Digital Elephant

Insurrectionalist Anarchism - Part One

2010-12-09T23:39:00.000-08:00

Alfredo M. Bonanno

Original title: Anarchismo insurrezionalista
Edizioni Anarchismo, "I libri di Anarchismo" N. 10
June 1999

Translated by Jean Weir

CONTENTS

Introduction
Affinity
Informal Organisation
The Revolutionary Project

INTRODUCTION

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The following ideas have emerged from a long itinerary of struggle and reflection. They represent a tormented, complex thesis, which is not only difficult to set out—which would simply be due a defect of the author—but even to expose clearly and definitively.
In conflict with my whole being, I am about to set out the fundamental elements of insurrectionalist anarchism anatomically. Will it be possible? I don’t know. I shall try. If the reading of these notes begins to suffocate, then just skip through them and leave it at that.
A mass insurrection, or that of a whole people, can at any given moment lead to the State’s incapacity to maintain order and respect for the law and even lead to the disintegration of social and economic conditions. This also implies the presence of individuals and groups that are capable of grasping this disintegration beyond its immediate manifestations. They must be able to see beyond the often chance and secondary reasons for the initial insurrectional outburst. In order to give their contribution to the struggle, they must look beyond the first clashes and skirmishes, not put a brake on them or underestimate them as mere incoherent insufference towards those in power.
But who is prepared to take on this task? It could be anarchists, not so much because of their basic ideological choice and declared denial of all authority, as for their capacity to evaluate methods of struggle and organisational projects.
Moreover, only those who have rebelled and faced the consequences of this rebellion and lived it to the full, be it only within the microcosm of their own lives, can have the sensitivity and intuition necessary to grasp the signs of the insurrectional movement in course. Not all anarchists are rebels, just as not all rebels are anarchists. To complicate things, it is not enough to be a rebel to understand the rebellion of others. It is also necessary to be willing to understand. We need to look at the economic and social conditions around us. We must not let ourselves be swept away like a river in full swell by the resounding demonstrations of the popular movement, even when it is moving full steam ahead and its initial triumphs lead us to hoist banners of illusion. Critique is always the first instrument, the starting point. But this must not merely be a surly taking sides. It must be a participatory critique, one that involves the heart, feels the excitement of the clash against the same enemy, now with its face finally stamped in the dust.
It is not enough simply to rebel. Even if a hundred rebels were to get together it would still not be sufficient, they would merely be a hundred crazed molecules writhing in destructive agony as the struggle spreads, wildly sweeping everything away. Important as an example and stimulus, rebels end up succumbing to the needs of the moment. No matter how effective and radical they are, the more their conscience carries them to attack—often blindly—the more they become aware of an insurmountable limit due to their failure to see any organisational outlet. They wait for suggestions from the mass in revolt, a word here, a word there, in the quick of the clash or during moments of calm when everyone wants to talk before taking up the struggle again. And they are not aware that even during these exciting moments there are always politicians waiting in ambush. The masses do not possess the virtues we often attribute to them. The assembly is certainly not the place put one’s life at risk, but one’s life can be put at risk by decisions made in assemblies. And the political animals that raise their heads in these collective moments always have clear ideas concerning what to suggest, with fine programmes of recuperation and a call to order already in their pockets. Of course, they will not say anything that is not absolutely correct, politically, I mean, so will be taken to be revolutionaries. But they are always the same, the same old political animals laying the foundations for the power of the future, the kind that recuperates the revolutionary thrust and addresses it towards pacification. We must limit destruction, comrades. Please, after all, what we are destroying belongs to us ..and so on.
To shoot before—and more quickly than—others, is a virtue of the Far West: it’s good for a day or two, then you need to use your head. And using your head means you need a project.
So the anarchist cannot simply be a rebel, he or she must be a rebel equipped with a project. He or she must, that is, unite courage and heart with the knowledge and foresight of action. Their decisions will still always be illuminated with the flames of destruction, but sustained with the fuel of critical analysis.
Now, if we think about it for a moment, a project cannot just turn up out of the blue in the middle of the fray. It is silly to think that everything must come forth from the insurgent people. That would be blind determinism and would consign us gagged into the hands of the first politician that stood up on a chair and made a few organisational and programmatical proposals, throwing smoke in everyone’s eyes with a few words strung one after the other. Although insurrection is a revolutionary moment of great collective creativity, one which can produce analytical suggestions of considerable intensity (think of the insurgent workers of the Paris Comune who shot at the clocks), it is not the only source of theoretical and projectual wealth. The highest moments of the people in arms undoubtedly eliminate obstacles and uncertainties, clearly showing what had only been hazy until then, but they cannot illuminate what is not already there. These moments are the potent reflector that make it possible to bring about a revolutionary and anarchist project, but this project must already exist, even if only in terms of method. It must have been elaborated and experimented to some degree, although obviously not in every detail.
On the other hand, when we intervene in mass struggles, clashes with intermediate claims, is that not almost exclusively so as to propose our methods? Workers in a particular factory demanding jobs and trying to avoid being laid off, a group of homeless people trying to get shelter, prisoners on strike for better conditions in jail, students rebelling against a cultureless school are all things that interest us, up to a point. We know perfectly well that when we participate in these struggles as anarchists, no matter how they end up there will not be any corresponding growth in our movement, and this is quite irrelevant. The excluded often forget who we even are, and there is no reason in the world why they should remember us, least of all one based on gratitude. We have asked ourselves more than once, in fact, what we are doing in the midst of such struggles for claims, we anarchists and revolutionaries who are against work, against school, against any concession to the State, against property and also against any kind of negotiation that graciously concedes a better life in the prisons. The answer is simple. We are there because we can introduce different methods. And our methods take shape in a project. We are with the excluded in these intermediate struggles because we have a different model to propose, one based on self-organised struggles, attack and permanent conflictuality. This is our point of strength, and we are only prepared to struggle along with the excluded if they adopt such methods of attack, even concerning objectives that remain within the realm of claiming.
A method would be no more than an agglomeration of meaningless words if were we unable to articulate it within a projectual dimension. Had they paid some attention to this aspect in the first place, many anxious critics of anarchist insurrectionalism would just have gone back to their momentarily disturbed slumber. What is the point of accusing us of being stuck in methods that are a hundred years out of date without taking a look at what we are talking about? The insurrectionalism we are talking about is quite different to the glorious days on the barricades, even if it might contain elements of a struggle that moves in such a direction at times. But as simple revolutionary theory and analysis, a method that comes to life in a project, it does not necessarily take this apocalyptic moment into account, but develops and intensifies far from any waving of banners or glittering of guns.
Many comrades are fully aware of the need to attack and are doing what they can to bring it about. They perceive the beauty of the clash and the confrontation with the class enemy hazily, but do not want to spend much time thinking about it. They want to hear nothing of revolutionary projects, so carry on wasting the enthusiasm of rebellion which, moving into a thousand rivulets, ends up extinguishing itself in small isolated manifestations of insufference. These comrades are obviously not all the same, you could say that each one constitutes a universe of his or her own, but all, or nearly all of them, feel irritated by any attempt to clarify ideas. They don’t like to make distinctions. What is the point of talking about affinity groups, informal organisation, base nuclei or coordinations, they say? Don’t things speak for themselves? Are not tyranny and injustice, exploitation and the ferocity of power, quite visible there in front of us? Don’t they exist in the form of things, and men basking in the sun as though they had nothing to worry about? What is the point of wasting time in pointless discussions? Why not attack now? Indeed, why not turn on the first uniform we come across? Even a ‘sensible’ person like Malatesta was of this opinion, in a way, when he said that he preferred individual rebellion to waiting to see the world upturned before doing anything.
Personally I have never had anything against this. On the contrary. Rebellion is the first step. It is the essential condition for burning our bridges behind us, and even if it does not cut the bonds that tie us to society and power with a thousand thick ropes in the form of family, morals, work, obeying the law, at least it weakens them. But I am convinced that this is not enough. I believe it is necessary to go further and think about the possibilities of giving more organisational strength to one’s actions, so that rebellion can transform itself into a project aimed at generalised insurrection.
This second step obviously does not appeal to many comrades. And, feeling such efforts to be beyond them, they underestimate the problem or, worse still, criticise those who do spend time and effort on the question of organisation.
Here we will try to provide a few elements to enable us to examine the organisational aspect of insurrectionalist anarchism in some depth. In particular, the problem of the affinity group, informality, self-organisation of struggles, base nuclei and the co-ordination of these nuclei (anarchists and non-anarchists) with affinity groups (of anarchists), through informal organisation.
As you can see, the question implies complex problems of method, and this means understanding certain concepts that are often distorted within the context of insurrectionalism. We must therefore give them our full attention in order to get rid of some of the preconceived ideas that often limit our vision without our realising it.
This introductory note will become more schmetic as it takes a look at these key concepts. The text itself will be more articulate, but would probably be difficult to follow without first becoming familiar with these concepts.
An anarchist group can be composed of perfect strangers. I have often gone into anarchist meeting rooms in Italy and elsewhere and hardly known anybody. One’s mere presence in such a place, the attitudes, the jargon and the way one presents oneself, the level of discussion and statements impregnated with basic orthodox anarchist ideology, are such that any anarchist feels at ease within a short space of time and communicates with the other comrades as well as possible, to their reciprocal satisfaction.
It is not my intention to speak of the ways that an anarchist group can be organised here. There are many, and each chooses their own comrades as they think best. But there is a particular way of forming an anarchist group that puts real or presumed affinity among all the participants before anything else. Now, this affinity is not something that can be found in a declaration of principles, a glorious past, or a history of ‘militancy’, no matter how far back this goes in time. Affinity is acquired by having knowledge of each other. That is why one sometimes believes one has affinity with a comrade, then discovers that that is not actually so, and viceversa. An affinity group is therefore a melting pot in which such relations can mature and consolidate.
But because perfection is a thing of angels, even affinity needs to be considered with a certain mental acumen and not be accepted supinely as the panacea for all our weaknesses. I can only discover that I have affinity with someone if I reveal myself to that person, do away with all the affectations that normally protect me like a second skin, harder and tougher than the first. And this cannot simply come about through small talk, me chattering about myself then listening to the other’s tales, but must come about in things that are done together. In other words, it must come about in action. When we do things, we unconsciously send out tiny signals that are far more revealing than words. It is from these exchanges that we create the conditions that are necessary in order for us to gain knowledge of each other.
If the group’s activity is not doing for the sake of it so as to grow numerically, but has the qualitative aim of comrades being aware of each other and feeling at one with each other, sharing the tension towards action and the desire to transform the world, then this is an affinity group. If it is not, the search for affinity will be no more than the search for a shoulder to lean on.
Affinity is therefore the knowledge that comrades acquire of each other, which is gained through action in the realisation of one’s ideas. A glance backwards to allow my comrades to see who I am is reabsorbed by looking forward together into a future in which we build our common project. In other words, we decide to intervene in specific struggles and see what we are capable of. These two moments, the first, let us say, of the knowledge of the individual, and the second, the projectual one of the knowledge of the group intertwine and constitute affinity, allowing the group to be considered to all effects an ‘affinity group’.
The resulting condition is not fixed in time once and for all. It moves, develops, regresses and modifies during the course of the various struggles, drawing from them so as to grow both theoretically and practically. It is not a monolithic entity. Decisions are not made vertically. There is no faith to be sworn upon nor commandments to believe in, in times of doubt or fear. Everything is discussed within the group throughout the course of the struggle, everything is reconsidered from the start, even if solid, eternal points might seem to exist already.
The affinity group’s task is to elaborate a particular project, the best place to study and examine the conditions one decides to operate in. It might seem that organisations of synthesis are better instruments for intervening in struggles than affinity groups, but the vast range of interests held by anarchist structures of synthesis is only apparent. In fact, in an organisation of synthesis, groups are allocated tasks at congresses, and although they are free to interest themselves in all the problems that characterise this society divided into classes, basically only operate according to what has been dictated by the congress. Moreover, being linked to programmes and principles that have been accepted once and for all, they are unable to make independent decisions and end up complying to the rigid limitations fixed by the organisation in congress. The latter’s role is to safeguard the organisation itself, in other words to ‘disturb’ power as little as possible and avoid being ‘outlawed’. The affinity group avoids such limitations, sometimes easily, sometimes only thanks to the courage and decision of the comrades that make it up. Of course, such structures cannot give courage to those who lack it. It cannot suggest attack unless each individual is already a rebel in his or her soul. It cannot go into action if people are only prepared to think at the level of an afternoon chat.
Once the problems concerning what is to be acted upon have been gone into, the necessary documentation has been found and analyses worked out, the affinity group goes into action. This is one of the fundamental characteristics of this kind of anarchist structure. It does not wait for problems to appear like a spider in the middle of a web. It looks for them and seeks a solution, which must obviously be accepted by the excluded who are bearing the brunt of the problem. But in order to make a proposition to a social reality that is suffering some specific form of aggression by power in a given area, it is necessary to be physically present among the excluded of that area and have a real awareness of the problems involved.
