A-Infos (en) France, OCL: OCL Libertarian Meetings: July 15-20 in Quercy (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr) [machine translation]

The libertarian meetings that the OCL offers each summer are scheduled 
this year from July 15 to 20 inclusive - in the hills of Quercy, thirty 
minutes north of Montauban or south of Cahors, one hour from Toulouse. 
---- They are a space for exchanging ideas about our activist 
investments, which is why they are open to anyone interested in the 
planned debates. In the spaces left free by the program, other 
discussions may be proposed to share an experience or present a 
particular struggle. The debates take place every day at 3 p.m. and 9 p.m.

We will be camping on the wooded grounds of a Quercy gîte in the commune 
of Vazerac, and will benefit from its shared facilities. There will also 
be press tables and a video library featuring films on past and 
present-day struggles. Regarding daily life and meeting management, 
meals and cleaning will be provided by teams that will change daily.

To facilitate meal preparation and your welcome, we ask that you notify 
us of your arrival by calling 06.16.93.07.28 at least 24 hours in 
advance. If you are arriving by train, we will pick you up at Montauban 
train station. Meal rates and rental fees will be based on your income.

The program of debates is as follows:

Tuesday, July 15:
Afternoon: The political and social situation in France.
Nothing new under the cold sun of capital. The attacks on labor and 
social protection show that the restructuring of French capitalism is 
still following the roadmap set for Macron: forced alignment with 
European social standards. Its social consequences have translated into 
struggles: Yellow Vests, Martinique, suburban riots, Kanaky, pensions...
A compelling pretext for this new austerity cure: the financing of the 
war economy-for which we are being prepared-which looks remarkably like 
the well-known (class) war of the economy. Speeches from across the 
political spectrum on sovereignty, relocations, etc., are colliding with 
global competition in which France cannot compete.
The left has nothing to offer but the same electoral soup (with which 
the CGT has aligned itself) and the now traditional anti-fascist 
barrage. The "radical" milieu, lacking a unifying revolutionary or 
anti-capitalist perspective, is undermined by ideological contradictions 
that are difficult to overcome.
While the period clearly reveals the contempt for leaders and the 
cynicism of capitalists, it is not our ideas that triumph, but rather 
despondency. So, while we wait for the next social explosion, what 
communist and libertarian perspectives, what disruptive strategies can 
we bring to the movements? Without sinking into fatalism or the 
self-fulfilling prophecy of the "coming fascism," what resistance can we 
offer to the shift toward security, authoritarianism, and war?

Evening: The election of Trump in the United States and its consequences.
Unlike most elections, Trump's has opened the way to considerable 
upheaval. But rather than falling into well-known explanations inherited 
from the past-crisis of capitalism, fascism, isolationism, openly 
oligarchic regime-let us instead try to see it as the sign of a strange 
and chaotic response to real problems, which are as much social and 
cultural as political and economic, faced by American society and, 
beyond that, the civilization of which it is a part. Only from this 
point of view can we identify avenues for an adequate critique.

Wednesday, July 16:
Afternoon: War ecology in progress.
Do some insulation work in your home and you will contribute to the war 
effort that is demanded of you. Indeed, you will consume less fossil 
fuels, which will weaken our enemies who draw their strength from our 
need for gas and oil. QED. This is the war ecology advocated by EELV.
Those who thought the government's greens were more or less pacifist 
find themselves back to their old ways. Those who had some qualms about 
the war effort as indispensable find themselves dyed-in-the-wool greens 
and cleared of any militaristic suspicions.
Let's not be naive and embrace the widespread idea that this is a 
spectacular turnaround by our Greens. For decades, the latter, in 
Germany as in France, have rallied to the NATO cause and embraced all 
its struggles. For years now, nuclear weapons and strike force have not 
been considered a casus belli in French political life.

Evening: Extractivism in the name of ecological transition? The 
struggles in France and elsewhere against lithium mines, but not only!
In France, collectives are rising up against the extraction of materials 
considered essential for the ecological transition. As others are doing 
in other parts of the world, whether in Europe, South America, North 
America, or Africa.
How do we prevent these mines from opening? How do we build strong, 
autonomous local movements in connection with collectives around the 
world and not remain among activists, but still maintain a clear 
discourse (on the uses of metals, transition, rearmament, etc.), all 
without being swallowed up by the organizational methods of social 
democrats and other legalistic environmental associations?

