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Title: Lightning Conductors and Stand-ins
Author: Anonymous
Date: 1980, January
Language: en
Topics: drafts, Elephant Editions
Source: Retrieved on January 18, 2020 from https://archive.elephanteditions.net/library/lightning-conductors-and-stand-ins
Notes: This pamphlet is a reply to the document of Azione Rivoluzionaria ‘Appunti...  The two articles ‘Parafulmine’... and ‘L.A.xC.=Nihil’ are the immediate reply of two comrades to the AR document...  original title: Parafulmini e controfigure

Anonymous

Lightning Conductors and Stand-ins

Preface to the first edition

This pamphlet is a response to Azione Rivoluzionaria’s document ‘Notes

for an internal and external discussion’ that appeared in no. 13-14 of

‘Countrainformazione’. The articles “Parafulmini e controfigure” and

“L.A.xC.=Nihil” are the immediate response of two comrades to AR’s

document. Having been refused by two reviews of the movement, it became

necessary to spread their publication autonomously. We are reporting the

passages of the review ‘Insurrezione’ that deal directly with the

question of ‘armed struggle’, and two articles that appeared in

‘Anarchismo’ n. 21 and n. 23-24, interventions that the text of AR

qualify as ‘critique-critique’. We also report a few passages of

Vaneigem, who, beyond the confusion and ambiguity, denote a position

that is quite far from armed strugglism, in spite of the clumsy attempt

of AR to co-opt him as ideological inspirer of the more intellectualised

terrorism.

Finally, we include a few texts from Apocalisse e rivoluzione (1973) as

a contribution to the comprehension and critique of the project of the

civil war in vitro, effectively realised a few years later.

Preface to the second edition

Here is the second edition of this auspicious little book which,

obscurely and without kicking up a fuss, marks the first clarifications

of the insurrectional orientation within the Italian anarchist movement.

By that I mean, let’s be clear, revolutionary anarchist

insurrectionalism, not expectations of the gigantic mass movement that

is to destroy all the existent or as much as is necessary in one great

day to set things right and give life to the anarchist society. There is

no trace of such a way of conceiving insurrectionalism in this little

book other than as the postponement to the generalisation of the clash,

which could very well abort in nothing - or in tremendous repression -

there being no guarantee at all. So, these few precious pages mark the

first steps taken to highlight certain critiques, which had become

absolutely urgent at the time (1977), concerning the so-called armed

organisations (combatant or otherwise).

I hope that this reprint will also be of use to all those with a

heartfelt desire to sanctify guerrilla activity, which, if on the one

hand began with good auspices, ended up taking an anything but

acceptable turn. I am referring to the great theoretical-practical

experience of Azione Rivoluzionaria. And the critique raised here

against positions that soon began to emerge within this very

organisation after a few months’ activity and analytical reflection, was

made at the time, contextually, while the iron was hot, showing no mercy

for the dead or imprisoned comrades, nor illusions concerning the fact

that we ‘are shooting too’, so will also ‘win’.

The writer of this introduction (co-author, along with some other

comrades, of the little book in question), happened to come up with the

slogan “only shooting one wins”, and reconfirms that this far-off

affirmation cost him a two and a half year’s prison sentence in 1972. In

fact it is precisely by shooting that one wins. But what does winning

mean? Certainly not conquering something. To win also means getting rid

of a number of obstacles from the field (men and things), in order to

start a new game, the construction of a new world free of all power and

it’s abuses, a world that cannot wholly emerge from ‘victory’, but which

will probably cost more struggles, more blood, more misunderstandings,

etc.

You can only win by shooting if you consider this victory a first, quite

modest, step towards the beginning of something really great but which

is elsewhere, beyond political calculation or measuring strength, beyond

the dazzling action that might fascinate us today, but does not

completely convince us. The struggle that develops towards its

insurrectional, therefore revolutionary, generalisation, is something

that takes a long time and cannot close itself up in the concept of

‘victory’.

The same goes for so-called ‘proletarian justice’. I have come back to

this definition more than once when talking of Azione Rivoluzionaria,

and I have received retorts. But we should bear in mind that this is a

dated concept which, in its time, pointed to the urgency of a practice

that certainly wasn’t central: putting those responsible for specific

abuse in their place, i.e. flat on their backs, without for that wanting

to establish a ‘higher’ conception of justice (proper tribunals, just

laws, opportune sentences – all rubbish that has never interested us),

but just an indispensible job of cleaning up, even on a large scale, at

the moment when the generalisation of the insurrectional struggle is

about to significantly get underway. At a moment of intermediate

conflict this kind of response to particular repressive conditions can

be seen as a practice of great significance, if nothing other than as

preparation for future, far more difficult and articulated tasks. After

all, precisely in this ‘neglected’ little book you can find a critique

of the concept of ‘proletarian justice’, limited, and rightly so in my

opinion, to the possible confusion with a more specific concept of

justice, that of the courts, I mean that which strikes everyone every

day. Other problems appear. ‘Going into clandestinity’ as I said before,

is one. Closing oneself up like a clam, cutting off contact with the

human condition that is so difficult to keep repairing in the face of

the constant attempts of power to isolate us? Of course, specialisation

is always the shortest road for getting immediate results. But are these

results really what is required? Do we really need a crosscheck to show

ourselves how clever we are? To change identity, our way of life, the

places we frequent, build a fictitious universe around ourselves of

survival and military decisions is all possible, but does that not

deprive us of something essential: of what we really are, of what we

really could be? It seems to me that today this problem, and these

questions, are finding different answers to those being put forward at

the end of the seventies. There is however a fairly evident new turn.

Not being able to integrate one’s life with what one considers one’s

revolutionary project is a really weird condition. One lives out a

fantisized version of what should be an adventure in the true sense of

the word. That is the situation which, sooner or later, leads to regret

and resentment. The fullness of life that one imagined one held the key

to starts to fade fast like a cut flower. In times like ours, when all

around us there are comrades that have been left with a bitter taste in

their mouth, this is something to think about. What have they done (some

of them) with their lives? And then, there is the icon. This must be

defended at any cost. The little saint, the brand name, the swearing of

allegiance. Anyone who refuses to do so has no credibility. How dare

they make an about-turn? And when we point out that you can’t go back on

something that you never agreed with in the first place, the glittering

icon lights up maliciously. One doesn’t discuss, one simply swears on a

declaration of faith. Now, there is not a shadow of doubt that a

specific anarchist organisation capable of facing the conditions of the

clash is indispensable. It is equally without doubt that each one of us

contributes - some more, some less - to the construction of this

organisation according to their own story and the era in which they

carry out their revolutionary activity. I am referring to anarchist and

revolutionary comrades here, not to daubers of ink and the chatterers.