The affinity group therefore moves in the direction of local intervention, facing one particular problem and creating all the necessary psychological and practical conditions, both individually and collectively. The problem can then be faced with the characteristics and methods of insurrectionalism which are self-organisation, permanent conflictuality and attack.
One single affinity group cannot necessarily carry out such an intervention on its own. Often, at least according to the (few and controversial) experiences to date, the nature of the problem and complexity of intervention, including the extent of the area as well as the means required to develop the project and the ideas and needs of the people involved, require something more. Hence the need to keep in contact with other affinity groups so as to increase the number of comrades and find the means and ideas suited to the complexity and dimension of the problem that is being faced.
That is how informal organisation originates.
Various anarchist affinity groups can come together to give life to an informal organisation aimed at facing a problem that is too complex for one group alone. Of course, all the groups participating in the informal organisation must more or less agree with the intervention and participate in both the actions and ideas.
Affinity groups often develop informal relations that become constant as they meet regularly to prepare for specific struggles or—better still—during the course of these struggles. This facilitates the circulation of information about the latter and the projects that are in preparation, as well as signs from certain areas of the world of the excluded.
An informal organisation ‘functions’ quite simply. It has no name as it does not aim to grow numerically. There are no fixed structures (apart from the single affinity groups, each one of which operates quite autonomously), otherwise the term ‘informal’ would be meaningless. It is not formally ‘constituted’, there are no congresses but only simple meetings from time to time (preferably during the course of the struggles themselves). There are no programmes, only the common experience of insurrectional struggles and the methods that distinguish them: self-organisation, permanent conflictuality and attack.
The aims of the informal organisation are conferred on it by the individual affinity groups that make it up. In the few experiences that have materialised it has been a question of one specific objective, for example the destruction of the Cruise missile base in Comiso in 1982-1983. But there could also be more than one intervention and the informal organisation would make it possible for single groups to intervene in these different situations. For example they could alternate when it became necessary to be in one place for a considerable length of time (in Comiso groups stayed in the area for two years). Another aim could be to provide both analytical and practical means, and provide the financial support that the individual group might require.
The primary function of the informal organisation is to make known the various affinity groups and the comrades that make them up. If you think about it, this is still a question of a search for affinity, this time at a different level. Here the search for affinity is intensified by the project—which does not exclude the ever-increasing knowledge of the single individual—and comes about at the level of more than one group. One deduces from this that the informal organisation is also an affinity group, based on all the affinity groups that make it up.
The above considerations, which we have been developing over the past fifteen years, should have been of some use to comrades in their understanding the nature of informal organisation. This does not seem to be the case. In my opinion, the most serious misunderstanding comes from the latent desire of many of us to flex our muscles. We want to give ourselves a strong organisational structure because that seems to be the only way to fight a power structure that is strong and muscular. According to these comrades the first characteristic that such a structure should have is that it be specific and robust, must last in time and be clearly visible so as to constitute a kind of light amidst the struggles of the excluded—a light, a guide, a point of reference.
Alas! We do not share this opinion. All the economic and social analyses of post-industrial capitalism show how power would swallow up such a strong, visible structure in one gulp. The disappearance of the centrality of the working class (at least what was once considered such) means that an attack carried out by a rigid, visible structure would be impracticable. If such structures are not simply destroyed on impact, they would just be co-opted into the ambit of power in order to recuperate and recycle the most irreducible elements.
So long as the affinity group continues to look inwards, it will be no more than a few comrades giving themselves their own rules and respecting them. By looking inwards I do not just mean staying inside one’s anarchist place, limiting oneself to the usual discussions among the initiated, but also responding to the various deadlines of power and repression with declarations and documents. In that case the affinity group would only differ from other anarchist groups superficially: ‘political’ choices, ways of interpreting the various responses to the power structure’s claim to regulate our lives and those of all the excluded.
The profound sense of being a ‘different’ structure, i.e. one based on a way of organising that is quite different to all other anarchist groups—in a word, on affinity—only becomes operative when it sets out a project of specific struggle. And what characterises this project more than anything is the presence of a considerable number of excluded, of people—in a word, the mass—bearing the brunt of repression that the project is addressing with recourse to insurrectionalist methods.
The essential element in the insurrectional project is therefore mass participation. And, as we started off from the condition of affinity among the single anarchist groups participating in it, it is also an essential element of this affinity itself. It would be no more than mere camaraderie d’elite if it were to remain circumscribed to the reciprocal search for deeper personal knowledge between comrades.
But it would be nonsense to consider trying to make other people become anarchists and suggest that they enter our groups during the struggle. Not only would it be nonsense, it would be a horrible ideological forcing of things that would upturn the whole meaning of affinity groups and the eventual informal organisation that might ensue in order to face the specific repressive attack.
But here we are faced with the need to create organisational structures that are capable of regrouping the excluded in such a way as to begin the attack on repression. So we come to the need to give life to autonomous base nuclei, which can obviously give themselves any other name that indicates the concept of self-organisation.
We have now reached the crucial point of the insurrectional project: the constitution of autonomous base nuclei (we are using this term here to simplify things).
The essential, visible and immediately comprehensible characteristic of the latter is that they are composed of both anarchists and non-anarchists.
The more difficult points reside elsewhere however, and on the few occasions of experimentation these have turned out to be a source of considerable misunderstanding. First of all, the fact that they are structures in the quantitative sense. If they are such—and in fact they are—then this characteristic needs to be clarified. They are actually points of reference, not fixed structures where people can count themselves through all the procedures of established membership (card-carrying, payment of dues, supplying services, etc). The only aim of the base nuclei is struggle. They operate like lungs in the respiratory system, swelling when the struggle intensifies and reducing in size when it weakens, to swell again when the next clash occurs. During quiet spells, between one involvement and another—and here by involvement we mean any aspect of struggle, even simply handing out a leaflet, participating in a public meeting, but also squatting a building or sabotaging one of the instruments of power—the nucleus acts as a zonal reference, a sign of the presence of an informal organisational structure.
To see autonomous base nuclei as needing to grow quantitatively would be to turn them into union-style organisms, i.e. something like the Cobas in Italy, who defend workers’ rights in the various productive sectors through a wide range of activities such as claiming and defence of those they represent. The more delegates there are, the louder the voice of the claimant. The autnonomous base nucleus does not have delegates, it does not propose struggles based on wide objectives such as the defence of jobs, wage increases, or safeguarding health in the factory, etc. The base nucleus exists for the one objective that was decided upon at the start. This can also be a claim of some kind, not made through the representative method of delegation, but faced using direct methods of immediate struggle such as constant unannounced attacks and the blunt refusal of all the political forces that claim to represent anyone or anything.
Those who form the base nuclei should therefore not expect some complex level of support to cover a wide range of needs. They must understand that this is not a question of some union-style defence organisation, but is an instrument of struggle against one specific objective, and is only valid if the initial decision to have recourse to insurrectional methods stands firm. Participation in the nuclei is quite spontaneous, as there are no benefits other than the specific, exclusive one of strength and organisation concerning the objective that has been chosen together, and attacking it. So, it is quite logical not to expect such organisms to develop a high numerical or (even less) stable, composition. In the preparatory phase of the struggle those who identify with the objective, agree with it and are prepared to put themselves at risk, are few. When the struggle is underway and the first results begin to appear, the hesitant and weak will also join in and the nucleus will swell, only for these last-minute participants to disappear later on. This is quite natural and should not worry us or make us see this instrument of mass organisation in a negative light.
Another common area of incomprehension is the short lifespan of the autonomous base nucleus itself. It comes to an end upon reaching the objective that had been decided (or through common agreement concerning the impossibility of reaching it). Many ask themselves: if the nuclei ‘also’ function as a regrouping point of reference, why not keep them in place for possible use in some future struggle? Here we come back to the concept of ‘informality’ again. Any structure that carries on in time beyond its original aim, sooner or later turns into a stable structure whose original purpose is distorted into the new and apparently legitimate one of quantitative growth. It grows in strength in order to reach the multiplicity of goals—each one interesting enough in itself—that appear on the nebulous horizon of the exploited. As soon as the informal structure plants roots in a new, stable form, individuals suited to managing the latter will appear on the scene: always the same ones, the most capable, with plenty of time to spare. Sooner or later the circle will close around the so-called revolutionary anarchist structure, which by now will have found its sole aim, its own survival. This is precisely what we see happening when such an organisational structure, albeit anarchist and revolutionary, establishes itself: it becomes a rarefied form of power that attracts all the comrades who want to do good for the people and so on, etc, etc.—all with the best will in the world, of course.
One last organisational element, which is necessary at times, is the ‘coordination’ of autonomous base nuclei. The coordinating structure is also informal and is composed of various representatives of the base nuclei. Whereas the individual nuclei, given their function as ‘lungs’ can be informal to the point of not even having any fixed meeting place (because a nucleus can arrange to meet anywhere), this cannot be so for the coordinating body. If a struggle—still circumscribed to the specific question that started the project—lasts for a considerable length of time and covers a fairly wide area, it is necessary to find a place for the various activities of the base nuclei to coordinate themselves.
The presence of anarchist affinity groups is not directly visible in the coordination, and this can also be said concerning the informal organisation. Of course anarchists are present in all the various base nuclei, but this is not the ideal place for anarchist propaganda in the classic sense of the word. The first thing to be done, both within the coordination and the individual nuclei, is to analyse the problem, the objective to be reached, then look at the insurrectional means to be used in the struggle. The task of comrades is to participate in the project and go into the means and methods to be employed, along with everyone else involved. Although this might sound simple here, it turns out to be far more complicated in practice.
The function of the ‘co-ordination of the autonomous base nuclei’ is therefore that of linking up the struggles. Here we have only one thing to suggest (absolutely indigestable for anarchists, but quite simple for anyone who is not an anarchist): the need, in the case of a mass attack against a given structure of power, to decide upon individual tasks before the attack takes place, i.e. to agree on what needs to be done down to the minutest detail. Many imagine such occasions of struggle to be an orgy of spontaneity: the objective is there in front of everyone, all you need to do is go ahead and rout out the forces protecting it and destroy them. I am putting things in these terms here, although I know that many will have a hundred different ways of seeing things, but the essence does not change. All of the participants must have a precise idea of what to do, it being a question of a struggle taking place in a given area that will have to overcome specific armed resistance. Now, if only a few people know what to do the resulting confusion will be the same, if not worse, than if no one does at all.
A plan is therefore necessary. There have been instances where it was necessary to have an armed military plan simply to hand out a leaflet (for example during the insurrection of Reggio Calabria). But can this plan really be made available to everybody, even just a few days before the attack? I do not think so. For reasons of security. On the other hand, details of the plan of attack must be available to all the participants. One deduces that not everybody can participate in drawing it up, but only those who in some way or other happen to be known either for their participation in the autonomous base nuclei, or because they belong to the affinity groups adhering to the coordination. This is to avoid infiltration by police and secret services, something that is more than likely on such occasions. People who are not known must be guaranteed by those who are. This might be unpleasant, but it is unavoidable.
The problem gets complicated when the project in course is known to many comrades who could be interested in participating in one of the actions of attack we are talking about. In this case, the influx would be considerable (in the case of Comiso, in the days of the attempted occupation, about 300 comrades came from all over Italy and beyond) and the need to avoid the presence of infiltrators becomes far more serious. Comrades turning up at the last minute might not know about the action in course, and will not be able to understand what is going on. In the same way, all those who decide not to accept the above verification will end up feeling left out.
And finally two last points that merit a concise, linear explanation: why we consider the insurrectional methodology and projectuality to be the most suitable means in the revolutionary clash today, and what we think can come from the use of insurrectional methods in a situation that is not insurrection in act.
As far as the first question is concerned, an analysis of social and economic reality today shows how structures of synthesis reproduce all the defects of the political parties of the past, great or small, making them ineffective or only useful to the restructuring of power.
To the second question, one could reply that it is impossible to say in advance how the conditions leading to insurrection will develop. Any occasion might be the right one, even if it looks like an insignificant experiment. But there is more. To develop a project of insurrectional struggle starting from one specific problem, i.e. a precise manifestation of power to the detriment of a considerable mass of excluded, is more than a simple ‘experiment’. It is insurrection in act, without wanting to exaggerate something that starts off as something small, and will probably remain so. What is important is the method, and anarchists still have a long way to go in that direction, otherwise we will remain unprepared in the case of the many insurrections of whole peoples that have taken place to date and continue to do so.
Basically this book is a contribution to the great problem ‘What is to be done?’.
Catania, 21 November 1998.

