Where we stand

Fighting, first and foremost, is a question of self positioning and location.

As antispeciesist activists, we must strive to ask ourselves those questions: From what position do we speak? In which locations do we fight ?

Seeking answers to those questions means understanding that each struggle erupts from a specific location. For defining our targets is a fundamental act. For we must set our anchor in those locations, for an effective diagnosis and a successful struggle to emerge FROM THERE.

When 269LA was born, in 2016, we were obsessed by one specific question:

"Where is that war's frontline, that's tryna stay hidden?"

We found it, inside slaughterhouses.

The killing floor, this violent place of passage between life and death became our frontline. Within this concrete corridor, where animals are forced to march towards their death, is where we planted our struggle and our bodies.

We're not on a quest for a sensory experience, to "feel what exploited animals get to feel". We're on a search for our place to stand, as their accomplices.
269LA stands for a vision of antispeciesism that's grounded within reality, that even comes to clash with said reality.

Antispeciesism, in the very places where animals are kept, by their sides.

We were seeking to fight by their side, never from an ethereal position, floating above the world, but from a very grounded stance, glued to the floor, crawling under the fence, chaining ourselves to the railing while sitting on the hard and cold concrete floor.

Sitting in between two worlds, that stand against one another. That's "our ground"

The slaughterhouse produces men who stand against animals. As a perpetual and neverending war, that must in fact, never end.

And the perpetual standoff that takes place in this corridor is embodying all the violence that is carried by this system.

This factory that opposes one side to the other is precisely what must be targeted.

We carry the intimate certainty that the key to the animalist struggle sits right there. We're convinced that the slaughterhouse is "the place" from where we must build the movement.

Standing between knives and animal's throats was an act of disruption.

Many try portraying direct action as a folkloric, marginal and laughable little world. They try and make it sound like an informal and insignificant island, a little ghetto for illegalist practices; we, on the contrary, believe it to be an endless source of extraordinary possibilities, as it pushes the animalist struggle forward, into the clash that's set to take place.

A revolutionary strategy of societal transformation cannot accept to remain locked within the margins of said society. It must strive to take it's place at the very heart of the contradiction it's sheltering.

Direct action isn't an individualistic liberation ritual, but a genuine act of disruption.

A breaking point that causes the eruption of a war that was being kept invisible, up to that point.

How many horrendous videos will there need to be, showing the nightmare that takes place inside slaughterhouses, for us to finally understand that "informing" is not enough? That informing does not induce any change, and that more is needed to give birth to a struggle, truly capable of attacking the domination.

It has to be something that engages our bodies with animal's body. For "society has been conditioned" by those images. Isn't it time for something else to unfold? To turn indignation into action? To run onto the killing floor and find our way to where the slaughter takes place, in order to make it stop ?

We cannot truly engage in a struggle by "keeping our distances"

True radicality means taking action. It means getting our bodies involved. Our activism's conflictuality precisely consists in putting our bodies across oppressive infrastructures, through wich the powers at play are organising the destruction of animal lives.

Such oppression cannot be fought with what's being granted, by history, as means of contestations. We had to invent and build from the ground up. In short, to elaborate an autonomous political practice.

Political ideas don't get shared only through intellect, but also, and more importantly, through practice.

Ideas, as true as they can be, cannot do anything by themselves.

We must incorporate them, share them for bodies to be set in motion. We cannot hope to engage in an actual fight against an oppressive system by keeping ourselves to the expression of our oppositions. As politics come to exist only through action.

Direct action means refusing to leave without having impacted something somewhere inside the slaughterhouse.

Direct action carries precisely this type of power: showing that we have a hold on reality, that we have the means to make the machine stop and to change lives. Something that engages us in a dimension of political activity that carries sensitivity. This proximity with dying animals always prevented us from aiming for imaginary engagements, forbidding us from "fighting" in the void. Everywhere we brought the necessity of direct action, got engraved in our minds the memories of animals, yelling while grabbing onto our clothes. A very heavy responsibility.

In a time when contestation already seem perfectly integrated into the system, direct action becomes our only way to conquer new political spaces, for a struggle as hard and unique as antispeciesism.

It's the only way for animalism to emerge.

There exist no other means of struggle wich we could truly use to carry antispeciesism.

(No union or political parties or movement)

Everything remains for us to invent.