But it is equally beyond doubt that when forms of the specific

organisation start to degenerate, such as happened with Azione

Rivoluzionaria at a certain point critique becomes indispensible, and no

sentimental appeal can convince me of the contrary.

This little book includes texts that were part of something in course

while debate was still possible, far before the sad conclusion of Azione

Rivoluzionaria. Had they been written in the sphere of the decisions

that were to end up in the union of the combatant organisations, they

would not have made any sense. And clearly the premises were such as to

allow reasonable foundation to the objections being raised. The

management of publicity concerning attacks, just to give an example.

Here too - as in the drawing up of the ‘communiques’ - the initial model

of the Angry Brigade (which were discussed and for a short time used by

them), soon became no more than a faint memory. The concise brevity of

that incisive model - unique concerning the ‘management’ of actions and

‘relations’ with the press - was soon lost in the claim to ‘explain’, a

typical schoolteacher-like attitude that is still hard to die, if not in

the minds, certainly in the desire of many comrades.

Then, the important, if not exactly brilliant, huge actions (the Moro

kidnapping for example), that filled up pages and pages of the

newspapers. If a specific organisation makes such a choice instead of

limiting itself to small actions of attack and sabotage, this is not so

much an oversight or a defect in organisational operativity as a choice

of field and, seen from another angle, an inevitable involution towards

organisational ‘closure’. If small actions can easily be generalised (as

everybody could see in the last half of the eighties and more than half

of the nineties), the same cannot be said for the more substantial ones

(even without having recourse to the model of the Moro kidnapping),

which in their geometrically military distance from the people can do no

more than raise a cheer from the stadium.

The critique concerning any organisational model of a specific anarchist

armed structure mapped out in this book (and in other writings of mine

at the time which were also stigmatised in the “Comuniques” of Azione

Rivoluzionaria) still stands today. In any case, being questions of

great importance and inexhaustible actuality, I think that they should

be meditated upon in depth by any serious comrade.

Alfredo M. Bonanno

Trieste 23 December 2000

Parafulmini e Controfigure Lightning Conductors and Stand-ins

...for anyone - a latecomer - who has entered consumerism in the role of

avant-guarde intellectual and wants to stop, there is nothing left to do

but put oneself in a desperate and bilious race with the all-powerful

centres of image production: get taken on as an actor or walk-on. Unpaid

actor or walk-on and really dispensed with or in any case liquidated; in

this consists the yearned for and beatifying “qualitative”

differentiation. (G. Cesarano - G. Collu, Apocalisse e rivoluzione,

Dedalo, Bari 1973, p. 93).

1. The movement of ’77 and the ‘guerriglia’

The chasing of Lama from Rome University in February 1977 marks the

historic rupture of the Italian proletariat with the racket

organisations that claimed to control and represent it. In this episode

a new movement appeared out of the blue that was incomprehensible for

constituted power.

In the preceding years capital and its experimenters had constructed in

vitro two basic models in which the opposition and the DC-PCI (Christian

Democrat - Communist Party) alliance and its programs of hunger and

sacrifice were destined to identify themselves. The first, mapped out at

the Lotta Continua congress in Rimini and the manifestation of the

counterculture Circoli del proletariato giovanile, (Proletarian youth

circles) tended towards channelling the mass of young people and

unemployed towards claims of an essentially cultural character. The

lesser of all evils for the system was that the young fight for their

right to a new identity and an alternative life-style to be recognised

in which, merged together the ideology of the trip, the smugness of

drugs, the crying and lamentations about emargination and the ‘crisis of

values’, the claim for the right to the most pointless and contradictory

customs. Some self-reduction could be included in the framework of such

an ideology. The only thing that shocked the reporters of “L’Unità” and

“Corriere della sera” were the expropriations where the mob stocked up

with champagne and caviar, thereby showing a refusal of “content” where

the young were to “come together”: ideologies and neo-christian values

of poverty, scarcity and the crisis. In the sphere of these “new” ideals

the young masses also complained and debated endlessly, not in order to

rebel against them and destroy them, but to affirm the dignity of their

existential condition and the freedom to decorate themselves with as

many feathers and masks as they liked.

The other kind of opposition that power was preparing to neutralize to

its advantage was the abstract and specialistic military one. For a long

time sociologists had been saying that, with the worsening of the social

and economic crisis, the increase in unemployment and the progressive

criminalisation of the preventive opponents of the DC-PCI block, an

increase in terrorism would also have to be taken into account. Italian

capital could willingly accept this challenge, so long as it remained

within the military field alone. In fact, this kind of clash (which

after a fashion can always be reduced to a technical problem where

capital’s forces were superior to those of the enemy from the start), if

it carried indubious hardship for the ranks of the civil servants and

cops, on the other hand presented such advantages as to make it become

the lesser of two evils, incomparably preferable to the danger of an

illegal violent mass movement of opposition. First of all, the

essentially spectacular character of most of the terrorist actions (in

particular the murders: the audience love blood) supplied the system

with the possibility of turning even the lowest figures of its

repressive apparatus into great propagandistic successes; moreover, the

development of a limited civil war would induce all the enemies of power

to escape from the real daily war into clandestinity and gave the State

the opportunity to express its own brand of terrorism to the best of its

ability, in a framework of a permanent state of siege and generalised

enlistment. Above all, it would freeze the most part - the masses, the

people, the proletariat, that the clandestine militant refers to - into

the role of indignant spectators, or supporters (electrified by the

sensational development and fascinated to live their own ‘adventures’ in

dream form, in reality they were reproducing their own condition of

powerlessness), in either case, passive participants. Finally, the

economy of entrenched camps is in itself a rationing economy, where each

one is asked for full identification with the crisis diversion; while

there is no public order more perfect than that of the sniper and the

curfew. As the enemy could be just around the corner, one barricades

oneself at home waiting for the right moment in which to unleash no

longer revolutionary passion, but compressed rancour and the chain of

retaliation. In Europe the precedent of Northern Ireland had already

demonstrated how the militarisation of the struggle - wanted as much by

the IRA as by the occupying army - supplies an economic and operational

outlet for capital, cleans the streets of the combatant yobs of young

unemployed and blockades and divides workers affected by avid demands.