Affinity

Anarchists have an ambivalent relationship with the question of organisation.
On the one hand there are those who accept a permanent structure with a well-defined programme and means at their disposal (even if only a few), that is divided up into commissions, while on the other there is a refusal of any stable relationship, even in the short term.
Classical anarchist federations and individualists are the two extremes of an escape from the reality of the clash. The comrade that belongs to an organised structure hopes that a revolutionary transformation will result from a growth in numbers, so he holds the cheap illusion that the structure is capable of controlling any authoritarian involution or any concession to the logic of the party. The individualist comrade is solicitous of his own ego and fears any form of contamination, any concession to others or any active collaboration, believing such things to be giving in and compromising.
This turns out to be the natural consequence, even for comrades who consider the problem of specific organisation and the federation of groups critically.
The organisation is thus born before any struggles take place and ends up adapting to the perspective of a certain kind of struggle which—at least one supposes—is to make the organisation itself grow. In this way the structure has a vicarious relationship with the repressive decisions of power, which for various reasons dominate the scene of the class struggle. Resistance and the self-organisation of the exploited are seen as molecular elements to be grasped here and there, but only become meaningful on entering and becoming part of the specific structure or allow themselves to be regrouped into mass organisms under the (more or less direct) leadership of the latter.
In this way, one is always waiting. It is as though we are all in provisional liberty. We scrutinise the attitudes of power and keep ready to react (always within the limits of the possible) against the repression that strikes us, hardly ever taking the initiative, setting out our interventions in first person, overturning the logic of the loser. Anybody that recognises themselves in structured organisations expects to see their number of members increase. Anyone that works within mass structures (for example in the anarcho-syndicalist optic) is waiting for today’s small demands to turn into great revolutionary results in the future. Those who deny all that but also spend their time waiting, who knows what for, are often stuck in resentment against all and everything, sure of their own ideas without realising that they are no more than the flip side of the organisational and programmatical stance.
We believe that it is possible to do something else.
We start off from the consideration that it is necessary to establish contact with other comrades in order to pass to action. We are not in a condition to act alone as long as our struggle is reduced to platonic protest, as bloody and terrible as you like, but still platonic. If we want to act on reality incisively there must be many of us.
How can we find our comrades? We have cast aside any question of programmes and platforms in advance, throwing them out once and for all. So what is left?
Affinity.
Affinities and divergence exist among anarchists. I am not talking about personal affinity here, i.e. sentimental aspects that often bring comrades together (in the first place love, friendship, sympathy, etc.), I am talking about a deepening of reciprocal knowledge. The more this deepening grows, the greater the affinity can become. In the case of the contrary, divergences can turn out to be so great as to make any action impossible. So the solution lies in a growth in reciprocal knowledge, developed through a projectual examination of the various problems that the class struggle presents us with.
There are a whole range of problems that we want to face, and usually care is taken not examine them in their entirety. We often limit ourselves to questions that are close at hand because they are the ones that affect us most (repression, prison, etc.).
But it is precisely our capacity to examine the problem that we want to face that leads to the best way to create conditions for affinity. This can obviously never be absolute or total (except in very rare cases), but can be sufficient to create relations disposed to acting.
If we restrict our intervention to the most obvious and superficial aspects of what we consider the essential problems to be, we will never be able to discover the affinity we desire. We will constantly be wandering around at the mercy of sudden, unsuspected contradictions that could upset any project of intervention in reality. I insist on pointing out that affinity should not be confused with sentiment. We can recognise affinity with comrades that we do not particularly like and on the other hand like comrades with whom we do not have any affinity.
Among other things, it is important not to let oneself be hindered in one’s action by false problems such as a presumed differentiation between feelings and political motivations. From what has been said above it might seem that feelings should be kept separate from political analysis, so we could, for example, love someone and not share their ideas at all and vice versa. That is roughly possible, no matter how lacerating it might be. The personal aspect (or that of feelings if you like) must be included in the above concept of going into the range of problems, as instinctively succumbing to our impulses often signifies a lack of reflection and analysis, or not being able to admit to simply being possessed by god.
From what we have said there now starts to emerge, even nebulously, a first approximation of our way of considering the anarchist group: a number of comrades linked by a common affinity.
The more the project that these comrades build together is gone into, the greater their affinity will be. It follows that real organisation, the effective (and not fictitious) capacity to act together, i.e. to find each other, make analyses and pass to action, is in relation to the affinity reached and has nothing to do with more or less camouflaged monograms, programmes, platforms, flags or parties.
The affinity group is therefore a specific organisation that comes together around common affinities. These cannot be identical for all, but different comrades will have infinite affinity structures, all the more varied the wider the effort of analytical quest reached.
It follows that all these comrades will also tend towards quantitative growth, which is however limited and not the main aim of the activity. Numerical development is indispensable for action and it is also a test of the breadth of the analyses that one is developing and its capacity to gradually discover affinity with a greater number of comrades.
It follows that the organism thus born will end up giving itself means of intervention in common. First, an instrument of debate necessary for analysis that is capable, as far as possible, of supplying indications on a wide range of problems and, at the same time, of constituting a point of reference for the verification—at a personal or collective level—of the affinities or divergencies that arise.
Lastly it should be said that although the element that holds a group of this kind together is undoubtedly affinity, its propulsive aspect is action. To limit oneself to the first element and leave the other in second place would result in relationships withering in Byzantian perfectionism.

Informal organisation

First let us distinguish the informal anarchist organisation from the anarchist organisation of synthesis. Considerable clarification will emerge from this distinction.
What is an anarchist organisation of synthesis? It is an organisation based on groups or individuals that are more or less in constant relation with each other, that culminates in periodical congresses. During these open meetings basic theoretical analyses are discussed, a program is prepared and tasks are shared out covering a whole range of interventions in the social field. The organisation thus sets itself up as a point of reference, like an entity that is capable of synthesizing the struggles that are going on in reality of the class clash. The various commissions of this organisational model intervene in different struggles (as single comrades or groups) and, by intervening, give their contribution in first person without however losing site of the theoretical and practical orientation of the organisation as a whole, as decided at the most recent congress.
When this kind of organisation develops itself fully (as happened in Spain in ’36) it begins to dangerously resemble a party. Synthesis becomes control. Of course, in moments of slack, this involution is less visible and might even seem an insult, but at other times it turns out to be more evident.
In substance, in the organisation of synthesis (always specific and anarchist), a nucleus of specialists works out proposals at both the theoretical and ideological level, adapting them as far as possible to the program that is roughly decided upon at the periodic congresses. The shift away from this program can also be considerable (after all, anarchists would never admit to too slavish an adherence to anything), but when this occurs care is taken to return within the shortest possible time to the line previously decided upon.
This organisation’s project is therefore that of being present in various situations: antimilitarism, nuclear power, unions, prisons, ecology, interventions in living areas, unemployment, schools, etc. This presence is either by direct intervention or through participaton in interventions managed by other comrades or organisations (anarchist or not).
It becomes clear that participation aimed at bringing the struggle to within the project of synthesis cannot be autonomous. It cannot really adapt to the conditions of the struggle or collaborate effectively in a clear plan with the other revolutionary forces. Everything must either go through the ideological filter of synthesis or comply with the conditions approved earlier during the congress.
This situation, which is not always as rigid as it might seem here, carries the ineliminable tendency of organisations of synthesis to drag struggles to the level of the base, proposing caution and using contrivances aimed at redimensioning any flight forward, any objective that is too open or means that might be dangerous.
For example, if a group belonging to this kind of organisation (of synthesis, but always anarchist and specific) were to adhere to a structure that is struggling, let us say, against repression, it would be forced to consider the actions proposed by this structure in the light of the analyses that had roughly been approved at the congress. The structure would either have to accept these analyses, or the group belonging to the organisation of synthesis would stop its collaboration (if it is in a minority) or impose the expulsion (in fact, even if not with a precise motion) of those proposing different methods of struggle.
Some people might not like it, but that is exactly how things work.
One might ask oneself why on earth the proposal of the group belonging to the organisation of synthesis must by definition always be more backward, i.e. in the rearguard, or more cautious than others concerning possible actions of attack against the structures of repression and social consensus.
Why is that? The answer is simple. The specific anarchist organisation of synthesis, which, as we have seen, culminates in periodic congresses has growth in numbers as its basic aim. It needs an operative force that must grow. Not to infinity exactly, but almost. In the case of the contrary it would not have the capacity to intervene in the various struggles, nor even be able to carry out its own principle task: proceding to synthesis in one single point of reference.
Now, an organisation that has growth in members as its main aim must use instruments that guarantee proselytism and pluralism. It cannot take a clear position concerning any specific problem, but must always find a middle way, a political road that upsets the smallest number and turns out to be acceptable to most.
The correct position concerning some problems, particularly repression and prisons, is often the most dangerous, and no group can put the organisation they belong to at risk without first agreeing with the other member groups. But that can only happen in congress, or at least at an extraordinary meeting, and we all know that on such occasions it is always the most moderate opinion that prevails, certainly not the most advanced.
So, ineluctably, the presence of the organisation of synthesis in actual struggles, struggles that reach the essence of the class struggle, turns into a brake and control (often involuntarily, but it is still a question of control).
The informal organisation does not present such problems. Affinity groups and comrades that see themselves in an informal kind of projectuality come together in action, certainly not by adhering to a program that has been fixed at a congress. They realise the project themselves, in their analyses and actions. It can occasionally have a point of reference in a paper or a series of meetings, but only in order to facilitate things, whereas it has nothing to do with congresses and such like.
The comrades who recognise themselves in an informal organisation are automatically a part of it. They keep in contact with the other comrades through a paper or by other means, but, more important, they do so by participating in the various actions, demonstrations, encounters, etc., that take place from time to time. The main verification and analysis therefore comes about during moments of struggle. To begin with these might simply be moments of theoretical verification, turning into something more later on.
In an informal organisation there is no question of synthesis. There is no desire to be present in all the different situations and even less to formulate a project that takes the struggles into the depths of a programme that has been approved in advance.
The only constant points of reference are insurrectional methods: in other words self-organisation of struggles, permanent conflictuality and attack.

