Earthquake in Chile: Turning the Class Society into Ruins and Rubble

Translated text by anonymous author, Hommodolars

Greetings international comrades. We are facing difficult times in Chile after the recent earthquake. In the most impacted areas of the country, people are taking to the streets and looting. We support these actions. We only hope to see this practice generalized. The natural disaster is nothing compared to the violence that capital brings to us day by day. Today, we loot capital to meet our basic needs after a natural disaster. Tomorrow, we must loot capital to destroy a larger disaster: capital and its guardian, the state.

After accumulating tension for 25 years, the tectonic plates where the territory called Chile is located released an enormous amount of energy, which for humans amounts to an earthquake, a natural disaster.

We do not live in just any society, but instead capitalism, the most extreme and concentrated form of class society. Disasters may very well come from natural forces. Their effects are not natural, but instead social.

The social disaster, which in itself constitutes the function of the commercial economy, becomes evident in these cases. It is not the homes of the bourgeoisie that crack and fall. It is not the families of the bourgeoisie that are left without basic needs. It is not our masters that remain out of communication, and basically without possibility to transport themselves in the shitty cities where the public transportation plays a disciplined role and transports human merchandise.

Urbanism is not innocent. The effects of the earthquake are indebted to conscious decisions of a certain section of industry—which the political powers accommodate as good class representatives—and the deliberate regulations and plans of the state. They are responsible for the fact that many proletarians have been literally left with only the clothes on their back.

While the business owners responsible for the structural failure and collapse of buildings recently constructed just might receive some judgement and fines in civil courts, the proletarians are treated as delinquents with police repression. The media criminalizes the proletarians, breaking from the normal roles that the state reinforces, expropriate the merchandise that all salaried people produce directly and indirectly. How long will we just sleep, ride the bus, and watch television, while we are increasing the value of capital? Everyone interviewed by the media has said that the most important thing is life, and all of the material things can be replaced. This is entirely logical. It is justified and necessary that we reclaim our lives through the direct appropriation of goods in the supermarkets, pharmacies, and other temples of commercial society.

The repressive apparatus of the state is at the point of being overwhelmed by the mass of people dedicated to the expropriation of the expropriators. In the city of Concepción, they have been obligated to tolerate a certain level of looting. The dogs of the bourgeois press have invented new divisive lines between people who appropriate products of basic need and people who empowered themselves to other types of “unnecessary” products. Without realizing it, they draw attention to the distinction between real human needs—that capital systematically ignores—and the superfluous well-being of which the creation, promotion, and distribution uselessly require the energies of countless proletarians. If this distinction is real, we insist that in the moment of crisis and collective action this is not of importance. The proletarians dedicated to expropriation have the perfect right to loot from capital a share of the appreciation that they estimate imperative to directly satisfy their needs and desires.

The most painful spectacle is the good citizens that long for the businesses to open their doors to be able to spend money and buy merchandise, because they do not want to “steal.” What happened to the wise saying in popular culture that states, “the thief who steals from the thief receives 100 years of pardon?”

Instead of using all of their abilities to rescue victims, the armed forces shows it’s clumsiness and bad faith. The armed forces communicated that there was no risk of tidal waves at the very same moment that they were occurring. The armed forces wants to repress the looters. They have sent a large amount of their forces to seek and recapture people who, being a part of the 55,000 prisoners in Chile, have taken advantage of the confusion and structural damages in order to escape from the dungeons of the state. Through this effort, the Chilean state has increased the number of earthquake victims with some comrades that have been executed in the streets simply for being faithful to their idea of freedom.

In this moment, we say to the proletarian anti-capitalists that we should strengthen our communication networks and mutual aide. We will not tire in bringing attention to the profoundly social nature of the disaster, participating directly in the activities that help create communities in struggle, appropriating use value, and attacking the state and capital. From a historic perspective, we know that, just like in the earth, social fabric is building tension that must bring us to a great and imminent insurrection. It is social seismology, which is to say, class struggle.

Capitalism is the catastrophe!

Long live the looting and direct action against the state and capital!

Reclaiming our lives, preparing the next insurrection!

For more information in Spanish, check Hommodolars.org

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