The movement of ’77 radically disrupted all the forecasts of the experts

of Italian capital. The attack on trades union leader Lama is the

expression of uncontrollable, spontaneous, generalised violence, which

abruptly shattered all cultural barriers and preconceived

generalisations: ‘indians’ and militants of the Autonomia, young

‘hippies’ and organised workers met in action, beyond their respective

sociological identities - which for revolutionaries were certainly not

be exalted but abolished, - just like proletariat, i.e. as an historic

movement that destroys and goes beyond capital and the demented society

produced by it. The nightmare of every power structure takes form and

becomes real: proletarians meet without intermediaries, each one

autonomously taking charge of solving their own problems and refusing

all those - trade unionists, stalinist bureaucrats, militant

groupuscules or counter-cultural ideologues - that claimed to speak in

their name, and start organising themselves collectively. Here, in spite

of the self-proclaimed vanguards and political specialists – the wildcat

workers’ movement find their natural allies and comrades, in the young

unemployed, in the mob of the suburbs and universities. The corrupt

edifice of the ‘historic compromise’ [Christian Democrats and Communist

Party] vacillates under the blows of a mass movement that is violent and

armed. This movement - which one month after the attack on Lama’s rally

rose up on March 12 in Rome and Bologna - precisely in its practice of

violence, demonstrated its total extraneousness not only to the

tear-jerking problematic of the specialists of the ‘personal’ and the

foreseeable ‘irony’ of so many aspiring intellectuals of the ‘creative

wing’, but also to the logic of the clandestine armed organisations.

From the pages of the last issue of “Controinformazione”, Azione

Rivoluzionaria accuses the review “Insurrezione” of having revealed the

hard-core separateness between the insurgents of March and the

specialists of armed struggle: “...the movement of ’77 did not appear

from nowhere, it has a history behind it that has also been influenced,

it’s hard to deny, by the actions of guerrilla warfare. If people in

Rome had limited themselves to irony, Lama would have held his

conference at the University and what has become an historic event, Lama

being chased out of the University, would simply have been a disturbed

conference, even if with intelligence, but all the same a rally,

therefore a victory for Lama and his acolytes. It is hard to separate

the movement of ’77 from all that was said and done over these years,

especially by the armed groups and the autonomous guerrilla». (Azione

Rivoluzionaria, Notes for an internal and external discussion in

“Controinformazione”, n. 13-14, March 1979 p. 90).

Far from limiting themselves to irony, thousands and thousands of

combatants did not hesitate to take arms for themselves when they needed

them, looting the gunshops on March 12, while the clandestine militants

were worrying about getting out their criticism of these actions as

‘spontaneist’ and ‘adventurist’, i.e. that escaped their control and

were contrary in pratice to any delegation of solving their own

problems, including military ones.

Power did not use interpretative patterns very different from those of

the guerrilla fighters of AR: for the whole of ’77, attempting to

repropose the two preconstituted identities - the counter-cultural and

the militarist - that the movement had refused, it tried opposing a

‘creative’ spirit and a ‘combatant’ soul of the movement. In this way

politicians, journalists and sociologists as usual understood fuck all

of reality, but in recompense tried, on the one hand to manoeuvre the

cultural rebels - youth movement, metropolitan indians, feminists etc. -

against the development of a determination and coherence of the

revolutionary movement, on the other to give credit to the idiocy of the

plot plotted by occult paramilitary organizations. The movement had

known how to scream in the face of all its paid observers what they

really were: IDIOTS!

For their part, neither the cultural vanguards nor the armed vanguards

were capable of distinguishing themselves from the servants of power in

their understanding of reality. Even less can it be said today that the

critiques made by Azione Rivoluzionaria were intelligent: « ... it is

possible to put forward the opposite hypothesis: the movement would

already have been routed, in its centres, its papers, its radio

stations, if the guerrilla had not acted as a lightening conductor,

pulling the whole repressive apparatus upon itself ». (Text quoted, p.

90). If the recent wave of arrests of Autonomia Operaia militants

accused of the Moro kidnapping clear the field of this nonsense, it is

worth considering for a moment the most ambitious of all the actions of

the urban guerrilla, precisely the Moro kidnapping. According to Azione

Rivoluzionaria, for this undertaking whose «essence lies in the capacity

of the revolutionary movement as a whole [and the Brigate Rosse

recognise themselves as part of this movement] to deal a blow to the

centre». (Text cited, pag. 88). «The clandestine movement paid the price

for the psychological war that was unleashed, the suspicion, the

Brigatista-hunt, the awakened police-like vocations». (Text cited, p.

89). Apart from the undeniable fact that with the Moro kidnapping power

had justified hundreds and hundreds of arrests, charges and arbitrary

imprisonment within the movement, and limiting ourselves to remembering

that the only concrete request of major repressive rigour made by the

PCI to the Christian Democrat government was on the occasion of the

closing of the meeting places and arrest of a series of militants -

indicated by their full names – of Autonomia Operaia of Rome, the BR had

turned their blow “to the centre” of the revolutionary tension that

persisted, even though fully in the phase of reflux, in Rome for more

than a year, arrogantly imposing the spectacle or symbol of the

revolutionary struggle on to everybody’s attention. In the incredible

atmosphere of these days inevitably perceived as irrelevant, i.e. not

wanted, not lived and not understood by revolutionaries, it became

possible to nail the masses down again to the passivity similar to

watching a film. After a year of determined struggles carried out by

subjects acting autonomously in daily reality common to everybody, they

turned in on themselves at the mercy of external forces that move not

only the will but also everybody’s consciousness from above. Held

between these far-off forces one was pushed to choose under the pressure

of real blackmail: one had to take sides, delegate once again. If the

State could impose its own infamous blackmail on everybody (‘either with

me or with terrorism’), the BR was asking everybody to dream: or rather

to cheer them, or develop the more ‘radical’ intention to one day join

the game of heroes. This has been the message of the BR: enlist, or stay

at home, put on the TV and clap your hands: that had always been the

message of the clandestine organisations: the Moro action simply brought

it into everybody’s home and in this way forced all those who wanted to

remain faithful to their own revolutionary subjectivity to reject it

radically.