The Revolutionary Project

It is not easy to grasp the various aspects of revolutionary activity. It is even more difficult to grasp everything in terms of a complex project that has its own intrinsic logic and operative articulation. That is what I mean by revolutionary work.
We all, or nearly all, agree as to who the enemy is. In the vagueness of the definition we include elements from our personal experience (joy and suffering) as well as our social situation and our culture. We are convinced that we know everything that is required in order to draw up a map of enemy territory and identify objectives and responsibility. Times change of course, but we don’t take any notice. We make the necessary adjustments and carry on.
Obscure in our way of proceeding, our surroundings also obscure, we light up our path with the miserable candle of ideology and stride forward.
The tragic fact is that things around us change, and often rapidly. The terms of the class relationship are constantly widening and narrowing in a contradictory situation. They reveal themselves one day only to conceal themselves the next, as the certainties of yesteryear precipitate into the darkness of the present.
Anyone who maintains a constant if not immobile pole is not seen as what they are: honest navigators in the sea of class confusion, but are often taken to be stubborn chanters of out of date, abstract, ideological slogans. Anyone who persists in seeing the enemy inside the uniform, behind the factory, at the ministry, school, the church, etc., is considered suspect. There is a desire to substitute harsh reality with abstract relations and relativity. So the State ends up becoming a way of seeing things and individuals, with the result that, being an idea, it cannot be fought. The desire to fight it in abstract in the hope that its material reality, men and institutions will precipitate into the abyss of logical contradiction, is a tragic illusion. This is what usually happens at times like this when there is a lull both in the struggle and in proposals for action.
No one with any self respect would admit to the State’s having any positive function. Hence the logical conclusion that it has a negative one, i.e. that it damages some to the benefit of others. But the State is not simply the idea State, it is also the ‘thing State’, and this ‘thing’ is composed of the policeman and the police station, the minister and the ministry (including the building where the ministry has its offices), the priest and the church (including the actual place where the cult of lies and swindling takes place), the banker and the bank, the speculator and his premises, right down to the individual spy and his more or less comfortable flat in the suburbs. Either the State is this articulated whole or it is nothing, a mere abstraction, a theoretical model that it would be absolutely impossible to attack and defeat.
Of course, the State also exists inside us. It is therefore also i d e a. But this being an idea is subordinate to the physical places and persons that realise it. An attack on the idea of State (including that which we harbour inside us, often without realising it) is only possible if we attack it physically, in its historical realisation standing there before us in flesh and blood.
What do we mean by attack? Things are solid. Men defend themselves, take measures. And the choice of the means of attack is also open to confusion. We can (or rather must) attack with ideas, oppose critique to critique, logic to logic, analysis to analysis. But that would be a pointless exercise if it were to come about in isolation, cut off from direct intervention on the things and men of the State (and capital of course). So, in relation to what we said earlier, attack not only with ideas but also with weapons. I see no other way out. To limit oneself to an ideological duel would merely increase the enemy’s strength.
Theoretical examination therefore, alongside and at the same time as practical attack.
Moreover, it is precisely in the attack that theory transforms itself and practice expresses its theoretical foundations. To limit oneself to theory would be to remain in the field of idealism typical of the bourgeois philosophy that has been feeding the coffers of the dominant class for hundreds of years, as well as the concentration camps of the experimenters of both Right and Left. It makes no difference if this disguises itself as historical materialism, it is still a question of the old phagocytic idealism. Libertarian materialism must necessarily overcome the separation between idea and deed. If you identify the enemy you must strike, and strike adequately. Not so much in the sense of an optimal level of destruction, as that of the general situation of the enemy’s defence, its possibilities of survival and the increasing danger it represents.
If you strike it is necessary to destroy part of their structure, thus making their functioning as a whole more difficult. All this, if considered in isolation, runs the risk of seeming insignificant. It does not manage, that is, to convert itself into something real. For this transformation to come about it is necessary for the attack to be accompanied by a critical examination of the enemy’s ideas, ideas that are part of its repressive and oppressive action.
But does this reciprocal conversion of practical action into theoretical and theoretical into practical come about as something imposed artificially? For example, in the sense of carrying out an action then printing a fine document claiming it. The ideas of the enemy are not criticised or gone into in this way. They are crystallised within the ideological process, appearing to be massively in opposition to the ideas of the attacker, transferred into something quite ideological. Few things are as hateful to me as this way of proceeding.The place for the c o n v e r s i o n of theory into practice and vice versa, is the p r o j e c t. It is the project as an articulated whole that gives practical action a different significance, makes it a critique of the ideas of the enemy. It derives from this that the work of the revolutionary is essentially the elaboration and realisation of a project.
But before discovering what a r e v o 1 u t i o n a r y p r o j e c t might be, it is necessary to agree on what the revolutionary must possess in order to be able to elaborate this project of theirs. First of all courage. Not the banal courage of the physical clash and attack on the enemy trenches, but the more difficult one, the courage of one’s ideas. Once you think in a certain way, once you see things and people, the world and its affairs in a certain way, you m u s t have the courage to carry this through without compromise or half measures, without pity or illusion. To stop half way would be a crime or, if you like, is absolutely normal. But revolutionaries are not ‘normal’ people. They must go beyond. Beyond normality, but also beyond exceptionally, which is an aristocratic way of considering diversity Beyond good, but also beyond evil, as someone would have said.
They cannot wait for others to do what needs to be done. They cannot delegate to others what their conscience dictates to them. They cannot wait peacefully to do what others itching to destroy what oppresses them like themselves would do if only they decided, if only they were to awake from their torpor and from allowing themselves to be swindled, far away from the chatter and confusion.
So they must set to work, and work hard. Work to supply themselves with the means necessary to give some basis to their convictions.
And here we come to the second thing: constancy. The strength to continue, persevere, insist, even when others are discouraged and everything seems difficult.
It is impossible to procure the means one requires without constancy. The revolutionary needs c u 1 t u r a 1 means, i.e. analyses and basic common knowledge. But studies that seem very far from revolutionary practice are also indispensable to action. Languages, economy, philosophy, mathematics, the natural sciences, chemistry, social science and so on. This knowledge should not be seen as sectarian specialisation, nor should it be the dilettante exercises of an eccentric spirit dipping into this and that, desirous of knowledge but forever ignorant due to the failure to possess a method of learning. And then the technics: writing correctly, (in a way that reaches one’s objective), speaking to others (using all the techniques on the subject), which are not easy to learn and are very important, studying (this is also a technique), remembering (memory can be improved, it does not have to be left to our more or less natural disposition), the manipulation of objects (which many consider a mysterious gift but instead is technique and can be learned and perfected) and others still.
The search to acquire these means is unending. It is the revolutionary’s task to work continually to perfect these means and extend them to other fields.
Then there is a third thing, creativity. There can be no doubt that all of the above means would be useless, simply specialisation as an end in itself, were they not to produce new experiences, continual modification in the means as a whole and the possibility of putting them to use. And it is here that it becomes possible to grasp the great force of creativity, i.e. the fruit of all the preceding efforts. Logical processes become no more than a basic, unimportant element, whereas a different, total new one emerges: i n t u i t i o n.
So now the problem comes to be seen differently. Nothing will be as it was before. Numerous connections and comparisons, inferences and deductions are made without our realising it. All the means in our possession begin to vibrate and come alive. Things of the past along with new understanding, old concepts, ideas and tensions, that had not fully been understood become clear. An incredible mixture, itself a creative event, which must be submitted to the discipline of method in order for us to produce something, limited if you like, but immediately perceivable. Unfortunately the destiny of creativity is that its immense initial explosive potential (which becomes something miserable in the absence of the basic means mentioned above) must be returned to the realm of technique in the narrow sense of word. It must go back to becoming word, pages, figures, sounds, form, objects. Otherwise, outside the scheme of this prison of communication, it would be dispersive and abandoned, lost in an immense fathomless sea.
And now one last thing, materiality. The capacity, that is, to grasp the real material foundations of what surrounds us. For example, we require suitable means in order to understand and act, and that is not so simple. The question of means seems clear, but always leads to misunderstanding. The question of money, for example. It is obvious that without money one cannot do what one wants. A revolutionary cannot ask for State financing to develop projects aimed at its destruction. They cannot for both ethical reasons and a logical one (that the State would not give it to them). Nor can they seriously believe that with small personal subscriptions they will be able to do everything they want (and consider necessary). Nor can they simply continue to complain about lack of money or resign themselves to the fact that some things just can’t be done for that reason. Even less can they adopt the stance of those who, being penniless, feel their conscience to be at rest and, stating they have no money, do not participate in the common effort but wait for others to do so in their place. Of course, it is clear that if a comrade does not have any money they cannot be held to pay for what they cannot afford. But have they really done everything they can to procure some for themselves? Or is there only one way to get hold of money: go begging for it, letting oneself be exploited by a boss? I don’t think so.
In the arc of the possible ways of being, including personal tendencies and cultural acquisitions, two extreme kinds of behaviour polarise, each of which is limited and penalising. On the one hand there are those who accentuate the theoretical aspect, on the other, those who immerse themselves up in the practical one. These two poles hardly ever exist in the ‘pure state’, but are often accentuated enough to become obstacles and impediments.
When exasperated to infinity the great possibilities that theoretical study gives the revolutionary remain dead letters, becoming elements of contradiction and impediment. Some people can only see life in theoretical terms. They are not necessarily men of letters or scholars (for the latter this would be quite normal), but could be any proletarian, an emarginated person that grew up in the streets coming to blows. This search for a resolution through the subtlety of reason transforms itself into disorganic anxiety, a tumultuous desire to understand that invariably turns into pure confusion, lowering the primacy of the brain that they are trying to hold on to at any cost. This exasperation reduces their critical capacity to put order in their ideas, widening their creativity but only in the pure, one might say wild, state, supplying images and judgement devoid of any organisational method that might make them utilizable. This person lives constantly in a kind of ‘trance’, eats badly, relates to others with difficulty. They become easily suspicious, when not anxious to be ‘understood’, and for this reason tend to accumulate an incredible hotchpotch of contradictory thoughts with no guiding thread. The solution for getting out of the labyrinth would be action. But according to the model of polarisation we are looking at, this would have to be submitted to the dominion of the brain, to the ‘logic’ of reason. So, the action is killed, put off to infinity or lived badly because not ‘understood’, not brought back to the pre-eminence of thought.
On the other hand, there is endless doing, the passing of one’s life away in things to be done. Today, tomorrow. Day after day. Perhaps in hope of a particular day that will see an end to this putting off to infinity. Meanwhile no search for a moment’s reflection that is not exclusively linked to things be done, or very little at least. Devoting all one’s time to doing kills in the same way as devoting it all to thinking does. The contradictions of the individual are not resolved by action as an end in itself. For the revolutionary things are even worse. The classic flattery that individuals use to convince themselves of the validity and importance of the action they wish to undertake is not enough for the revolutionary. The only expedient one can have recourse to is to put things off to infinity, to better days when it will no longer be necessary to dedicate oneself ‘exclusively’ to doing and there will be time to think. But how can one think without the means to do so? Perhaps thought is automatic activity that one slips into when one stops doing? Certainly not. In the same way as doing is not automatic activity that one slips into when one stops thinking. The possession of a few things then, courage, constancy, creativity, materiality, can allow the revolutionary to bring the means they possess to fruition and build their project.
And this concerns both the analytical and practical aspects. Once again a dichotomy appears that needs to be seen in its inconsistency, i.e. as it is usually intended by the dominant logic.
No project can be just one or other of these aspects. Each analysis has a different angle and development according to the organisational proposal, which needs to be assisted by other, similar analyses.
The revolutionary who is unable to master the analytical and organisational part of his project will always be at the mercy of events, constantly turning up after things have happened, never before.
The aim of the project, in fact, is to s e e in order to f o r e s e e. The project is a prosthesis like any other of man’s intellectual elaborations. It allows action, makes it possible, prevents it from being extinguished in pointless discussions and improvisation. But it is not the ‘cause’ of action, it contains no element of justification in this sense. If correctly intended, the project itself is action, whereas the latter is itself a project, becomes fully part of it, makes it grow, enriches and transforms it.
A lack of awareness of these fundamental premises of the work of the revolutionary often leads to confusion and frustration. Many comrades who remain tied to what we could call r e f 1 e x interventions often suffer backlashes such as demotivation and discouragement. An external event, (often repression) gives the stimulous to act. This often ends or burns itself out and the intervention has no more reason to exist. Hence the frustrating realisation that one has to begin all over again. It is like digging away at a mountain with a spoon. People do not remember. They forget quickly. Aggregation does not occur. Numbers decline. Nearly always the same people. The comrade who can only act by ‘reflex’ often survives by going from radical refusal, to shutting himself away in disdainful silence, to having fantasies of destroying the world (human beings included). On the other hand, many comrades remain attached to what we might call r o u t i n e interventions, i.e. those involving periodicals (papers, reviews, books) or meetings (congresses, conferences, debates, etc.). Here again the human tragedy does not fail to present itself. It is not usually so much a question of personal frustration (which also exists, and you can see it), as the comrade’s transformation into a congressual bureaucrat or editor of barely readable pages that try to hide their inconsistency by going into daily events, explaining them according to their own point of view. As we can see, it is always the same story.
So, the project must be p r o p o s i t i o n a I. It must take the initiative. First operatively, concerning things to be seen or done in a certain way. Then organisationally: how to go about doing these things.Many people do not realise that the things to be done (in the context of the class clash) are not set down once and for all, but take on different meanings throughout time and in changing social relations. That leads to the need for their theoretical evaluation. The fact that some of these things actually do go on for a long time as though they cannot change, does not mean that this is so. For example, the fact that there is a need to organise in order to strike the class enemy necessarily signifies extension in time. Means and organisation tend to crystallise. And in some respects it is well that this should be so. That is not to say that it is necessary to re-invent everything each time one re-organises, even after being hit by repression. But it does mean that this ‘resumption’ should not be an exact repetition. Preceding models can be submitted to criticism, even if basically they remain valid and constitute a considerable starting point. At this point one often feels attacked by misinformed critics and preconceived ideas, and at all costs wanting to avoid being accused of being an ‘irreducible’, which actually sounds quite positive, but implies an incapacity to understand the evolution of social conditions as a whole.
So it is possible to use old organisational models, so long as they are submitted to a radical critique. But what could this critique be? In a word, pointing out the uselessness and danger of centralised structures, the mentality of delegating, the myth of the quantitative, the symbolic, the grandiose, the use of the media, etc. As we can see, it is a question of a critique aimed at showing the other side of the revolutionary horizon, the anarchist and libertarian side. To refuse centralised structures, organisation charts, delegates, quantity, symbolism, entrism, etc., means to fully adopt anarchist methods. And an anarchist proposition requires a few preliminary conditions.
The latter might seem (and in certain aspects is) less effective at first. Results are more modest, not so obvious, have all the aspects of dispersion and that cannot be reduced to one single project. They are pulverised, diffused, i.e. they concern minimal objectives that cannot be related to one central enemy immediately, at least as this comes to be presented in the descriptive iconography that power itself has invented. Power has every interest in showing its peripheral ramifications and supporting structures in a positive light, as though they had purely social functions that are indispensable to life. Given our incapacity to expose them, it effectively conceals the connections that pass from these peripheral structures to repression, then to consensus. This is the not inconsiderable task that awaits the revolutionary, who should also expect incomprehension concerning actions when they begin to strike, hence the need for ‘clarification’. And herein lies another trap. To make these clarifications in ideological terms would reproduce concentration and centrality exactly. Anarchist methods cannot be explained through an ideological filter. Any time that this has happened it has simply been a juxtaposition of our methods on to practices and projects that are far from libertarian.
The concept of delegating is criticised because it is a practice which, aside from being authoritarian, leads to increasing processes of aggregation. Refusal to delegate could lead to building i n d i r e c t a g g r e g a t i o n, a free organisational form. Separate groups then, united by the methods employed, not by hierarchical relations. Common objective, common choices, but i n d i r e c t. Not feeling the need to propose aggregational relationships that sooner or later end up producing hierarchical organisation charts (even if they are horizontal, claiming to adhere to anarchist methods), which turn out to be vulnerable to any increase in the winds of repression, where each does their own thing. It is the myth of the quantitative that needs to fall. The myth that numbers ‘impress’ the enemy, the myth of ‘strength’ before coming out into the struggle, the myth of the ‘liberation army’ and other such things.
So, without wanting it, old things are transforming themselves. Models, objectives and practices of the past are revolutionising themselves. Without a shadow of doubt the final crisis of the ‘political’ method is emerging . We believe that all attempts to impose ideological models on to subversive practices have disappeared for ever.
In due proportion, it is the world as a whole that is refusing the political model. Traditional structures with ‘strong’ political connotations have disappeared, or are about to. The parties of the left are aligning themselves with those of the centre and the parties of the right are also moving in that direction, so as not to remain isolated. The democracies of the West are moving closer to the dictatorships of the East. This yielding of the political structure corresponds to profound changes in the economic and social field. Those who have a mind to manage the subversive potential of the great masses are finding themselves facing new necessities. The myths of the past, also that of the ‘controlled class struggle’ are finished. The great mass of exploited have been drawn into mechanisms that clash with the clear but superficial ideologies of the past. That is why the parties of the left are moving close to the centre, which basically corresponds to a zeroing of political distinctions and a possible management of consensus, at least from the administrative point of view.
It is in things to be done, short term programmes such as the management of public welfare, that distinctions are arising. Ideal (therefore ideological) political projects have disappeared. No one (or hardly anyone) is prepared to struggle for a communist society, but they could be regimented into structures that claim to safeguard their immediate interests once again. Hence the increasing appearance of wider struggles and structures, national and supranational parliaments.
The end of politics is not in itself an element that could lead one to believe there has been ‘anarchist’ turning in society in opposition to attempts at indirect political management. Not at all. It is a question of profound changes in the modern structure of capital that are also taking place on an international level, precisely because of the greater interdependence of the various peripheral situations. In turn, these changes mean that the political myths of the past are finished as a means of control, resulting in a passage to methods better suited to the present time: the offer of better living conditions in the short term, a higher level of satisfaction of primary needs in the East, work for everybody in the West. These are the new rules of the course.
No matter how strange it might seem, however, the general crisis in politics will necessarily bring with it a crisis in hierarchical relations, the delegate, etc., all the relations that have tended to put the terms of class opposition in a mythical dimension. It will not be possible for this to go on for much longer without consequences, many people are starting to see that the struggle must not pass through the mythical dimension of politics but enter the concrete dimension of the immediate destruction of the enemy.
There are also those who, basically not wanting to know what the work of the revolutionary should be in the light of the above social changes, come to support ‘soft’ methods of opposition, claiming that they can obstruct the spreading of the new power through passive resistance, ‘delegitimation’ and such like. In my opinion this is a misunderstanding caused by the fact that they consider modern power, precisely because it is more permissive and based on wider consensus, to be less ‘strong’ than that of the past based on hierarchy and absolute centralisation. This is a mistake like any other, deriving from the fact that in each one of us there is a residual of the equation ‘power equals strength’ whereas the modern structures of dominion are dismantling themselves piece by piece in favour of a weak but efficient form, perhaps even worse still than a strong, boorish one. The new power penetrates the psychological fabric of society right to the individual, drawing him into it, whereas the latter remained external. It made a lot of noise, could bite, but basically only built a prison wall that can be climbed sooner or later.
The many aspects of the project also make the perspective of the revolutionary task multiple. No field of activity can be excluded in advance. For the same reason there cannot be privileged fields of intervention that are ‘congenial’ to one particular individual. I know comrades who do not feel inclined to take up certain kinds of activity—let us say the national liberation struggle—or certain revolutionary practices such as small specific actions. The reasons vary, but they all lead to the (mistaken) idea that one should only do the things one enjoys. This is mistaken, not because it is wrong that one of the sources of action must be joy and personal satisfaction, but because the search for individual motivations can preclude a wider and more significant kind of research, that based on the totality of the intervention. To set off with preconceived ideas about certain practices or theories means to hide—due to ‘fear’—behind the idea, nearly always mistaken, that these practices and theories do not ‘please’ us. But all pre-conceived refusal is based on scarce knowledge of what one is refusing, on not getting close to it. The satisfaction and joy of the moment comes to be seen as the only thing that matters, so we shut ourselves off from the perspective of the future. Often without wanting to, we become fearful and dogmatic, resentful of those who do manage to overcome these obstacles, suspicious of everybody, discontented and unhappy.
The only acceptable limits are those of our capabilities. But these limits should always be seen during the course of the event, not as something that exists beforehand. I have always started off from the idea (obviously fantasy, but good operatively) of having no limits, of having immense capabilities. Then day to day practice has taken on the task of pointing out my actual limits to me and the things that I can and can’t do. But these limits have never stopped me beforehand, they have always emerged as insurmountable obstacles later on. No undertaking, however incredible or gigantic, has prevented me from starting. Only afterwards, during the course of particular practices, has the modesty of my capabilities come to light, but this has not prevented me from obtaining p a r t i a 1 results, the only things that are humanly attainable.
But this fact is also a problem of ‘mentality’, i.e. of a way of seeing things. Often we are too attached to the immediately perceivable, to the socialist realism of the ghetto, city, nation, etc. We say we are internationalist but in reality we prefer other things, things we know better. We refuse real international relations, relations of reciprocal comprehension, of overcoming barriers (also linguistic ones), of collaboration through mutual exchange. One even refuses specific local relations, their myths and difficulties. The funny thing is that the first are refused in the name of the second, and the second in the name of the first.
The same thing happens concerning the specific preparatory activity of finding revolutionary means (instruments). Again, this decision is often automatically delegated to other comrades. This is due to fear or remorse which, if gone into carefully, have little to say for themselves.
The professionalism that is flaunted elsewhere is not welcome in anarchist methodology, but neither is downright refusal or preconceived ideas. The same goes for what is happening concerning the present mania for experience as a thing in itself, the urgency of ‘doing’, personal satisfaction, the ‘thrill’. The two extremes touch and interpenetrate.
The p r o j e c t sweeps these problems aside because it sees things in their globality. For the same reason the work of the revolutionary is necessarily linked to the project, identifies with it, cannot limit itself to its single aspects. A partial project is not a revolutionary one, it might be an excellent work project, could even involve comrades and resources for long periods of time, but sooner or later it will end up being penalised by the reality of the class struggle.