Thursday, July 17:
Afternoon: free

Evening: Class struggle as a compass and binder for future battles
To launch this debate, we will present two recently published books that 
reaffirm the importance of work and class issues, as well as social 
resistance:
Avant de faire le tour du monde, faire le tour de l'atelier , by La 
Mouette enragée, aims, by reconnecting with the workers' inquiry, to 
give body and voice to a working class that is perpetually changing and 
that is being made invisible. While we no longer speak of the "working 
world", the working condition has never been so present, both through 
the intensification of exploitation at work and through the material 
conditions of existence. It is no longer the worker in large factories 
but rather the worker in the tertiary sector that the workers' inquiry 
has encountered. There emerges a speech situated in the class struggle 
and which participates in the reconstruction of a common imagination, of 
a class consciousness (?): its history, its nature, its scope and its 
necessity always recommenced according to the mutations of the 
wage-earning system.
In Capitalism is Cannibalism , Nancy Fraser criticizes the "forgetting", 
for decades, of social struggles in many analyses centered on other 
struggles (feminist, anti-racist, ecological, etc.). She traces the 
history of capitalism by highlighting its contradictions, which force it 
to evolve under the effect of multiple factors. And she calls for 
linking all struggles through anti-capitalism in order to destroy a 
global, and not a "just" system of economic exploitation. However, like 
others on the "left of the left", Nancy Fraser denounces above all the 
financialized phase of capitalism called "neoliberalism", and by 
considering the State as a tool usable against its "misdeeds". Such 
choices show that "anti-capitalism" does not necessarily lead to social 
emancipation - everything depends on its bases, its components and its 
purpose.

Friday, July 18:
Afternoon: Alternating Current newspaper commission (critique of issue 
351 and preparation of the back-to-school issue).

Evening: The Urgent Need for Solidarity with Immigrants
In most cases, the French administration no longer even responds to 
requests for regularization from undocumented workers. It's either 
silence or the issuance of an obligation to leave French territory 
(OQTF). Even the automatic renewal of residence permits is no longer 
guaranteed. Added to this is the computerization of all appointments at 
prefectures, the requirement to pass French language, history, and 
geography tests in our institutions, and so on. Family immigration is in 
the crosshairs-already, in Mayotte, the infamous Manuel Vals reportedly 
wants to stop regularizing the parents of French children, or to revoke 
a residence permit from the parents of a child who disturbs public order.
As for the regularization of undocumented workers, it has been blocked 
for several years, and yet many sectors of the economy can no longer 
find workers ("jobs under pressure").
In solidarity with immigration, what initiatives will be taken to 
reverse the balance of power that is currently crushing millions of people?

Saturday, July 19:
Afternoon: Alternating Current Newspaper Commission (end)

Evening (debate introduced by Sarah Katz and Pierre Stambul): Gaza:
How Gazan society organizes, resists, and survives in the face of 
genocide. What concrete solidarity is there? How did the Zionist project 
lead to genocide in Gaza? Why are the dominant powers of this world 
complicit?

Sunday, July 20:
Afternoon: screening, followed by a discussion, of the documentary We 
Are Not Our Parents (by Matteo Severi, Madeleine Guediguian, and Sarah 
Cousin, 2024, 88 minutes) on the PSA-Aulnay struggle.
1982, 2013: these are two historic strikes at the PSA-Aulnay plant 
during which the rank and file, the vast majority of whom were 
immigrants, succeeded in stopping the assembly line and establishing a 
balance of power against the car industry bosses and their management 
with their thuggish methods. But, beyond these similarities, there is 
also a major difference: the 2013 struggle is defensive compared to that 
of 1982, because it very quickly aims to obtain the most severance pay 
from an industrial capitalism that had decided to desert an entire 
region and its population. It is these back-and-forths between these two 
periods that We Are Not Our Parents offers us. The co-authors of this 
self-produced film, members of the MBPS association, will also be there 
as key participants in this movement. We will be able to discuss with 
them the history of the labor movement-to understand in particular how 
religion was used to break the automobile strikes of the 1980s-class 
struggle, immigration, and more.

Evening: free.

http://oclibertaire.lautre.net/spip.php?article4437
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