In Praise of the Smashed Shop Window

Making Disorder Against the Order of the End of the World

by Maddalena Fragnito

Kids, burn it down, burn it down! /

Burn it down to bring order /

Burn it down, bring disorder /

Bring disorder to bring order

Martiniquan feminists #Pébouchfini, 2018

If today you can claim the right to secular public education and labour rights, thank the women and men of the Paris Commune who rose up in 1871, erected barricades along the boulevards, toppled the Vendôme Column and set fire to the Tuileries Palace. Thousands were massacred, but their ideas would return to fracture the order of the ruling class. In your life, too.

Thank those who, in 1791, set fire to the plantations of Saint-Domingue and destroyed the property of French colonists. Those who rose up in Jamaica in 1831, burning sugarcane fields and helping to make slavery in the British Empire politically untenable. Abolition did not spring from the generosity of white owners: it was won by enslaved people who decided to materially destroy the world that held them in chains.

If women can vote today, thank the suffragettes, such as Emmeline Pankhurst, who smashed London shop windows, set buildings on fire, sabotaged communications and planted bombs at symbolic sites of power. Thank the women who continued to challenge governments and police elsewhere, even when the vote was granted to some while others remained excluded. Women’s suffrage was no gracious gift from parliaments, but a victory wrested from institutions that had denied half the population the right to determine their own destiny for centuries.

If today you can invoke the Italian Constitution, thank the women and men partisans who took up rifles, blew up bridges and organised uprisings against Nazi-fascism. While part of the Italian bourgeoisie sought to preserve its property and privileges, others risked their lives to overthrow the regime. The Republic was also born of the armed struggle of those who decided that fascism had to be defeated, not merely opposed.

If you have the right to an eight-hour working day, paid holidays and a shorter working week, thank the generations of workers who occupied factories and brought production to a halt. Those who struck for the eight-hour day in Chicago in 1886 and faced police rifles. Those who occupied thousands of French factories in 1936, winning paid holidays and the forty-hour week. Those who stopped the assembly lines during Italy’s Hot Autumn of 1969 and wrested wage increases and trade-union rights. No boss has ever given away a single hour of freedom from work: every one of those hours had to be taken from them.

If you celebrate Pride today, thank those who, on the night of 28 June 1969, during a police raid on the Stonewall Inn in New York, decided they had taken enough blows from police batons. Trans and queer people took to the streets, throwing bottles and stones at police officers: Pride was not born as a parade sponsored by banks, but as a riot against the police.

If today you can insist that shelter, electricity and food are needs to be met rather than privileges, thank those who squatted homes in the 1970s. The families in Turin who collectively reduced their electricity bills through direct action in 1974. The workers and neighbourhood residents who, on 19 October that same year, entered supermarkets in Milan, imposed lower prices at the tills and took the goods home. These were called proletarian expropriations, and no one waited for somebody else to recognise their right to live: they took it for themselves.

Finally, thank everyone who broke the law when the law oppressed you too.

In the sanitised memory of our fine democracies, these acts of revolt disappear. Every civil gain is narrated as the result of the moral maturation of institutions, while the conflicts that

made it possible are filed away as excesses. What remains are photographs of uprisings, preferably without fires, shattered windows or overturned flowerpots. What remains are rights, severed from the bodies that won them. Yesterday, barbarians, savages, vandals, scoundrels, pirates; today, black blocs, racaille, terrorists and maranza. Those to whom you deny even the possibility of having political reasons.

If you celebrate rights while condemning those who wrested them into existence, if you like revolutions only once they are dead enough to break nothing anymore, there is no point beating around the bush: you are part of the problem too.

Disorder is not chaos; it is the challenging of what those in power call the world order, a world they have built and are constantly reinforcing, which they consider immutable even though its organization and workings are constantly being challenged. Françoise Vergès, 2023

For days now, on television talk shows and in government circles, in newspapers and before the moral tribunal of social media, the usual spectacle of democratic respectability has been playing out. To be allowed to speak, you must first recite the formula: I condemn violence, without ifs or buts. Before you can say anything, you must prove that you have no intention of reconstructing the history of violence, of asking where it comes from, who perpetrates it and what relations of power make it possible. Anyone who insists on asking these questions is expelled from civilised debate. But what civilisation are we talking about?