STRANGE VICTORIES - The anti-nuclear movement in the U.S. and Europe

2010-08-31T03:38:00.000-07:00

1979

Midnight Notes
This pocketbook edition published in 1985 by Elephant Editions

Cover illustration and design by Clifford Harper

Introduction by Alfredo M. Bonanno

CONTENTS
Introduction

Strange victories

I - Who Is Involved in the Anti-Nuclear Movement?
II - The Ideology (Self Definition) of the Nuclear
Movement in Relation to Capitalist Planning
III - Organisation and Tactics of the
Anti-Nuclear Movement

IV - Strange Victories: The Anti-Nuclear Movement and the Nuclear Industry

V - The Anti-Nuclear Movement in the Cities

INTRODUCTION
At a certain point in their development, capital and the State manage to rationalise exploitation. This is happening at the present time to a certain extent: pure repression is giving way to 'being involved'.
These new forms of repression must be understood if we do not want to remain tied to out-of-date forms of revolutionary activity.
The new forms of involvement, though not entirely new, are now being developed in more original and highly dangerous ways.
The permissive State, although it still uses dissuasion (in the form of police and army), is tending towards dialogue, allowing a certain amount of freedom of movement and self-regulation so that everyone becomes controllable at all levels.
In this way the counter-revolutionary role of so-called dissent is fundamental to maintaining order and continuing exploitation. Both the bosses and their servants are depending more and more on these forms of recuperation in preference to pure repression by armed forces - although the latter continue to remain the ultimate element in convincing and repressing.
So the State is asking the revolutionary movement to collaborate in maintaining social peace. Comrades shouldn't jump back in horror at such a statement. The State can ask what it wants of us. It is up to us to understand whether we are being drawn into manoeuvred consensus, or whether our dissent still has an element of rupture. The State's projects are continually being updated. One minute they are putting up a wall of repression, the next they are softer, decodifying behaviour that was once condemned and persecuted. The State and capital have no moral code of conduct. They adapt according to the Machiavellian thesis of using the brute force of the lion one day and the cunning of the fox the next.
Today might well be the moment for the fox's velvety paw.
One extremely useful element in the present day situation, that gives capital's restructuring a seeming aspect of being a spontaneous process of adjustment, is the massive presence of 'dissent'. We must say `no'. They are putting through anti-union laws, we must say no. They are putting missiles at Greenham Common, we must say no. They are building more and more prisons with special wings, we must say no..
This no must be shouted aloud, not be a simple whisper of platonic dissent. It mustn't pass into action, but remain simply a 'minority' demonstration of disagreement. It is then up to the governing forces to explain the practical impossibility of such a choice, which is nevertheless based on the 'highest moral values'. As good a way as any of making a fool of people, extinguishing their potential aggressiveness, directing this impetus of rebellion towards activities that are dissent in appearance alone, and in fact are counter-revolutionary in every aspect.
This is what is being asked of the peace movement, and that is what they are supplying. As an ideology pacifism lends itself to being exploited for the production of social peace. An indigestible mixture of Christian sacrifice and millenarian fideism, it is much appreciated by the State as a means of involvement. Even the peace demonstrations that comrades are so impressed by are an element that is much appreciated in the spectacular framework of exploitation. The fact that these demonstrations are innocuous has nothing to do with whether or not they clash with the police. They are recuperated on all sides because of their being sporadic and passive as far as the State is concerned, and because of their basic lack of ideology as far as the peace movement is concerned.
These new priests, clutching on to the altar of their own sacrifice, are incomprehensible to people who would like to participate in struggles, but not for that are prepared to abdicate their patrimony of violent attack against the State. This is what the State puts its trust in, their incomprehensibility, allowing the peace movement demonstrations that are forbidden to others, but intervening as soon as any signs appear of an outside presence within the pacifist organisations.
The same can be said for trade union struggles, even autonomous ones, 'self-managed' ones, or those carried out under the leadership of the few anarcho-syndicalist organisations. The State is also asking them for the maintenance of social peace. Their ineffectiveness is the guarantee of their possibility of continuing. Revolutionary ineffectiveness immediately transformable into complying with the State's counter-revolutionary requests. Their function today is that of lending credibility to the process of restructuring that is taking place, at least in the most sensitive areas, extinguishing dangerous attempts at isolated actions of attack in total disaccord with any kind of trade union representation.
We should also be more aware of the counter-revolutionary role of the new commune movement, the vegetarian and ecology movements, the anti-psychiatry movements and all the tendencies that are trying to split up the real contrast with power, or are trying to reduce it to simple, formal dissent.
We can consider all forms of strictly formal dissent and all attempts to divide the class conflict into a multitude of sectors, as being functional to power. This is exactly what the couple capital/ State want to happen.
Many comrades in good faith fall prey to this contradiction.
The best of them, those really in good faith, are only misinformed, or simply stupid due to lack of analytical clarity. They are the ones who limit themselves to great declarations of principle against nuclear weapons, or are abstentionists every time the elections come around, or hand out leaflets against special prisons, then return to their lairs to wait for the next time to repeat the sacrosanct ritual of the eternally obvious.
The worst, those in bad faith, are the skeptics who have lost their enthusiasm of the past and now understand everything about life; and the ambitious ones trying to get a little allotment of power on which to seminate their swindles. On the one hand the super-intelligent looking down on those limiting themselves to carrying on with the struggle; on the other, those advancing their careers by kissing the hands of the labour party or the arses of the dissenting church. The nausea that overcomes us on seeing the first is equal only to that which we feel on seeing the second at work. There are many ways of gazing at one's navel or furthering one's career, but these are among the worst.
We must oppose the advancing counter-revolution with all our strength. First of all with analytical clarity.
It is time to put an end to shyness. It is time to come out and say things clearly and without half measures. Beautiful declarations of principle are no longer enough, in fact they have become merchandise for trading with power. We must engage seriously in a struggle to the end, an organised and efficient struggle which has a revolutionary project and is capable of singling out its objectives and means.
The following piece of work, on the anti-nuclear movement in the US and Europe, although written in 1979, is still a valid contribution to this search for clarity as a basis for struggle. Since the time it was written the anti-nuclear/peace movement has grown and multiplied mainly due to the mining of Europe with nuclear missiles. This growth has been of massive quantity, but the logic and quality remain the same as when the following was written. All the Alfredo M. Bonanno

STRANGE VICTORIES

After the Three Mile island accident in Pennsylvania, we all know that we pay not only for our electricity, but also for financing the destruction of our health. Nuclear reactors are not only expensive and ineffective, they are a permanent danger. In 1978 alone, atomic plants had 2,835 'incidents' and they ran at only 67.2% of their capacity. (New York Times, April 15, 1979). Radioactivity causes cancer, leukemia and genetic damages. It doesn't respect county or State borders; radioactive iodine contaminates our milk and we have no means to control it. Radioactive clouds travel with the wind, and the pollution of our water and food distributes it everywhere.
Electricity is only a part of our energy expenditures. We pay also for gas, heating and gasoline. In the last few months the prices for fuel started rising again, after they had risen more than 100% between 1973 and 1975. With Carter's deregulation of petroleum prices, they will go up continuously in the coming years and probably will reach European levels of 2.50 dollars per gallon of gasoline very soon.
The Government and the energy companies tell us that 'we' are in a squeeze since the 'energy shortage' forces 'us' to build nuclear plants and raise rates and prices. They tell us that the Arabs have us by a string and 'we' must 'protect' ourselves. Most people have not bought this story. Polls show that 70% of the people do not believe there is an energy shortage - simply because it is obviously false. 78% believe the companies 'just want to make more money'. (New York Times, April 10, 1979). All other fuel prices are going up as well: natural gas, coal, uranium and oil. This has nothing to do with the Arabs (all our coal and most of our uranium is mined domestically) nor with shortages (US coal reserves could last for hundreds of years and there is more crude oil available than ever before). The energy prices go up because the companies have the power to raise them. They control oil wells, coal-mines and power plants, and they can blackmail us at will because we depend entirely on their supply. We have only the choice between paying or freezing to death. Higher energy prices are a continuous attack on our wages and force us therefore to work more and to work for the plans of the companies, who are not interested in supplying the people with energy, but are interested in making money and strengthening their control over us.
The nuclear power plants are the ultimate peak of this blackmail. The energy companies demand not only that we should accept higher energy prices, but also higher levels of radioactivity, cancer and fear. Not only must we work more and harder to pay the bills, but also we must lose our health and wellbeing. With the threat of nuclear danger, they can impose 'safety measures' on us, install a police State, order us to leave our homes, evacuate our families, respect curfews. How can we know that they tell the truth? Most people don't believe them anyway; polls showed that only 16% of the people believe what government and nuclear officials said during the Three Mile island accident.
What can we do against this politics of fear and exploitation? First, we have to reject this crisis mentality they want to impose on us. We must know that there is enough energy, enough money (in 1978 the capitalists made record profits of 130.7 billion dollars), enough food, clothing and housing for everybody, employed or unemployed, waged or unwaged. And if problems of energy conservation arise, we must make sure that the people themselves control such measures and that they are not dictated to us by the energy-capitalists in order to make more money. Before we can speak of energy conservation, we must have more power.
Higher prices and radioactivity hit everybody everywhere: blacks, hispanics and urban whites as well as farmers, small-town residents and atomic workers around nuclear plants. This fact is crucial for the future development of the anti-nuclear movement which started in semi-rural and sub-urban areas. This movement was a first response of concerned people against nuclear development. This anti-nuclear movement is a social movement with its specific type of people involved, with its specific ideology, tactics and experiences. Now that the situation is changing, that 'Everybody' is hit by the nuclear issue, the experiences of the movement must be studied and - if necessary - criticised. It is important both for 'old' anti-nuclear militants and for 'new' people in urban areas who are entering mobilisations against nuclear energy to find out if and how the anti-nuclear movement can play a role in our struggle against the power of capital.
In the case of the anti-nuclear movement, there is a risk that it could be used against poor urban people. As long as the anti-nuclear movement does not clearly attack the price policies of the energy, companies and does not link the `health' and `money' issues, it cannot be understood by people who are struggling for daily survival. In such a situation capital can play the anti-nuclear movement against the poor or vice versa. For example, the energy companies and the State (the government) can blame the anti-nuclear movement for the higher electric bills; or they can try to impose solar energy and higher energy prices.
We are writing this paper because we are convinced that the anti-nuclear movement in general and the 'new' anti-nuclear movement in urban areas in particular could be a catalyst for struggles against the 'crisis' and capitalism's attack against the working class. Now the most urgent problem is: How can we organise against capital? In attempting to answer this question, we shall look at the anti-nuclear movement as a movement of social organisation, determined by the class interest of the people involved in it, by its relationship to capital, its historical, geographical and psychological conditions.
We shall not specifically deal with the nuclear issue as an environmental and technological problem. We know that any technology developed by capital is used as a weapon against the working class, i.e., ourselves. Further, the nuclear industry is only one of the actual fronts of new technology, together with the computer and chemical industries. Nuclear energy production is used to break the struggles of the coal-miners in the US or of the oil-workers in the Middle East and in the US. (This is the reason why coal, an abundant energy source which could be made safe with available technology, is not used instead of uranium.) There is no such thing as an independent 'technological and scientific progress' occurring outside class struggle. 'Progress' has become another word for 'more effective exploitation' and has nothing to do with our needs and wishes. The present capitalist technology has been shaped for exploitation and control over our lives. It is not a neutral means that can be used in a different class context. There will be no 'liberated assembly-line,' no 'socialist nuclear power,' no 'acceptable risks.' On the other hand, there is no reason why capital could not be able to use solar energy against us, although so far they have not.