2. The hierarchy of the ‘Popular Front’ of clandestine organisations:

actors and stand-ins. With clumsy zeal Azione Rivoluzionaria makes the

blackmail that had always been concealed by the bureaucratic-political

language of the BR proclamations explicit: «The critique critique that

tends to isolate guerrilla warfare from the movement is perfectly

functional to the plan of repression that uses violence against the

guerrilla and uses critique (from Asor Rosa to passionless cynics) to

isolate it. The ‘critique critique’, that knows everything, does not

know that by isolating the guerrilla it is also preparing the conditions

for its own precipitation into clandestinity, unless capital, in its

great ingeniousness, just as it does not know today how to recognise its

friends and tortures, kills, persecutes terrorists, tomorrow will not

know how to recognise as its sole enemy the critique critique and

guarantee it chairs and podiums». (Testo citato, p. 90) Without staying

to confute the Christian imbecility of those who want to see the truth

of a faith demonstrated by the martyrdom of its followers, what

immediately comes to mind, reading this infamous passage, is the

blackmail directed for 50 years by stalinism against all the

international opposition (the same that Lenin had directed against

Kronstadt and the Workers Opposition): ‘Russia, home of socialism, is

threatened by the imperialists and to defend it thousands and thousands

of proletarians all over the world have sacrificed themselves: so if you

criticise Russia, you are obstructing internal or foreign politics etc.,

you are useful to imperialism, or rather you are nothing but a cover, a

mask, agents of disguised international fascism’. Azione Rivoluzionaria

launches all this against whoever criticises clandestine struggle in a

document in which they make no critique of the stalinists of the BR,

allies in the process of construction of the guerrilla.

The complicity of the anarchists in the counter-revolution in Spain in

1936-37 demonstrates with a thousand examples such as ‘who sleeps with

dogs wakes up with fleas’, so whoever goes with the stalinists learns to

slander the revolutionaries. As in Spain, there exists a Popular Front

in Italy today, minoritarian and clandestine, of course, but which

aspires, like that of the past, to become majoritarian and in power, to

gather the impetus of the revolutionary proletariat into its ranks. An

even minimal knowledge of revolutions and counterrevolutions of the past

clarifies that within every popular front there exist very rigid

hierarchies that correspond to different specific gravity of the

organisations that make them up. For example in the Spain of 1936-37 the

tiny Communist Party had enormous authority inside the Popular Front,

superior to that of the anarchists, even though the latter were the

major force of the Spanish proletariat. The present front of clandestine

organisations has an essentially spectacular result: that is why the

Fronte Popolare is not a question of sharing out the ministries of a

counter-revolutionary government, but also in this case the Front has

its internal hierarchy: while the role of protagonist and main actors

are indiscutibly assigned to the stalinists, nothing remains for the

strange libertarians of Azione Rivoluzionaria but the role of stand-in.

To the Brigatisti the headlines of the dailies and the cheers of the

passive admirers; to the anarchists ugly downfalls and acts at breakneck

speed.

3. Critique of daily life

«Only (and we excuse the critique critique here) real autonomy in the

armed project against all aspects of social life, the constitution of a

network of resistance and attack on the vital centres of exploitation

and death, living one’s life fully, aware of already being partly

outside the grip of capital, can allow this road to liberation to begin.

But even here, at the level of the operating subject, just as at the

social level, it is necessary to cut one’s bridges with daily normality,

create a situation of no return, go into clandestinity». (Testo citato,

p. 90). Thus guerrillas of Azione Rivoluzionaria ammoniate the critique

of daily life. We have already said how, in realty, the “strategic

choice of clandestinity” never gave the militants of Azione

Rivoluzionaria anything more than “liberation” in the catastrophic role

of stand-in. To the opposite, radical critique, which the Azione

Rivoluzionaria document (which among other things copies all the

critical thematics “Insurrezione”, except for insulting its own source,

to which it attributes positions that are totally invented) tries to

recuperate some positions, for example, Vaneigem, who has never

expressed any sympathy for political terrorism, and has on the contrary

always condemned positions of armed immediatism like that of the

document of Azione Rivoluzionaria. It is clear therefore that when a

practice that explicitly places its discriminant in the “strategic

choice of clandestinity” takes determined positions, for example on the

critique of daily life, they do so exclusively with the aim of

recuperation.

The only radical position to take towards the existent is, today, that

of those who from their specific position in society (the situation in

which most spontaneously and sincerely they develop their social

relations, communication, love, friendship) are facing real war – daily

and without quarter – against capital and its interiorisation. That

means above all struggle against the organisation of one’s own life

according to the world of appearances, images – therefore struggle

against the interiorisation of the codes of behaviour that capital is

constantly producing, renewing and transmitting. To want to be

revolutionaries, i.e. to want live the possible adventure of life

according to one’s own material passions and one’s own living senses,

implies the radical refusal of identification with any social

determination of capital, with any identity, preconstituted and

fictitious mask, that hides and mystifies the dynamic of life. It is in

perceiving oneself as body in movement, recognising one’s passions for

what they are, that is, irreducible to the society of symbols and its

organisation, and arming oneself against it, that it is possible for

each one to find the sense of a unique and specific life. And it is at

this point that necessity presents itself and along with it opens up the

possibility to communicate the armed project against capital and live in

the community that surrounds us. Any coherent revolutionary praxis

recognises the falsity of all the social identities proposed by capital

and fights all of them, knowing them to be, in the most violent and

sectarian forms, absolutely clandestine for the spectacle, knows that it

is elsewhere. Certainly who lives this elsewhere in immediate or

geographical terms has not the faintest idea of where it is to be found:

there is no other field of battle than the world dominated in total by

capital, inside and outside individuals, and from this world, this

battle, there is no escape. Whereas for who knowingly fights the real

war both inside and outside himself, clandestinity might become an

unavoidable necessity in some cases, but always one more obstacle to

overcome in the battle for one’s own transparency and coherence. Those

who fictitiously push away their ‘normal’ social identity to choose the

heroic and spectacularly hyperevaluated one of the “guerrilla warrior”,

clandestine for the real movement as much as for the police, come to

find themselves today, due to one of the tricks that the spectacular

optic plays, not only at the centre of the shoot-outs, but also at the

centre of the fire of the cameras, at the centre of the spectacle. What

was to have been a struggle against value becomes the ultimate

valorization possible of the personality of the militant, the ultimate

sacrificial rite capable of producing value. As the strange libertarians

of Azione Rivoluzionaria declare, it is true that the spreading of the

clandestine military practice democratises today this possibility of

self-valorization: « every village, every city, now has its stage and

its actors; violence is a spectacle available to anyone of good will ».

(Text cited, p. 90). In the same way, but from an opposite point of

view, it is true that revolutionary violence, if it wants to be,

destroys every stage and every spectacle and knows to see in all actors

the natural enemies of truth and overcoming.

