YES, ONE CAN

Since April 2001 in Algeria, and particularly in the region, the population has risen up against all the managers of society – whether they are modernized bureaucrats or Islamic fundamentalists – in order to take back their life. As in a "secret rendezvous between generations", the insurgents have discovered, under the glowing embers of Time, a still living tradition, that of the village and neighborhood assemblies in which to discuss and decide in a direct and horizontal way. They have shown in this way, in practice, that the state is not only repressive, it is also useless. Since then, less than two percent of the inhabitants go to the polls to vote, forcing the Algerian government to reveal to the entire world what a gigantic lie representative democracy and its supposed consensus are. On their placards the rebels wrote, "To vote is to betray our memory." The memory of brothers and sisters killed by the army, the memory of free villages that resist.
We cannot say such a thing, since the rebel ferocity of the people here is lost in the shadow of history. We can only state: "To vote is to betray our possibilities." Because in the face of profiteers and bureaucrats, hired pens and anesthetized awareness, in the face of transgenic "well-being" and misery with a cell-phone, one can live differently.
The pleasure of direct action – this is what we need to discover very quickly. The pleasure of confronting our individual and collective problems in the first person, without delegation, without alibis, without the continuous search for scapegoats. Rather than voting and in exchange demanding the right to complain (about increasingly low wages or increasingly high rents, pensions that don’t come or an environment that is more polluted and unlivable every day, let’s start to decide for ourselves about our lives. Let’s start to collectively take that which we collectively need, let’s start to discuss face to face without mediators or professional politicians.
There are empty houses and public spaces, left in the past to speculation, and there are many of them. It is possible to occupy them and bring them to life.
Living environments should be to the measure of human beings, not commodities. If the destruction of the Earth is an inevitable consequence of this society, this society is not, in fact, inevitable. Polluters and poisoners are not invincible. Overturning an upside-down world is possible.
They terrorize us with surveillance cameras, police and repression, or else with the extortion of work. But the real problem is our fear. We can learn courage. The masters and their servants are few, we are infinitely more. Rebellion is possible.
The fascists become more arrogant; they present old putschists and those who stab workers, such as Eccher and Cecchin, for election. One fights against these rotting carcasses every day in the streets, not at the polls every five years. Responding to the violence is possible.
The mass media falsify and slander the reasons for every revolt. But when the necessities. But when the exigencies are real, their smokescreen of silence and falsehood thins out and disappears. Communicating without filters is possible.
Our greatest enemy is resignation. But here no heroes will free us like in the TV movies. From amorous relationships to the education of children, from the job that we endure to the society that we desire, it is up to each one of us to choose, without waiting for the party, the masses, public opinion or the super-lotto. To each one of us, contemptuous of profit, the law, morality. Because yes, one can.

"I hate all those who, by ceding through fear and resignation, a part of their potential as human beings to others, not only crush themselves, but also me and those I love, with the weight of their fearful complicity or with their idiotic inertia."