Chapter One

Who Is Involved in the Anti-Nuclear Movement?

Strangely, the anti-nuclear movement did not originate in highly populated, industrialised and polluted areas where, it could be assumed, a struggle against environmental dangers would seem to be urgent. The anti-nuclear movement is not an immediate response to the attack on the quality of life which takes place in the 'industrial triangles' of the US and Europe. In West Germany, where the anti-nuclear movement first started, it emerged not in the traditionally polluted Ruhr area, but in South-west Germany in a rural zone of vineyards and small, farmers (Whyl, 1974). The same was true for France (Malville, near Lyons, is situated in an essentially rural area), Switzerland (Kaiseraugst, Goesgen, etc.) and Italy (e.g. the nuclear plant of Montalto di Castro in the Maremme). A similar type of area is found near Seabrook nuclear plant in New England, which is one of the few regions of the US where an older type of small or middle-sized farming and fishing exists (in the rest of the US we should rather speak of agricultural industry).
But the strange location of the anti-nuclear movement is not so puzzling at a second look: It is due to the conscious choice of the nuclear industry. The 'back-to-the-land' movement of capital is easily explained by the 'bad experiences' it had in the metropolitan, industrialised centres. Urban riots, student agitations, workers' struggles were developed and favoured by the urban environment. The capitalists realised that the cities were dangerous for their health.
Nuclear development presented possibilities for a new organisation of industrial geography, a new industrial frontier. Never before in the history of capital have the sites of industrial installations been more carefully planned than nuclear power plants. Some decisive aspects of this planning have been:
-minimising risk in case of accidents (rural areas are less populated and pose fewer problems in case of evacuation);
-safety-distance from dangerous, unreliable class-sector (problems of sabotage, 'bad' influence on personnel);
-strategic locations around metropolitan agglomerations (very useful for evacuations for different purposes, e.g. in case of social troubles);
-political passivity or conservatism of the local populations; (in this respect capital made some of the most painful miscalculations).1
Plant locations were chosen from the beginning to prevent protests and organised actions against or within nuclear plants. The problems of communication and organisation in rural areas compounded by the complicated class situation mixing small owners, wage-depending people or rural intelligentsia, coupled with the relatively immense financial power of the companies, were supposed to guarantee a quiet development and disarm any opposition.
While this plan worked in some cases, it did not in others. Protests developed despite these difficult conditions. Pay-offs to local governments and some advantages to local businesses could not always effectively divide the local population. However, the anti-nuclear protest of local com-munities usually did not go beyond legal actions (voting in town meetings, law-suits, petitions, media action, etc.), although there are some significant exceptions, mostly due to the farmers' radicalism (tractor blockades in Germany, cutting of power lines in Minnesota, and other episodes). For them the construction was not a mere 'danger for mankind during the next 500,000 years,' but a direct attack on their income.2 Confronted with the allied power of the companies and the government, these legal actions led mostly to a dead-end. Only the emergence of an additional factor decided whether the struggle would move to a higher level or the nuclear industry had won that round. Only where this 'factor' was present can we speak of an anti-nuclear movement.

An additional factor

This 'additional factor' was introduced by an important change in the class structure of some rural areas which occurred in the early seventies, a period when the planning and location of the nuclear plants had already been completed. (In the US, this process takes about 12- years; while in Europe it used to be faster, but most plants now completed had obviously been planned in the sixties.) The change we are speaking of is the resettlement of urban intellectual workers (wage-depending professional, teachers, artists, journalists, social-workers, students, government workers, etc.) in rural zones, a move largely stimulated by the various sixties movements. As a 'back-to-the-land' movement, it chose rural areas which were not too isolated and too far from the cities, for it needed continuous contacts with the educational and cultural industries.
In the US this 'additional factor' decisively emerged in two regions: in New England and in California.3 These are, not surprisingly, the areas where anti-nuclear movements have developed most continuity and mass-character. The choice of these areas is directly linked to the specific interests of this intellectual proletariat (we use the term proletariat in the original marxist sense: all the people who live on a wage and cannot live on their capital without working - 'independently of whether the wage is high or low'.) On the level of production these areas are the major national or regional centres of the education industry in which workers receive 'skills' and qualifications which result in a higher valuation of their labour power. They provide a variety of full-time, part-time, seasonal and temporary jobs themselves and in related businesses, such as bureaucracy, social assistance, book-stores, printing-shops, building maintenance, drug-dealing, culture, art, sports, psychiatry, restaurants and small shops, etc. A look at the rate of private and public education expenditures per inhabitant in these areas can give some evidence.
The most typical case for us is Massachusetts, with expenditures far above the 2nd ranking New York, and forming the centre of the New England area, while New Hampshire and Connecticut follow close behind in the national ranks. Moreover, rural New England has a good network of highways leading to nearby major cities like New York and Boston, the educational and cultural centre of the US. Thus, rural New England has attracted a lot of intellectual workers in search of a quiet country life. To a lesser degree, this is also true of California around San Fransisco, and other areas. Rural New England and California offered not only possibilities of external jobs, but also conditions for cheap reproduction of this type of worker. By the term reproduction we mean all the work that has to be done in order to keep us in shape so that we are able to work: eating, clothing, relaxation, medical care, emotional 'services', discipline, education, entertainment, cleaning, procreation, etc. Sometimes what we call 'life' is, in reality, only reproduction for capitalist exploitation. Cheap reproduction is particularly urgent for the intellectual workers as they hold only temporary jobs or part-time jobs or live on welfare and food-stamps.
In New England, subsistence farming, collective reproduction (communal living) and mutual use of the skills of the highly qualified intellectual labour-force via the substitution of capital-intensive reproduction (hospitals, micro-wave ovens) by labour-intensive reproduction techniques (macrobiotics, yoga, bioenergetics, meditation, massage, walks and fresh air) were favoured by the agri-cultural structure, the climate (which imposes a certain discipline), the vicinity of metropolitan areas and low real estate prices.
This constellation allowed a certain refusal of full-time intellectual work and the loosening of capitalist control over it. Under this aspect, the retreat to the countryside and the alternative lifestyle are forms of struggle by intellectual workers against capital. Capital has always had problems in controlling its intellectual labour force mainly because the profit returns are indirect and slow, particularly for disciplines like philosophy, literature and art. This loose tie between intellectual work and capital does not imply that it stands outside of capital, even if it is temporarily devoted to apple-picking, woodworking or cow-milking, and if it is geographically separated from the centres of formal capitalist command (like universities, publishing houses, etc.). There is no such thing as 'outside of capital' in a capitalist society: from a long-term perspective, the 'back-to-the-land' intellectuals are just testing out new capitalist possibilities of dealing with certain, problems of cheap production.
One of the requirements for the cheap reproduction of the 'back-to-the-land' intellectual labour-force is a relatively intact natural surrounding. Nature, if intact, is cheap or even free. Nature as a means of reproduction is important for these intellectual workers because the specialisation and one-sidedness of their work generates psychological instability and requires periods of complete relaxation without jarring sensorial stimuli (noise, media, social contacts). Nature is the most efficient compensation for intellectual stress since it represents the unity of body and mind against the capitalist division of labour. Extensive consumption of nature has traditionally been an element of the reproduction of intellectual workers. (It started with Rousseau, then came the Romantics, Thoreau, the early tourists, Tolstoi, artists' colonies in the Alps, etc.). The ecological movement responds directly to the class interests of the intellectual sector of the proletariat and the struggle against nuclear power plants is a mere extension of this struggle.

Movement in New England

The history of the Green Mountain Post Films is a good illustration for this process in New England. It's story began in 1967 in Washington, DC, when Marshall Bloom and Ray Mungo founded Liberation News Service as an essential means of exchanging news in the fast-growing anti-war movement. By 1968 LNS suffered an irreconcilable split between 'orthodox Marxist-Leninists' and a 'less doctrinaire' faction led by Bloom and Mungo. Mungo and friends decided to leave New York City, then home of LNS, and resettle at a farm in Packers Corner, Vermont; and, soon after, Bloom and his band found a farm in Montague, West-Massachusetts, some 15 miles away.
A weekly news service dispatch came out of the Montague barn for a few months, but it trickled off under the pressure of a New England winter. The abrupt switch to farm life temporarily forced media and politics into the background. The two communities were busy struggling to survive. Then, in November, 1969, Marshall Bloom killed himself, supposedly due to the isolation. His death served to strengthen the farm-people's resolve to keep working in the media. Over the years the two farms produced a considerable amount of books and articles. After the Vietnam war, political concerns were largely subsumed by the demands of rural self-sufficiency. It takes years to get an organic farm going; fortunately, haying, the maple trees' gift of sap, and authors' fees provided some cash.
Then in December 1973, the Northeast Utilities Company announced plans to build a twin-tower nuclear plant three miles from the farm in Montague. One of the first reactions was Sam Lovejoy, a long-term farm resident, cutting down a 500-foot weather observation tower which was to precede the proposed plant. He then hitched a ride to the Montague police station and handed in a statement on the necessity of civil disobedience in times of environmental emergency. He went on trial and won.
The two farms have provided scores of informal ideologists and leaders of the anti-nuclear movement in the New England area: Harvey Wasserman, Anna Gyorgy and others. They produced several films and also distributed a film on the Whyl anti-nuclear movement which had a strong influence on the movement against the nuclear plants in New England, particularly at Seabrook. (cf New Age, Special Report, 1978 and Ray Mungo, Famous Long Ago).
The crisis after 1973 has intensified also the attacks of capital against the intellectual proletariat which had conquered certain levels of power in the sixties (represented mainly by the high educational budgets and the expansions of the universities and research institutions) and had been able to defend itself against tight command structures. The counter-attack of capital was mainly oriented toward regaining control over the productivity of the intellectual labour force. By cuts of educational and university budgets (engineered with the 'fiscal crisis'), food-price inflation and destruction of the rural retreats (where reproduction is cheap), capital has tried in the last few years to regain control. This process of devaluation put the underemployed intellectual proletariat in a tight squeeze.
By 1976, when the first wave of attacks was over, it was clear that the job-perspectives for intellectual workers would be dim for decades and that they. could not expect to get out individually or by intensified retraining (revaluation). In 1976 the Clamshell Alliance was founded, the first sentence of the founding statement being:
"RECOGNIZING: 1) That the survival of human-kind depends upon preservation of our natural environment." It is obvious that the 'survival of mankind' is intimately linked to the survival of this intellectual proletariat, and the preservation of - 'our' natural environment can be taken literally. (Intellectuals have always had the precious talent of presenting their own class interests as those of 'humankind' - as though their own class interests were something dirty).
The 'choice' of the anti-nuclear issue as terrain of struggle is to be explained not only by the specific history of the two farms in New England or other similar developments. For underemployed or temporarily employed workers it is very difficult-to organise on the job. The jobs are unstable, the possibilities of mass struggle are minimal (the worker-boss ratio being low or, in the case of self-managed or 'alternative' jobs, reaching 1/1), and sabotage is ineffective in the case of intellectual work and in the absence of expensive capital goods. All this pushed the struggle immediately on the level of the 'general' circulation of capital, on the level of 'society', of 'humankind'. As it is not possible for them to attack any specific capital from the inside, the struggle has to be launched from the outside.
The anti-nuclear protests of local residents presented such a possibility of intervention from the outside. A unifying factor from outside could intervene in a dead-lock situation of conflicting interests of small store-keepers, farmers, workers connected with the nuclear plan, professional petty-bourgeois, etc. The anti-nuclear militants of the 'second movement' could keep together this strange class mixture and at the same time use it as 'hostage' against an isolation of their own struggle. So it was possible to forge that 'misalliance' between former urban radicals and rural conservatives. This alliance was, however, never without problems, and the division between 'locals' and anti-nuclear militants remained clear on the level of real actions, with the locals, for example, supporting occupations or demonstrations mainly passively.
The development of this movement was facilitated by the fact that a large number of the New England "subsisters" had had experiences in the anti-war movement, i.e., in mobilization techniques, media work, information finding, legal work, etc. Further, once the movement was started it developed its own dynamic reproductive functions for the militants as it provided social contacts and interesting events for old politicos who began getting bored in the relative isolation of the country life. Additionally, the movement became a source of income and created jobs for intellectual workers (writing and selling articles, books, buttons, T-shirts, making conferences, figuring out "alternative energy sources", etc.). In this regard, it was a direct answer to the problem of survival for at least a particular section of "humankind".

