier vans (known to be used for dawn snatches of immigrant family groups) and 1 large van. The border regime mercenaries draw the attention of our total contempt the same as any other cop does, and now this long arm of the State has felt that we are close and we don't stop.
A couple of weeks earlier, high noon on Sunday 2nd at a Tascor corporation depot at a Cribbs Causeway/Patchway area trading estate, 2 minibuses with barred passenger windows had their windscreens smashed and multiple dents to the bodywork of the cabs. Tascor (formerly Reliance Secure Task Management) work for the Border Agency and Border Force to ‘escort’ detainees between immigration prisons and to their deportations, utilizing the consequence-free violence their position furnishes them with such as during the recent forced removals of Marius Betondi and Raul Ally, and are the largest private sector provider of this ‘service’ worldwide (having taken over these duties in the UK from Group 4 Security in 2011). They also run designated holding rooms and short-term holding facilities throughout the UK as well as for UK border forces in Calais and Coquelles, France.
Capitalism profit greatly from a pool of cheap migrant labor, including known 'illegals' who are even more vulnerable to the bosses' blackmail. The State criminalizes those they decide are non-productive, utilizing poisonous nationalism to further divide the exploited (like the recent wave of hatred against anyone thought to appear 'Muslim') and to win elections. The 'lucky' migrants get to arrive in the slums of alienated Western society and are thrust into competition with other urban poor, the 'unlucky' or unprofitable in deportation prisons, in both cases governed by fear and racialized policing. However this sorting of human bodies doesn't always go as smoothly as planned: mass hungerstrikes in Dutch detention facilities and heavy rioting on the streets of Sweden are recent instances of refusal to submit to such degradation.
We don't want a world where the tyranny of immigration bureaucrats can mean the difference between life and death, and unique beings are categorized and labelled to wring the maximum profit and subordination from us all. We don't want the indignity of every movement being scrutinized for the purposed of social control and enclosure, whether at borders, on the housing estates, in school or at work.
The legend has it that 'we' are lucky to live here, under democratic totalitarianism with some comfortable cages and technological addiction to escape from reality. But infact we are surrounded by depression, divides of wealth and race and gender, devoid of any earth-based selfsufficiency and dependant on the very machine we hate. This machine is only fuelled by rampant exploitation here and largely in the countries that migrants have fled from, creating a disgusting feedback loop as industrial civilization consumes everything in its path. We want to demolish the myth that there is any good place to be within a global system of interconnected misery.
Our struggle is far from the calls for peaceful (re)integration of 'illegals' into this faceless society. We also don't want to set ourselves up as advocates of homogenized groups of migrants, nor to sanctify them all for their specific oppression. Instead of abstract humanitarian charity, we search for the rebel affinity that may be found with migrants who maybe want more than a different regime, and who breach borders, wound guards and destroy prisons from the Mediterranean to Australia; that may be found in the hearts of those who self-organize, with or without accomplices.
Borders are just one significant expression of the currently dominant order, in a world of divisions both physical and psychological, of walls segregating populations, classes and imaginations. Our attack carries the seeds for another world. One where each and every creature is free to roam as they choose. Our borderless solidarity bursts out like our flames for people struggling for life unchained, for Gabriel Pombo da Silva, the CCF imprisoned members, comrades raided in Belgium, Marco Camenisch, Henry Zegarrundo, the anarchists held in Italy and Denmark, the dignified criminals, lawless fugitives, rebellious migrants and other socially disaffected who arm their rage to fight for liberation.
We would consider this our leaving gift to the UK Border Agency, due to be renamed and reorganized in the future - except it turns out it'll mainly be "the same jobs", "in the same places", "with the same mission". We know that their same regime of exploitation will continue more adapted and integrated, so likewise our war is perpetually against all forms of categorization and control that attempt to hinder free movement and wild life on Earth. Nothing is over, everything continues.
Borderless Solidarity Cell (Informal Anarchist Federation)
Capitalism profit greatly from a pool of cheap migrant labor, including known 'illegals' who are even more vulnerable to the bosses' blackmail. The State criminalizes those they decide are non-productive, utilizing poisonous nationalism to further divide the exploited (like the recent wave of hatred against anyone thought to appear 'Muslim') and to win elections. The 'lucky' migrants get to arrive in the slums of alienated Western society and are thrust into competition with other urban poor, the 'unlucky' or unprofitable in deportation prisons, in both cases governed by fear and racialized policing. However this sorting of human bodies doesn't always go as smoothly as planned: mass hungerstrikes in Dutch detention facilities and heavy rioting on the streets of Sweden are recent instances of refusal to submit to such degradation.
We don't want a world where the tyranny of immigration bureaucrats can mean the difference between life and death, and unique beings are categorized and labelled to wring the maximum profit and subordination from us all. We don't want the indignity of every movement being scrutinized for the purposed of social control and enclosure, whether at borders, on the housing estates, in school or at work.
The legend has it that 'we' are lucky to live here, under democratic totalitarianism with some comfortable cages and technological addiction to escape from reality. But infact we are surrounded by depression, divides of wealth and race and gender, devoid of any earth-based selfsufficiency and dependant on the very machine we hate. This machine is only fuelled by rampant exploitation here and largely in the countries that migrants have fled from, creating a disgusting feedback loop as industrial civilization consumes everything in its path. We want to demolish the myth that there is any good place to be within a global system of interconnected misery.
Our struggle is far from the calls for peaceful (re)integration of 'illegals' into this faceless society. We also don't want to set ourselves up as advocates of homogenized groups of migrants, nor to sanctify them all for their specific oppression. Instead of abstract humanitarian charity, we search for the rebel affinity that may be found with migrants who maybe want more than a different regime, and who breach borders, wound guards and destroy prisons from the Mediterranean to Australia; that may be found in the hearts of those who self-organize, with or without accomplices.
Borders are just one significant expression of the currently dominant order, in a world of divisions both physical and psychological, of walls segregating populations, classes and imaginations. Our attack carries the seeds for another world. One where each and every creature is free to roam as they choose. Our borderless solidarity bursts out like our flames for people struggling for life unchained, for Gabriel Pombo da Silva, the CCF imprisoned members, comrades raided in Belgium, Marco Camenisch, Henry Zegarrundo, the anarchists held in Italy and Denmark, the dignified criminals, lawless fugitives, rebellious migrants and other socially disaffected who arm their rage to fight for liberation.
We would consider this our leaving gift to the UK Border Agency, due to be renamed and reorganized in the future - except it turns out it'll mainly be "the same jobs", "in the same places", "with the same mission". We know that their same regime of exploitation will continue more adapted and integrated, so likewise our war is perpetually against all forms of categorization and control that attempt to hinder free movement and wild life on Earth. Nothing is over, everything continues.
Borderless Solidarity Cell (Informal Anarchist Federation)
Comments
Display the following 9 comments