[May ’79]

Cues of non-news

communitarian expression of a rupture with the values with which power

substantiates itself into specialistic social reason of political

apparatuses, and reduced to a military expression of social unrest. It

has thus been able to become the tool with which the indigenous

bourgeoisie enter the “heart of power” moving out the managerial classes

too prone to foreign (or multinational) Capital.

mythologies, both democraticist: antifascist resistentialism, and

third-worldism with its “national liberations”; they are vehicles for

the transformation of forms of power, not their suppression.

The post-sixty-eight reflux and the failure of the micro-bureaucratic

groupuscules drowned in the swamp of re-editions of old tools of the

politics of the remote past that manifested themselves historically, was

not enough to sweep away the contents with which it fed itself. These

live again in armed struggle-ism.

politics by taking it to the extreme: vanguardism, specialisation,

unidimensionality of action, incompleteness, separation.

In that it is an extremicised form, it is not difficult to find in armed

struggle the facet of polihedron politics: armed... reformism,

economicism, workerism, feminism, ecologism!

prosthesis into the rachitic hand of representation? To arm spirits,

expel introjected values and ideologies, get rid of the archaisms of the

historical past (of defeat), overcome remotion, affirm desire, refuse

the alienation that turns us into things, vibrate with passion, be

conductors of life - in a word invest with our practical critique every

situation where dominion is reproduced and do this without falling into

specialised roles, is nothing other than reproposing politics - in the

virile and martial form ?

real critique perceptible by anyone with all five senses.

Politics are born (and abort) in the economy and in the ritualism of its

merchandise. Man, to find himself, struggles against the logic of the

merchandise that subjects him. Politics remains prisoner of the

imperative of goods: it can only interfere with the rhythms of their

production, one doesn’t question the reasons for their very existence.

(their own) partiality into globality; each one charges with escatologic

values its chosen role, and looks disdainfully at all the rest.

Until now there has been who has made of the economy and the productive

sphere the main contradiction, the weight-bearing axis, centrality, etc.

There is who – in the eternal search for the “new” revolutionary subject

and the revolutionary means par excellence – has carried out the same

operation with youth, women, marginals, the mad, etc.

The armed strugglists consider that their means is the revolutionary one

in absolute, and attribute to their practice primacy, qualitative

superiority, the subversive potential that is greater than all the

others.

Since when, in the struggle against power that founds its dominion on

specialisation and separation, a practice – partial, reiterated, serial

– is superior to all the others? Why?

of the means of communication, it is spectacle, it is the capacity to

represent reality in the way that is most convenient to it, it is

control of science and knowledge... it is psychiatry, the university

professor, medicine, the priest, the worker, etc.

There exist therefore the contradictions between what one is forced to

do (be) and making emerge the human essence denied by Capital/State, but

is capable of denying it. The revolutionary movement will affirm itself

if it is capable of facing – and denying – all the contradictions, in

width and depth, i.e. every moment of the reproduction of dominion.

of illegality = impossibility of recuperation by power”, is false.

Because it bases itself on counter-position - negation of only one of

the reigning categories or values.

Power cannot exist – its code – to connote and give body totally to

negation, to that which should destroy it; without remaining in its own

field. You don’t deny the carabiniere with the counter-carabiniere,

politics with politics, alienation with alienated means.

general one between body and mind, limbs and propulsive cerebral

centres. It is the reproposition of the counterposition thought/action,

intellectual/militant, theoretician/combatant, courage/cowardice, etc.

Cocooned within one’s own reified practice – considered superior to

others of course – one ends up keeping oneself removed from radicality,

that is from one’s own organic recomposition to find subjectivity.

In France, where primacy is given to theory: a plethora of pamphlets,

brochures; alienation in writing.

In Italy, country of the predominance of practice, there is a sequence

of gesture-actions (political symbols of negation) repeated obsessively,

generalised in time and space with the tuning fork to the rhythms of the

assembly line, the quantitative has been taken as the guiding value:

hence the Molotov alienation.

Two substantially equivalent forms of incompleteness: ideas that never

become practice, and practice that never knows how to go beyond itself

for its disdain of theory.

it is one of the symptoms that announce the proximity of insurrection)

or shattering a wall. Shattering is shattering. But in the scenario of

the political spectacle shattering becomes a coded language,

communication by symbols. It can mean: we don’t want it, we are angry,

we want to scare you; but it says it with a symbol that strikes, a

symbol of alienation. Moreover, it must also be interpreted!

the functions, the togas, if then there is a man inside them that’s too

bad...”.

The debate on the connection and reciprocal determinations between

function and functionary is ancient, and keeps resurging from its own

ashes. There can be no doubt that a social rebellion such as the Russian

one that managed to eliminate all the civil-servants (the human workings

of the machinery of power), did not manage to go beyond the capitalist

function, form. And that, for many reasons, not least that which makes

leninists the apologists of industrialisation, and vehicles of the

penetration of capital into Asia and Africa, through the liberation

fronts.

There where a social movement, although partial, has failed, can a

stalinist micro-bureaucracy with its cult of maximum spectacular action

succeed? With its once tragic ideology, today farcical, of stalinism?

With its constant negation of the sociality of the movement to pervert

it and secure oneself “political representativity”? For these people the

party is everything, the movement is nothing.

To shoot a judge is not yet a critique of law, so much so that they have

“people’s” trials, applying “revolutionary” law, exercising

“proletarian” justice.

end is contained in the means, the means are already the end, one is a

consequence of the other. A is A, and not A, in virtue of faith, can

become B.

event (kneecapping) is more important or its management through the mass

media to reinforce their “political image” with the proletarians. Surely

access to the means of communication of power is an alienated way to

communicate with the proletarians.

In the face of the spectacular event in which the active subjects are

few, nothing remains to others but passive fruition, cheers in favour of

or against, identification or not with the operative staff. Whether it

be a question of trade union, cultural, or armed strugglist operators is

of little importance.

The revolution is the abandoning of the spectacle that renders passive,

that renders objects, eyes that see images, it is the multiplication of

critical subjects capable of recognising in oneself (and always less in

the vanguards of the spectacle) the capacity to act, and in a creative

way.

they appear so; it is true that they are never disposed to deceive

themselves in useless daring or on the separate intelligence of

efficacy. They might identify with this by transference, as spectators,

and it is their way of defending themselves when they don’t really

believe in themselves“.

impulse what premature ejaculation is to the orgasm.

Armed strugglism always ends up being the miniaturisation of civil war,

its containment, its piloted control. Above all if it reduces itself to

the monovalent expression of the combatant party. This will produce

effects that for power are comparable to the slaughter of public

holidays on the motorways.

parametre and metre of measure.

