The preliminaries of going to smash shop windows

The novelty of Saturday's violence was, according to the Mossos, that the hooded individuals did not carry out the classic action of hiding at the tail end of an organized protest demonstration, but rather were summoned on TikTok, met up via WhatsApp in groups of no more than 15 or 20 youths (this, in their jargon, is called “the funnel”), planted themselves in the center of Barcelona and started destroying and looting. In a word, the violent ones began breaking windows, skipping the preliminaries. And the police were surprised by the virulence and the impact.

But the truth is that preliminaries are a thing of the past. In the world of social media, there are no previews. One goes from one thing to another without introduction, body, and conclusion, without opening music or opening credits. On Monday, a call-out poster begins to circulate, images from France run, some friends meet up, testosterone, nothing to lose and loot to be gained.

But furthermore, society has long since had the preliminaries done: precariousness, lack of purchasing power, evictions, no-future... there is no longer a need to shout slogans to arm oneself with arguments, first, and end up smashing shop windows later.

There are more than 300 identified and more than one hundred arrested. There are people from everywhere and not all of them fit, by any means, the cliché of the subsidized immigrant, as the extreme right says. The police will not lack information. In light of what had happened in France and Italy, they lacked anticipation.

The dynamite and the fuse have been in place for a long time. Another thing is who lit this Saturday's fuse, and to this day no one has dared to claim that the vandalism in Barcelona was not a false flag attack, taking into account who is rubbing their hands together. Careful, then, that the general strike does not end up turning against those who are calling for it.