Manifesto for the Abolition of Capitalist Traffic
We don’t die in traffic.
We are killed by it.
Every year, the asphalt exacts its blood tribute. Crushed, mutilated, erased bodies—and everything continues to function as if it were normal! It’s not a tragedy! It’s not an accident!
It’s organized violence, reproduced daily by an urban model made for machines, profit, and control. The system doesn’t stop because of so many deaths, nor does it assume its responsibility…
The individual automobile is a socially accepted weapon. It kills, pollutes, segregates, and occupies common space as if it were private property in motion.
The city has been hijacked to guarantee its flow. Streets have become lanes. Squares have become parking lots. People have become obstacles; cities are for cars! (between 30% and 40% of urban areas have become spaces for cars and not for people…)
This daily massacre kills more than many armed conflicts—but it doesn’t cause a scandal because it serves capital. The automotive industry, oil, advertising, and the state form a well-oiled machine that transforms death into “statistics” and congestion into an “inevitable cost.” Inevitable for whom?
We do not accept the farce of individual choice. No one chooses to depend on a car; we are pushed into it by hostile cities, imposed distances, and deliberately dilapidated public transport. The freedom sold by the automobile is a lie: isolation, debt, permanent risk, and submission to the system’s timeline.
We demand the destruction of the car paradigm as the axis of urban life. Not its reform. Not its humanization. Its overcoming.
We defend the radical collectivization of mobility: transport as a common good, organized horizontally, oriented by use and need, not by profit or state management. Buses, trains, bicycles, walking—anything that reduces speed, returns public space, and weakens the logic of the commodity on wheels. Cities must come back to life, not become consumer zombies, rushing to and fro in a frenzied madness!
A free city is incompatible with deadly roads.
A vibrant society is incompatible with the normalization of death!
Slowing down is subversion.
Sharing is a direct attack on individualism.
Taking back the streets is an act of insubordination.
As long as we accept traffic as it is, we will accept living under an undeclared war, where the poor, the marginalized, and the invisible die first. Our response will not be adaptation. It will be rupture.
Against the traffic of death.
Against the city of capital.
For life, for autonomy, for libertarian mobility.
See you in the streets!
In the struggle, we are dignified and free people!