The more spectacular the violence the more it banalizes the infinite

violence that each one puts up with in daily life. This ends up

pulverising itself, disappearing, seeming minutiae of nevrotics,

reproachable frustrations.

The more one puts up with passively, the more one needs the spectacle of

violence to consume in the shadows of survival.

The more one abandons the field of the contradictions in daily life, the

more politics advances and sociality recedes.

being. It matters little if these are useful, useless, deadly or

enjoyable. It is important that they are produced (and consumed), that

they incorporate vital energy, that their possession becomes the

distinctive trait of man, the scale of values with which to judge him.

Up until now the revolutionary movement has stayed within the logic of

the production of commodities: it has asked for more money and less

work, i.e. let’s produce less, give us more money to consume more.

A radical movement must today pose the problem: is the production of

this merchandise useful? Can man give himself what he needs by using his

own creative intelligence? That is, taking from the worker the character

of goods producing goods, from work the character of alienation and from

the product that of commodity.

A movement that is capable of imposing its own interests, and that asks

itself fino in fondo its reasons for what it is constrained to do, can

at last hope to realise liberation from work, and from capital’s

destruction of nature. In the face of that all ecologist foolish

ambitions appear in all their misery.

still backing goods, it valorises them.

Who – fetichist of industrialisation – being excluded from the

productive process finds himself theorising reappropriation is a

paralytic supporting himself on a crutch hired from power: he is not

questioning the means of capitalist production, is not criticising the

worker-commodity because he is a workerist, and he exhorts the

consumerism of plastic, poisons, noises, devitalising things. They

remain debtors of capital.

He who reappropriates violently is the close cousin of the other.

[“Anarchismo” n. 21, May-June 1978, pp. 156-158]

Italy 1977: an assault on the heavens

Italian review “Insurrezione” – novembre 1977,

translated from ‘Parafulmine e controfigure’, ed. Anarchismo

If we undoubtedly claim the wealth of violent and armed expressions of

the movement (generalised theft and expropriation as critique of waged

work, radicalisation of clashes in the streets, sabotage, etc.), we are

convinced, on the other hand, that the field of violence cannot in

itself constitute a qualifying moment, a moment, in other words, that

characterises the new revolutionaries as such. «The impatience to use

weapons at all costs today is delaying the moment in which the exploited

as a whole will have recourse to arms, because it anticipates

repression. Those congratulating themselves on the stupid use of arms

are not the revolutionary movement, but the rearguard of its theoretical

and strategic conscience». (Manifesto handed out in Bologna 23 September

1977, signed: Ass. For the Epidemic of Contagious Rage).

In our opinion, it is precisely social decomposition to push towards

totalising choices – armed struggle as a specialist and separate

dimension – which, by reducing the complexity of the clash to a feud

between gangs, remains in a field that capital can always manage for its

own benefit. If, concerning the BR [Brigate Rossi] for example, we

cannot prevent ourselves from feeling a feeling of sympathy for the

measure in which they sometimes manage to ridicule and beat the State in

its own field, we don’t forget that their neo-stalinist program is full

of militaristic ideology and has nothing to do with the project of the

proletarian revolution.

And on the basis of the failure of the movement of ‘68 it is possible to

understand the present wave of terrorism. When, at the beginning of the

70s, the perspective of a total revolution seemed to be moving away, a

few groups considered it possible to destroy the State in a military

clash. The incapacity to understand how no armed voluntarism or other

can take the place of the pace of the real movement, led to a curious

ideology that puts together elements of a naive rebellious tendency and

ultra-bolshevist traits, in a horrible pot-pourri. In the beginning, the

armed groups at least obtained the aim of showing up the vulnerability

of the State, all the same the rapid rationalisation of the police

apparatus immediately rendered the repression more effective and, soon,

their practice transformed itself into a personal war, autonomised by a

real struggle. Moreover, the typical slogan “strike the heart of the

State”, hides the real objective, capital, which the State is only the

phenominal manifestation of. Actually, the armed groups have become an

obstacle to the development of the movement that they (BR) criticise as

spontaneist and adventurist (!). These criticisms recall the

lamentations of the official left, which these people only constitute

the radical wing of. Independently of intentions and the revolutionary

ardour of single individuals, we grasp in this kind of armed struggle

the seeds of recuperation. Not only and not so much in the sense of the

police-like cannibalisation, but in the reduction, the repetition,

absolutely functional to power, of the revolution to a simple military

question. To that we are opposing real war, war that crosses the whole

social totality and does not let itself simply be reduced to the armed

clash. It is true that the groups of the autonomia do not identify with

the BR, but it is just as true that their acritical pushing towards the

militarisation of the movement presents the same problems.

The State is clearly trying to push a large number of people into

clandestinity. That reaches the objective of reducing the movement to

its military dimensions, where power can still win, at least in this

phase. Groups such as the Brigate Rosse believe they have found

confirmation of their strategy. And it is significant that the recent

period characterised by growing confusion and a kind of return to

traditional militarism has been marked by the most stupid terrorism

(Casalegno and Acca Laurentia).

It is obvious that the clandestine groups are now playing on the

ambiguity between crises and revolution; between neo-stalinist

management and radical transformation in the communist.

Further cues of non-news

of our time. We are obsessed by heroes that live for us and whom we

punish. If all the radios and televisions were deprived of their sources

of power, all books and paintings burnt tomorrow, every spectacle and

cinema closed, all the arts of living per interposta persona o per

procura...” (Jim Morrison). The most successful and involving spectacle

that power of our time bowls at us daily are the magic pirotechnics of

armed struggle. Few actors, many supporting actors, extras and a huge

audience, all with the skilful direction amplifying structures of mass

communication.

aground in the quicksands of groupescule reformism because power had

firing positions (bocche di fuoco) and the others only anachronistic

slings (“the Vietcong wins because he shoots”) and then one threw

oneself a corpo morto to a give himself a hundred bocche di fuoco, today

hardly manages to admit that the ratio of strength has changed in favour

of power: if first it was1.000 weapons to one, today it is 600.000 to

300! The discrepancy magnifies in geometric proportions and doesn’t give

a damn for arithmetical voluntarism! It is a game that has strange

analogies with the electoral bullfight for the conquest of the 51 per

cent of the bullets... The attack on one single field, moreover carried

out by professional specialists, has induced a concentration and

reinforcing of power to a military level (the mercenaries of the private

police are now more numerous than the cops of the regular police). The

sectorial and partial critique – and practice– solicited by the

rationalisation and modernisation of the institutional military

establishment; is the “anaemic negation” that power incorporates to be

able to continue to survive. the critique – and pratice – is either

unitary (i.e. tends to invest itself with the totality of the

institutions and ideologies that support it) or it is nothing.

