Accueil > Assemblée générale 2012 d’Attac France > Candidat-e-s au conseil d’administration 2013 > Mathieu Lamour > We don’t owe, we won’t pay !

We don’t owe, we won’t pay !

mercredi 5 décembre 2012, par Mathieu Lamour

"To successfully uproot existing powers and lay the foundations which lead to social revolution, we will need to get hold of resources. Tax resistance and civil-economic disobedience could provide two such means to develop and extend organization and solidarity between people who have long been accustomed to delegation and ecocentrism"

Economic disobedience Manifesto :
Sick of politicians and institutions ignoring their demands, more and more people within Spain are determined to build their own, truly public spaces. Such spaces are collectively-run, created for and by the people themselves, rejecting the cuts and other interferences from those in power.
Consensus-led decision making in meetings and collectively-run services are essential to improving popular forms of organizing. There’s no time to lose ; Europe is steeped in debt, states are continuing to cut their people’s rights, loans and services, leaving an ever vaster number of basic social needs exposed. States neither want to cover nor are capable of providing for their people’s needs.
Now’s our chance to fill this space and, by doing so, show that other ways of organizing forms of work, leisure and consumption are possible.
In the meantime, European states will continue to increase taxes and fines, hoping to collect more money and keep dissidence at bay. Strengthening and sharing the skills that enable us to defend ourselves against such attacks is, therefore, vital. We must put our knowledge and skills into practice by creating tools of defense, communal resources, insolvency and comprehensive cooperatives.
It’s not just because repeated demands and mass demonstrations are not offering any results.
But it’s because, if we truly want to offer real resistance to all the forms of abuse that the banks and the State are subjecting us to, we must be capable of creating effective, popular forms of power. And, we’re not going to achieve this by adding our bodies to the numbers at mass demonstrations.
Let’s remember that a shepherd only needs a few dogs to control the entire flock.
To successfully uproot existing powers and lay the foundations which lead to social revolution, we will need to get hold of resources. Tax resistance and civil-economic disobedience could provide two such means to develop and extend organization and solidarity between people who have long been accustomed to delegation and ecocentrism.
Revindication is not enough, transformation is vital.
We must move from words to deeds, from the symbolic to the practical and from outrage to action.
Economic disobedience, the formation of cooperatives, new, social currencies, insolvency, the self-organization of those in debt, communal resources, direct action....... The alternatives are numerous and there are many people putting such things into practice. It must be everyone’s responsibility to get to know the alternatives, to share them with others and make this change happen.
These tools aren’t simply those of people who champion self-sufficiency and collective-organizing ; they’re also important tools for those fighting to defend our rights.
The more self-empowered the latter group are and the more resources they have at their disposition, the less they’ll depend on the system and the more effective their fight will be.