The civilisation of evictions, healthcare waiting lists, wages that cannot even cover the rent on a room, underfunded schools and residence permits used as instruments of blackmail? Perhaps the one that has thrown its doors wide open to property speculation, driven residents out of their homes and called all this urban regeneration, sustainable development, green transition, the future? Are we talking about the civilisation of detention centres, patrols that stop people because of the colour of their skin, security decrees and soldiers sent into cities to restore order?

Are we perhaps talking about the civilisation that demands condemnation of a broken shop window while, for three years, we have watched the annihilation of Gaza on our phones? The one that would have us believe that destroyed hospitals, amputated children, universities razed to the ground and entire generations wiped out are “collateral damage”? Or the one that invokes international law in words while trampling it underfoot, bending it to suit its military and economic alliances?

Apparently, yes. We are talking about the very same civilisation that has taught us so many names for the systematic destruction of the conditions of life: security, defence, TINA, the war on terror, whatever it takes, austerity, flexibility. And then: Europe demands it, the crisis demands it, and today even war demands it. A vocabulary vast enough to allow governments and administrations to destroy entire lives without ever having to utter the word violence.

In this linguistic operation, the cosy salons of civilised discussion have performed an invaluable service, endlessly rehearsing the etiquette of “common sense” and preaching moderation to those being deprived of life, while parliaments and ministries continue to welcome with full honours those who possess the means to destroy it. Spaces of debate so removed from the world that they mistake their inability to understand it for moral superiority.

Common sense, they repeat in chorus: common sense! Their common sense, of course: the kind that has watched the devastation of the welfare state and the environment over recent decades without much disturbance, and now cries barbarism at the shattered windows of a few luxury shops. The kind that demands unequivocal condemnation of violence against objects while systematically omitting violence against life.

At this point, allow me to remind you that you ought to thank, in advance and before history turns it into history, those of us who have no common sense whatsoever. Those who reject

“democratic” etiquette and refuse to settle into the routine administration of violence. Those who do not recognise property’s right to determine where civilisation begins and where our possibilities of re-existing end. Those who feel no need to make a show of distancing themselves from the “maranza”: those girls and boys deemed too young to have political reasons, or never Italian enough to be heard. And finally, those who refuse to make the theft of a Gucci handbag the boundary of their ethics while the world is on fire.

No one represents us. We represent ourselves.

M1710, 2026

Milan has been looted and devastated for years. By property funds, by financial rent, by administrations that have sold off the city one square metre at a time and called the expulsion of its residents, and of those who keep it running, development. A city where those who clean homes, teach in schools, wait tables, care for patients in hospital wards, deliver food and look after the elderly do not earn enough to live in it. Yet this violence has all the necessary permits, green architectural renderings and institutional endorsement. Not a riot squad in sight to stop it.

Now the very same progressive administrators who presided over this hollowing-out invoke social cohesion. A cohesion that treats poverty as a problem of public decorum and the concentration of wealth as an urban-planning success. And when the sons and daughters of those pushed to the margins break a shop window, they discover in horror that there is a social question to be solved with more police. Meanwhile, the government — that one really is right-wing! — announces the deployment of five hundred soldiers and approves yet another security decree, extending preventive detention to minors aged sixteen and over, introducing a new offence of violent participation in a demonstration, and providing for sentences of up to twelve years in prison for those who organise or promote “violent” demonstrations, including through social media. “You break it, you pay for it,” Meloni declares from the grandest salon of them all. After Gaza, even the idea of using the army to contain minors seems to have lost something of its obscenity.

The eruption of young people’s anger into our oh-so-civilised cities interrupts, if only for a few hours, the power to decide who may cross a threshold, touch a commodity, inhabit a street. It materially breaks the social separation that the city pretended was natural and finally cracks open the dead end between the end of the world and bourgeois respectability in which we have all been trapped for decades: between those who destroy life and those who demand that we oppose its destruction with good manners.

Dressed as Spider-Man and Dante Alighieri, shouting with joy and grinning with rage, the bodies that flooded the streets of central Milan show us that at the end of that dead end there was no wall, but a shop window. And that we can smash it again.

It took the kids to save the world, to borrow from Elsa Morante, or at least to bring class struggle back into a left that has expelled it from its vocabulary.