community that insurges against all the conditions of domination – but

its pantomime rigged up by the scriptwriters of the mass-media, the

psycho-dramatisation dilated artfully by the specialists in “various

humanities” – is very easy when you think of the Russian reality, where

between 1905 and 1906 armed anarchists suppressed about 4.000 between

civil servants and tzarist officials! The reflection, if ever, should

dwell on the consideration that in spite of this, in spite of this

radicality of intent, the result was... that verminous and

heinous “soviet” State that had banned even the freedom to think. The

contemporaneous emulators, with their tiny pharmacist’s scales and their

attitudes of judicial auditors, are no more than the feeble echo of a

past that power never tires of circumscribing, sterilizing and utilizing

to “update” the spectacle of the upturned representation of reality, and

to institute a diaphragm-bunker that separates once again the

proletariat from themselves and from the implosion of their passions

that are – these yes – destructive and capable of sweeping away the

totality of sociality.

real guerrilla; Rudolf de Jong says in fact: “[the guerrilla is] ... war

on a small scale, everywhere, supported by the whole population, or by

large sectors of it, in which those who participate continue their daily

life and work as far as possible. [ ... ] My concept of real guerrilla

implies that the ‘professional’ guerrilla, who has abandoned his normal

life does not belong. The Chinese Red Army in its ‘long march’ of the

Thirties, the columns of Fidel Castro in the Sierra Maestra, the

Bolivian group of Che Guevara, did not belong to the real guerrilla.

They represent the nucleus of a new army, the foco – a word in vogue in

the ’60s – of a new normal structure directed by power”. The qualitative

difference between the guerrilla reduced to a profession and confined

only to the lazzaretto of political economy (i.e. to the need for mere

merci) and the Zapatista guerrilla is the same difference that runs

between the life and the celluloide images of those trying to reproduce

it. At Morelos it was the Indian population of the ancient communities

that rebelled, because with the expropriation of their land to allow the

expansion of the sugar industry all their life was being threatened,

their values, their daily rythms, their intense communitarian life. It

was the rebellion of a community that refused the model of survival that

industry was the bearer of and that disintegrated the forms till then in

force in which everybody recognised themselves. And in this rebellion of

all, extended to every ambit of daily life, there was no room for

specialisazion, for prefixed roles that tend to turn into professions,

in a word, they did not fight the enemy that wanted their domestication

by adopting the same schemes and ideologies, but by denying them

radically. They refused the simile similia similibus and adopted the

doctrine of contraries; already in the means used was recognisable the

negation of the existent. The same for the Russian Machnovists: they

were not just a handful of men in arms, but a vast community that

associated itself according to other criteria, that produced, working

the land with different criteria from those that had been imposed on

them from that moment, that had instored interpersonal relations and

interfederative between base groups always more socialising and that ...

combatted Bolscevichi and Whites.

equivocal theorisations about “counterpower”, miniaturised and upturned

images of the existent of which constitutes the other side of the medal,

and they do not realise that they have already reproduced inside them

that world which in their voluntaristic delirium believe they are

negating. The process of transformation of realty and man is intended as

a progressive widening of “counterpower” to the point of becoming Power,

a widening obtainable by exasperating the mutilating partiality of the

skeletal reduction of social subversion to its shadow of “military form”

operated by specialised taylorists assembled in combattentist

corporations. To the short-sighted enthusiasts of “counterpower” we

remember what G. Sadoul wrote in “La Revolution Surrealiste” of December

1929: «I am taking the chance to salute la Ghepeu, revolutionary

counter-police in the service of the proletariat, necessary to the

Russian Revolution such as the Red Army». And Aragon in “Front Rouge”

(1931): «Long live la Ghepeu, dialectical figure of heroism!». The fact

that one can be only negation of power, antipower, and that to be thus

it is not in fact sufficient to oppose oneself to some

figurine-function-role of the dominion in act (cop, foremen, department

heads), moreover changing the logic, and that instead you must extend

the viewfinder of the critique to the subjectivity colonized by capital,

domesticated to the objectivity of commodities interiorised and become

me, to the logic of power introjected that becomes condizioned reflex,

represents the threshold that lottarmatismo does not want to cross. Its

“battle” monovalent, unidimensional, is all aimed at obtaining power

over the production of commodities re-evaluating objectivity, and in

particular expresses a moralistic critique-pratice to the capetti there

where they shy away, in a manichean way, from exercising criticism of

their own subjectivity that... reproduce more power than they destroy.

wither in the mine or that do work so noxious that a fixed yearly quota

runs into a death sentence; the professionals of the productive cycles

of pestilential chemicals or nuclear that exposes their bodies to injury

and could lead to the scars of work... well, not for this can they

desert their role imposed on them, not dissolve the imaginary cage of

the function to which they have been condemned.

Whyever should from some sgarrettamento, some “knee-capping” a higher

level of paranoia should come out the effect– really miraculous! – of

getting rid of the bad guys, of reclaiming the swamp from the

(gregarious) capetti? To overestimate the effects produced by the

pedagogy of terror (strike 1 to educate 100) means no take flight from

the pavement of the purifying and purificatory mystique and stay

entangled in the net of vendetta; and who illudes oneself to retaliate

deciding to cut the net, is forced to dive into these waters, where it

is the fisherman to have decided to down their nets.

immuted present, the mechanism or the men? The resentful Christians and

the Manicheans strike the men. The condition of proletariat is given by

the awareness of not having any power over one’s life. The others – the

gregarietti/capetti – are an exception? At least that one wants to

exclude a priori any character of humanity from the process of social

radical transformation, it appears that the Manichean fulmination of who

is – also him – determined by the social relations in force, is a

shortcut that take an overpass on the accumulation of real

determinations, which we are a part of. The critique must be a laser

that penetrates in depth. “The dilemma is to organize the struggle

against death without sacrificing life, which is fully such only in the

freedom of spontaneity.” (O. Alberola). To strike the mechanism

therefore, not its valets, because the colour of the livery informs

about the bosses, not the valets. An assembly line sabotaged, stopped,

that does not produce, turns the foreman into a guy that has lost his

function of hierarchical control over the workers who from that moment

are no longer “wage-earners” but ozious. Of commodities, their

totalitarian imperialism over life, we don’t want to know and we don’t

give a damn, of men, yes. Viceversa, for capital man is nothing and

commodities are everything, and sacrifices tranquilly the first to the

second. This makes capital the most nihilist force of our time.

the fictitious sphere of politics, but it does not deconstruct the world

of institutions, the circuits moulded by alienated people, strangers to

themselves and their desires, who have lost the compass that orients

towards the pleasure principle. The critique emanated by lottarmatismo

stops at the surface of things (be they objects-commodities or

objects-people), does not penetrate in depth, not go to the root of

things that is man himself, and does not do so because it does not know

how to recognise the profound aspirations, and does not recognise them

because it does not know how to identify them – above all – in himself,

as a man that affirms himself against the dehumanisation imposed on him.