Outside the Movement

Perhaps the class structure of the anti-nuclear movement becomes even more clear when we look at those sectors of the working class who are not present in it: factory workers, blacks and urban minority people, atomic workers (with some important exceptions), construction workers and young urban clerical and service workers. All these urban or industrial class-sectors are usually exposed to substantially higher levels of pollution and environmental stress and are, even when living in large cities, not safer in the case of radioactive fallout when a nuclear accident occurs, as the accident at Three Mile island has demonstrated. But these sectors have a qualitatively different relationship to capital, more stable in the case of the factory workers (unions, family, mass organisation on the job) or without any assets in the case of the poor (their labour-power is not very valuable or is even worthless for capital because little money has been invested in their reproduction). Even more different are the types of reproduction, including all "cultural" differences, straight lifestyle, etc.. The indifference of these sectors toward the anti-nuclear movement (or better: issue) is not based on a "lack of education and information" as anti-nuclear militants often bitterly complain. Even very uneducated class-sectors have always been able to grasp the essential knowledge about their problems, if the knowledge were in their interest and presented possibilities of struggle. There is of course no such thing as a "theoretical class interest": the uneducated Iranian masses have been able to beat the CIA-trained Shah regime which was backed by the most educated capital in the world, U.S. capital; scores of poor people have the skills to cheat welfare; workers can deal with their union bureaucrats; etc. Moreover, recent polls show that practically everybody distrusts the energy-lies of the government and the companies. The problem is not education, but organisation and finding ways of effective and direct struggle.
So far, the anti-nuclear movement has presented no promising way of acting for the urban working or unemployed people. "Nuclear danger" alone can trigger activity only if there is an immediate material interest involved. It is pointless to be afraid of something if you can't do anything against it... (That's why nuclear disarmament movements provoke so little reaction, even with a global, horrible catastrophe being possible at any second.) There is no "objective danger" and death is not immediately a political category. Power is.

The European Movement

The formation and class composition of the European anti-nuclear movements follow in general the American pattern. The main difference consists in that in Europe the new intellectual, work-refusing working class has not been geographically concentrated in certain regions. European capital has not been able to organise the division of labour, especially between physical and intellectual work, along well-defined geographical lines. The movement started in Germany where the 'subsistence intellectuals' had reached relatively high levels of autonomy (the installment of the social democratic government in the late 60's marked the impact of the movement and presented large material concessions to students, intellectuals, etc.) which were then brutally attacked in the crisis (ideologically covered by Red Army Faction (RAF, 'Baader-Meinhof')-hunting hysteria. The process of alliance of the 'first anti-nuclear movement' with the 'second movement' was very similar to the one in New England. It represented a 'little political miracle', for the 'alternative' people were officially stigmatised as 'terrorists' and the populations of the nuclear sites were traditionally right-wing.
The lack of geographical division in Europe favoured the class-specific expansion of the movement. Unlike the US, whole sectors of urban young or unemployed workers joined it, not particularly because of the anti-nuclear issue, but for its quality as a general social movement expressing insubordination, rebellion, the possibility of violent struggle, etc. As the whole plethora of the 'new' or 'radical' left quickly filled its ranks, huge demonstrations of dozens of thousands of people like, those in Brokdorf, Kaiseraugst, Malville, Kalkar, etc, were possible. In Europe, everything is geographically and politically 'near', communications are easy and fast, there is a continuity of 'demonstration culture', while the existence of socially 'homogenised' political parties (particularly socialist and communist) immediately link all types of issues to the general political power game. This can be seen by the fact that the nuclear issue has been used by different political parties to overthrow the governments: In Sweden the conservatives used it against the ruling social democrats and won; in France the socialists use it against a 'liberal' government; in Switzerland the anti-nuclear issue was first used by the extreme right, then the extreme left, at last also by the social democrats. This further proves that the anti-nuclear issue by itself fails to provide a definition of the class-content of the movement.

Chapter Two

The Ideology (Self Definition) of the Nuclear Movement in Relation to Capitalist Planning

We have seen that the anti-nuclear movements always express specific class interests, which are not everywhere the same. The nuclear industry creates contradictions not only between certain sectors of the intellectual proletariat and capital, but also between endangered small owners, petty bourgeois, small industrialists and more advanced capital. The nuclear industry represents for the former classes the destruction of older levels of capitalist development and psychological equilibrium. This explains why the anti-nuclear issue and ecological issue in general have been used in the context of reactionary ideologies. We mention 'ecofascism', a right-wing ideology which intends to impose austerity, lower wages and longer working hours, old-style family life, etc, while struggling against new technologies. This tendency had some impact in Europe, but obviously not in the US where the Ku Klux Klan supports the construction of nuclear plants.
One of the characteristics of the ecological and anti-nuclear movement is that the class interests of the people involved in it are never directly expressed in its ideologies. Anti-nuclear militants seem to be classless angels, coming directly from the heaven of a general 'responsibility for humankind' and announcing the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah by a core melt-down. The main argument for this classless ideology is, of course, that radioactivity affects all classes, that radioactive waste will be a problem for capitalists as well as workers. This is only partially true, for rich people have more possibilities to avoid radioactive areas and can protect themselves better. But even if radioactivity might kill everybody, it does not eliminate class difference until that moment (and this is obviously the period we try to deal with).
In reality, the 'classless' ideology of the anti-nuclear movement is an outflow of the class-situation of its members: as they have no possibility of organisation or self-definition on their jobs, they are forced to operate practically and ideologically on the level of the general development of capital. From their point of view, even if capital is seen as the basic relation of society, capital's enemy is taken as 'humankind' or 'all living creatures'. As we read, "Nuclear power is dangerous to all living creatures and to their natural environment. The nuclear industry is designed to concentrate profits and the control of energy resources in the hands of a powerful few, undermining basic principles of human liberty." (Declaration of nuclear resistance of the Clamshell Alliance, November 1, 1977). This is a pure but useful fiction. The abstraction 'humankind' is used to not endanger the alliance with local small owners, professionals, etc. At the same time it is the expression of the class ideology of intellectual workers whose function is to plan for the general development of capital - including the working class - and to sell these plans to us all.

The Anti-Planners

Confronted with 'bad' nuclear capital, this general responsibility above all classes is transformed into the planning of an alternative development. They don't simply reject capitalist development, but rather present an anti-plan: "2) that our energy policy be focused on developing and implementing clean and renewable sources of energy in concert with an efficient system of recycling and conservation." Here again, it is not said who would develop and implement 'our' energy policy. This statement about alternative planning is completely disconnected from problems of power and class and thus reveals its merely ideological function.
The anti-plan ideology is in fact one of the most visible class-ideologies of devaluated intellectual workers. Developing anti-plans means nothing less than finding a new function for such intellectuals in a modified capitalist development. The struggle among the anti-planners of 'our' future is the struggle about the qualifications of future intellectual workers, for the ability to find alternative futures is exactly the function of intellectual workers (on a 'lower' level called management, on a 'higher' level, philosophy).
It is clear from the beginning that less valuable labour-power such as factory workers, clerks, housewives, etc. cannot participate in this type of management of the future. For them the present is more difficult because their relationship with capital is more immediate and irreconcilable. The anti-plan ideology at the same time keeps away such less valuable workers from the movement, thus keeping the class-composition of the movement 'clean'. A worker who is in permanent struggle with management will never try to participate in it, even if it is 'alternative management'. This becomes even more evident when we look at some of these anti-plans:
Ralph Nader proposes a model of 'sane' capitalism based on competition of small capitals under the quality-control of the State. This would provide scores of easy jobs for quality-controllers like Nader and consorts, but no advantages for workers, only tighter control (as is typical in smaller businesses).
The most frequent anti-planning ideologies are based on the development of solar or other alternative energy sources. Solar energy has been promoted particularly around the job-issue. It is said that the nuclear industry destroys jobs and that solar developments would create lots of new jobs. This argument starts usually as Harvey Wasserman puts it in one of his articles (New Age, Special Report 1978): "The conflict lies in the basic difference between a capital-intensive economy and one based on human work." Such a statement is simply false: capitalist intensive economies are based on human work and require still more and more intensive human work. First, the machines, the equipment, etc. of capital intensive industries have to be built ultimately by human work. Then, as a glimpse at statistics shows us, non-industrial and service jobs have been expanding rapidly in the last few years 'despite' nuclear development. While the rate of unemployment has been stable, overall employment has gone up rapidly. More human work than ever is being extracted from workers in the US. It is true: proportionately less people work in manufacture and automated industries in general, especially in the energy sector. But this doesn't mean that capital can or wants to do without human work. It is an optical illusion to see only the automated factory and not the sweatshop on the corner. The fact is, human work, and therefore surplus values (surplus human labour extracted by capital), is extracted in less capital-intensive branches and appears as the profit of highly capital-intensive sectors.
One of the instruments of this surplus-value transfer is the hike of energy and food prices. In order to pay their bills, the energy companies make us work more and more in small shops, as salesmen, typists, clerks, drivers, etc. The capitalist system forms a unity: exploitation in one place can result in profits in another place. This would also certainly be the case in the solar industry. The solar wor-kers would do the shit work and the companies (e.g. steel companies which produce sheet steel) would make the profits. Wasserman's cry for a 'labour-intensive' development means nothing more than offering capital a new source of human work, a new source of exploitation. The problem is not lack of jobs. Nobody cares about jobs, because every job means self-repression, loss of life, repression of one's wishes. The real problem is lack of money, access to power and to the wealth which we have ourselves produced. If jobs are an efficient way to get money, we might accept them as a temporary solution, a tactical compromise with capital. But jobs can never be a solution to the problem of the working class.
Of course, unemployment is also a weapon used by capital against us, because it forces us to choose between misery or accepting the worst jobs at the lowest wages. On the other hand, many people have discovered temporary unemployment as a weapon against capital: you don't get much money, but if you organise with other people (as Harvey Wasserman and his crowd did in New England) you have more time for yourself, can regain some strength and develop your talents. Unemployment is not a question of technology, but a question of power. As long as we don't have the power, the control over all resources and social wealth, 'human work' will always be an attack on us, whether it is planned by Rockefeller or anti-planned by Wasserman.
The same is true, of course, for socialist and communist models, like the one of the CPUSA, which includes even nuclear energy, but 'under democratic control', i.e., managed by the State (whomever that may be). The 'State' is only another name for 'general capital', especially in the energy sector, and what ultimately we might expect from socialist States can be seen in Russia, China, Vietnam, etc.
Even more radical and 'anarchist' anti-plans such as Bookchin's proposals or other similar models, which want to cut back society and economy to small, human, self-sufficient units, without State, capital and money, suffer from the same basic vice: anticipating and planning a future for 'others', assuming the functions of intellectual workers, defending one's own value as qualified labour-power, putting the future as a barrier between the different class sectors in struggle. The ecological and anti-plan ideology is an expression of the fears of intellectual workers in confronting less valuable labour power. They are not ready to devaluate themselves, to renounce their planning and managing function, to 'get down' on the level of immediate, irreconcilable struggle against capitalist exploitation in all its forms. Hiding behind the concept of 'responsibility for humankind', for the future, for 'constructive alternatives', for all 'ifs' and 'buts' (will we have enough energy? who will clean the streets?) they protect their own existence as a distinct sector of the proletariat. This is neither surprising nor vicious - we just have to be aware of it...

Attack Nuclear Capital

However, the anti-nuclear movement need not be 'a movement of anti-planning. Making the nuclear industry a target of struggle is essential at this point. The nuclear industry represents a synthesis of all major trends of capitalist development. All aspects of the general perspective of capital are concentrated in this industry: high capital intensity (70 plants in the US employ only about 79,000 workers and produce 13% of all electricity), extreme discipline and command over the labour force, combination of State and private capital (in research, financing, supervision), internationality, computerisation, and extension of the 'planning horizon' far into the future (nuclear waste). The nuclear industry is able to occupy all free spaces geographically (reactors are independent of local resources), politically (all police-State measures can be justified by radioactive dangers), and in time (even if we 'win', we will have to deal with the nuclear waste; our 'utopias' are infested for thousands of years).
Psychologically, nuclear reactors are symbols of permanent self-control and self-repression, representing the psychological character of the fifties: The controlled explosion, the slow burn-out, corresponds to the process of exploitation of each single worker. Nuclear plants emit bad 'vibes' because they are like capital wants us to be. We are not allowed to explode socially - the reactor is not allowed to explode technically. Our control-rods are family-education, responsibility-ideologies (including 'alternative'), fear of death - for if we melt down, we are punished with the 'technical' death penalty. The nuclear plant is just another element of this blackmailing with death, together with traffic, machines, etc.
In the sixties, some of this technical reliability melted down, millions of intellectuals and other workers refused the stress of self-repression. In this respect, nuclear development is felt like a counter-attack of capital to create new centres of reliability against the marsh of obscure wishes and desires. It is an attack on the working class because it aims at imposing tighter command and higher productivity on it. The anti-progress, anti-command, anti-concrete-and-steel-ideology within the anti nuclear movement represents a basis for unity with other class sectors as it is a genuine expression of the class-situation of the intellectual proletariat as well as of factory and office workers, etc.
Slime against concrete/refusal of responsibility and command against capital/life against work/ wishes against need - these are elements of an ideology and practice which could destroy the planning/ anti-planning dead end.