Rather than exalt the discontinuity, the ruptures, the differences, the

anomalies and the perversions of above all their own subjectivity, he

camouflages himself behind some “respectable” role, mimes normality and

respectability, then reproduces them enhanced by a surplus of

ideology... and thus began the ballet of self-clandestinisation of the

identity of one’s own self and one’s own will to pleasure in that circus

of dressage that is survival.

is: routine, quantitative logic, obsessive repetition. Lottarmatismo as

endemic factor, as bacterial culture having only the capacity to

self-produce itself; variabile of politics that becomes always more

predictable, controllable, programmable. A variable that has become

constant! A price to pay – contemplated on the scales of prevision – in

the continual reproducing of oneself by power. In the game of the

subversion of dehumanised order it is time to introduce other

“variables”, other games. The subversive practice that expresses itself

in looting and destruction of the urbanistic monstruosity that happened

during the black-out of New York [of 1977], has shown that all those

possessed by a will to life know their needs, and know how to satisfy

them as soon as minimally favourable conditions present themselves; and

in doing this any logic of heroism is banished. And has also shown the

total extraneity to these events of any “vanguard” political racket or

combattentistic corporation.

When emancipation is – really – the work of the exploited themselves,

all the “organised segments” are extraneous, nobody claims, nobody can

limit themselves to the claiming of the spectacle in the passivity of

the spectator and supporter. They can only regret not having taken part.

present and future, where the present is hell to get to paradise, is a

altar boy who persists in staying in the limbo of alienation, is

“revolutionary” politico mediator of the present with the distant past.

He is eternalizer of the christian maxim “there is no gaudenza without

suffering!” and does not grasp that “Revolution means turning the

hourglass. Subversion is something else: it means breaking it,

eliminating it”. (Dubuffet). The cheek does not lie in saying it but in

doing it.

exercised their psychic influx among the exploited, for example that of

the general strike that would rout the dominant classes. The myth

produces itself and takes a place in the mind and in the expectations of

the subordinated because – evidently – they need it and are carriers of

this particular kind of “demand”. It is a realty that comes to manifest

itself by intersecting determinations/decisions of who puts forward the

“demand”, of who “satisfies it” in practice, and of who cultivates it

with a concerted effort of informative and cultural support that

massifies it. The myth is the absolutisation of an instrument, of a

specific means of struggle, it is a delusion that takes for exhaustive

entirety something that only had validity if it was a combination – in

the modern world – of various methodologies of attack. It ends up being

predilection of the monochord note detached from a polyphonic concert.

This absolutisation of a partiality becomes possibile in characterial

structures of the religious kind, that does not tend towards

self-liberation but waits that from outside oneself something is going

to free one; revolution seen as eschatology. The myth is a propelling

force that pushes to paralysis, feeds “political” hope in the future

(modern form of religiosity) and upsets the boundaries of the real

opacizzandoli, and even renders possible that the hunchback of some

Andreotti or other passes through the eye of the lottarmatista needle

while the poliomylitic leg of Agnelli continues to ski...

spectre of economic needs of the wage-earners, and attempts to satisfy

them mediating them with the need to save the cohabitation between the

capitalists and wage-earners in order to be able to continue to act as

mediator. The “worker” partities are structures that reflected the most

fictitious needs, pulverised, rarefied and falsified. At the moment in

which the proletarians start to refuse the division of their interests

into economic and political and take their affairs into their own hands,

il lottarmatismo stands as a structure capable of administrating the

exercise of vendetta, also known as “proletarian justice”. It is a

structure that represents the sphere of the so-called “lower instincts”,

so needs its public-relations, its delegates that gather the requests of

the “base” and transmit them to the military “vertices”, which then pass

to execution. Substantially, the relationship between the “base” called

to express opinions, the mass delegates solicited to compile

indices-of-approval of the actions carried out and the operative staff,

remain imuted. It makes no difference whether it is a question of

political, trade union professionals, of cultural or lottarmatisti

animation.

It is a model which structurally does not present anything new. Even if

the inverted optic of the lottarmatisti takes charge at the “base” of

its presumed inactivity and likes to think of itself and represent

itself as the “advanced division” that expresses antagonism even when

everybody is dumb and blind.

Weathermen, Gauche Proletarienne, M.I.L., G.A.P., F.R.A.P., etc. A list

just outlined referring to different geo-political contexts that refutes

imported guerrilla triumphalism and confirms the failure of all the

forms of partialisation realised from the subversive praxis and its

debasement to under-militarism that competes with institutional

militarism. Only a pratice that combines all the possibile means of

struggle in a concert that goes through all the moments of the

reproduction of power can actuate phases of liberation. When also they

contrast M.P.L.A., P.A.I.G.C., Algerian Front, etc. as “victories”, we

know that they are the victories that have historically manifested the

new dominion of State bourgeoisie that can now choose between the

various “imperialisms” available.

combine the will to life with the reawakened resources of fantasy, with

the interior war conducted in the isolation cell of one’s own self (to

expel tabus, rules, norms, ethics), with the potentiality of the bodies

become conductors of pleasure, with the identification of Power in the

idle times and the alienation that one encounters along everyday life

(and not in the invention of always new sociological “more combative”

new strata), with the rediscovery of nomadism and the accelerated

desertion of roles, with knowledge intended as experience lived in

adventure and erratic movement and not as an exclusively cerebral fact,

with the decodification of all the languages with which power speaks to

us... We learn to recognise daily subversion in the terms in which

Bakunin lived ’48: “It seemed that the whole was upside down; the

incredible had become habitual, the impossibile possibile, and the

possible and habitual absurd!”.

“Anarchismo”, n. 23-24, September-December 1978, pp. 264-268