Chapter Three

Organisation and Tactics of the Anti-Nuclear Movement

Affinity Groups

The problem of practical organisation in a semi-rural area was resolved in the case of the Clamshell Alliance by the system of affinity groups (a term alluding to the 'grupos de afinidad' of the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War). Under the term 'affinity group', different types of social aggregation are included. On the one side, an affinity-group can be constituted by a traditional citizen-committee, i.e., a more or less formal, loose type of social organisation based on occasional meetings and limited types of action (mainly legal and institutional). On the other extreme, an affinity group can coincide with reproductive organisations, e.g., rural communes, where there is no distinction between 'life' and 'politics'.
Typical affinity groups in New England are located between two 'extremes', i.e., they are not necessarily living together but are based on additional common activities (like bicycling, running a mobile kitchen in an old bus, acting, music playing), job-relationship (students) or pre-existing organisational ties (women, gays, American Friends, socialists, vegetarians). Affinity-groups are limited to 20 members who usually live in the same community or neighbourhood. Some of the names of affinity groups evoke this atmosphere of blending 'life' and 'politics': Chautauqua, Critical Mass, Medical Alliance, Nuclear Family, Frustrated Flower Children, Winds of Change, White Trash, Tomato Sauce, Hard Rain.
The activities and social life of affinity-groups are not focused necessarily on the anti-nuclear issue. With this issue it was possible to put together and 'centralise' all these initiatives in the Clamshell Alliance, which then developed a dynamic of its own. Formally, the affinity-groups send their representatives to the Coordination Committee, which, with the help of various subcommittees, organises the activities of the Alliance. Major decisions are made in Clamshell Congresses, meetings of all members of the affinity-groups.
Not being based on economic relationships, the affinity-groups require a continuous effort, ideologically and socially, to keep them together. It seems that those affinity-groups which were not able to develop a certain type of para-economic activities (mostly reproductive, like being in the same yoga-sessions) proved to be very unstable. This organisational problem was partly resolved by the establishment of nonviolence training sessions, which were publically announced by posters and leaflets. An organisational force behind these sessions was the American Friends Service Committee (the 'Quakers'). A typical session consisted of an ideological introduction presented in these terms: "Non-violence is a constant awareness of one's humanity, dignity, and the self-respect of oneself and others. It implies a vision of a type of society you're looking for and therefore means there are certain things you do and do not do." (Wally Nelson as quoted in Valley Advocate, Sept. 1 1976).
After this introduction, the group was divided in different roles, 'police', 'occupiers', 'media', 'Public Service Company officials', 'legal observers', and these roles were played in the form of a fictive occupation. These sessions served not only to enforce nonviolent tactics, but also to create several affinity groups or strengthen shaky groups.
This type of 'artificial' organisation corresponds to the situation of an intellectual proletariat spread over a rural area where communications have to be willingly established and 'spontaneous' mass mobilisations are not possible. The apparent rigidity of this organisation is a means of self-protection and replaces lacking economic ties. Nonviolence training sessions become virtually compulsory for affinity groups. At the same time, participation in occupations and other acts of civil disobedience outside of an affinity group became practically impossible, for 'everybody knows if nobody knows you'.

Consensus

The formally loose and unauthoritarian structure of the affinity groups and the organisation as a whole is compensated by procedures of ideological and social preselection based on the consensus process. Consensus has been presented as a 'non-violent way for people to relate to each other as a group' and practised for centuries by the Quakers. The process is formally democratic like minority/majority systems, delegation systems, and decision by lot. But on the level of class reality, it excludes the less qualified labour force or people who are forced into full-time jobs or are exhausted by work. Consensus, therefore, favours people with psychological and sociological education since physical power is not allowed to enter group decision making.
The exclusion of physical violence is more than compensated by the sophisticated use of psychological and intellectual pressure and the use of time against people who are less skilled and have less time. Consensus can be used as a means of black-mailing, for it imposes the responsibility for the whole group on each member, thus becoming an additional source of ideological and psychological pressure. Theoretically, it could only work in a non-totalitarian way if all members had the same class-status, the same skills, and the same level of reproduction. Otherwise, it becomes the instrument of an elite which forces other people into 'withdrawing from the group'. The consensus-system of decision-making is another symptom of the high value of the labour power of its users, expressed by Wally Nelson as the 'humanity, dignity, and the self-respect of oneself and others'. "It is not a universal, class-independent system and cannot be rigidly adopted in other situations."
A basic set of rules for a consensus process is:
1. Be clear about areas of agreement.
2.The problem/situation needing consideration is discussed. A clear idea of what decision needs to be made is formulated. A proposal can then be made. (Part of this discussion should bring out the present position or course of action of the group relating to the Issue at hand).
3. People present who do not speak are assumed to have no strong feeling on the issue.
4. After adequate discussion, it is asked if there is opposition to the proposal as stated.
5. If there are no objections the proposal can be formally stated and adopted. A consensus has been reached.
6. Opposition to a proposal will block its adoption. Opposition must be resolved for the proposal to be adopted.
7. If the objection cannot be satisfied, and no creative alternative solutions can be offered which meet no objections, then a proposal cannot be adopted as consensus. The group would then continue with the last consensus decision it had on the subject, or lacking such a previous decision the consensus would be to take no action on the proposal.

There are ways to object to a proposal within the consensus:
1. Non-support ("I don't see the need for this, but I'll go along.")
2. Reservations ("I think this may be a mistake, but I can live with it.")
3. Standing aside ("I personally can't do this, but I won't stop others from doing it.")
4. Withdrawing from the group.

Some guidelines from consensus process:
1. Responsibility - Block consensus only for serious principled objections. Help others find ways to satisfy your objections.
2. Respect - Accept objections, trust those who make them to be acting responsibily. Help find ways to satisfy objections.
3. Cooperation - Look for areas of agreement and common ground: avoid competitive right-wrong, win-lose thinking. When a stalemate occurs, look for creative alternatives, or for next-most acceptable proposals. Avoid arguing for your own way to prevail. Present your ideas clearly, then listen to others and try to advance the group synthesis.
4. Creative conflict - avoid conflict-reducing techniques like majority vote, averages, or coin-tossing. Try instead to resolve the conflict. Don't abandon an objection for 'harmony' if it is a real problem you are speaking to. Don't try to trade off objections or to reward people from standing aside.
We all have the same purpose, to non-violently stop nuclear power. Seemingly irreconcilable differences can be resolved if people speak their feelings honestly and genuinely try to understand all positions (including their own) better.
It should be noted that the above section is only an introduction to consensus and how it works. We are all learning more about the consensus process as we use it.
From the Handbook for the Land and Sea Blockade of the Seabrook Reactor Pressure Vessel (Clamshell Alliance)
In certain situations 'consensus' was violated even within the Clamshell Alliance, when the consensus of the informal leaders did not correspond to the consensus of the informal followers. This was the case of the legal rally of June 1978 and the cancellation of a demonstration in November 1978 when the Ku Klux Klan announced a counter-demonstration at Seabrook. In these situations, the real power-structures within the organisation broke through and the democratic fog dissolved. Formal democracy is never a guarantee of real people's power, for it does not answer the basic question: who decided to use democracy? who decided on the timing? who poses the questions? The real power in such situations is always based on criteria like: "Who has the money?Who has the information? Who has the education? Who has the technical instrument (paper, telephones, cars, printing machines, megaphones, guns)? Who has the social connections?" Awareness of these basic elements of power is much more effective in preventing the formation of a ruling clique than consensus-rituals. If there are leaders (which might be justified and effective) they must not be allowed to hide behind democratic smoke-screens, but must be forced to operate in their real function and submit to the control and criticism of the movement. It is better to have an open dialectics of leaders and masses than paralysing illusions.

Civil Disobedience

Not only are affinity-groups and the consensus system based on labour-intensive reproduction techniques, but so is the third tactic of the anti-nuclear movement: nonviolent civil disobedience. With this tactic the movement declares and guarantees the rejection of physical interactions with dis-ciplinary workers (policemen) who are usually less qualified than the anti-nuclear demonstrators. At the basis of nonviolent civil disobedience is a deal with the police centred on the value of the militants themselves. On the one side, the cops will refrain from cracking the heads of the highly trained, actual or potential, professional intellectual workers because they might get into trouble, e.g., the typical antinuclear militant would have easy access to lawyers or might be a lawyer himself and thus could sue the cop without too much trouble. On the other side, the militants take, almost naturally, the attitude of being the cops' bosses and assume they have no need to 'resort to violence'. For example, the advice given to demonstrators for dealing with the cops is first to look them in the eyes and ask "Hi, my name is..., what's yours?" That is, the cops are to be treated as if they were domestic servants to be dealt with 'humanely'. This advice is clearly based on the presumption that the demonstrator is highly qualified; needless to say, if a ghetto resident took up this advice he would have some lumps to pay for such 'humanity'.
1. Everyone must be nonviolent.
2. No weapons.
3. No dogs.
4. No alcohol or drugs (see medical section for exceptions.) 5. Safe boating.
6. All participants in the Blockade are to undergo some form of nonviolent preparation.
7. No damage or destruction of property.
8. Use discretion and safety in crossing police boat lines.
9. Minimum movement after dark. The following are allowable; a. supply and emergency.
b. change of watch in boats.
c. tactical movement in response to movement or action by reactor shippers or enforcers.
d. new arrivals to blockade.
From the Handbook for the Land and Sea Blockade of the Sea-brook Reactor Pressure Vessel (Clamshell Alliance)
The Clamshell does not make explicit the class presuppositions of nonviolent civil disobedience. They write, "...nonviolent direct action has been a means of mobilising popular support for a movement by convincing the general public that actions taken against an unjust situation are valid." However, they do not say when such 'means' are possible. The social power of nonviolent civil disobedience is based on the value embodied in the human capital of the nonviolent militants (invested in them by 'general capital'). Nonviolent civil disobedience is a potentially very effective strategy as long as the value of the labour force involved (e.g. in the case of intellectual workers, especially in New England) is high. It can be used by its proprietors to blackmail single capitals (e.g. the nuclear industry or a single utility company) from the out-side, mobilising the interests of 'general capital' (the 'general public', the State, etc.) against such a single capital. As long as they are nonviolent, the value of their own labour-power protects the militants from being attacked, for their expensive human capital could be damaged.

A nonviolent group action is an orderly, coordinated demonstration of a purpose, and for a purpose. Nonviolence is dependent on reason, imagination and discipline. Here are seven specific guidelines on nonviolence:
1. Our attitude towards officials and others who may oppose us should be one of sympathetic understanding of their personal burdens and responsibilities without support of their official actions.
2. No matter what the circumstances or provocation, do not respond with violence to acts directed against us.
3. Don't call names or make hostile remarks.
4. When faced with an unexpected provocation try to make a reasoned, positive, creative and sympathetic response.
5. Try to speak to the best in all people, rather than seeking to exploit their weakness to what we may believe is our advantage.
6. Try to interpret as clearly as possible to anyone with whom we are in contact - and especially to those who may oppose us - the purpose and meaning of our actions.
7. If at any time you cannot maintain the discipline of non-violence, you should withdraw from the action.
From the Handbook for the Land and Sea Blockade of the Sea-brook Reactor Pressure Vessel (Clamshell Alliance)

Nonviolent militants use their value to 'shame the State'; supposedly, if people as valuable as they violate the law, then the law or policy they are protesting must be obviously unjust! They set themselves and their judgement as the standard for the State's actions. To send such 'fine' people to jail would seem to condemn the State, therefore, and not them. Such 'moral' presumption is ultimately based on the high value capital stored in the militants which is not a universal property of all workers. Thus, nonviolent civil disobedience cannot be a universal remedy, for its effect depends upon who does it.
The antinuclear movement has not always relied exclusively on nonviolent civil disobedience. It has turned to more violent tactics whenever the contract of non-physical behaviour could not work because a sufficient quantity of highly valuated human capital could not be assembled or only a devaluated labour force was present (e.g. in agricultural areas without 'new' intellectuals or in industrial regions). A clear case in point is the anti-nuclear struggle in the Basque country of Spain. The nuclear plant under construction in Lemoniz was bombed by the ETA (a Basque nationalist organisation) on March 17 1978, and two workers were killed. This accident did not impede the anti-nuclear movement but widened its impact. The ETA was not blamed for the death of the two workers, not even by their fellow workers, who protested against the use the unions and left-wing wanted to make of their dead colleagues. (The unions and the parties had used the funeral to denounce 'violence'.) It was revealed that the ETA had announced the bombing half an hour in advance and that the management of the construction firm had refused to evacuate the site. The movement, far from losing support after the bombing, turned the incident against the plant and continued to sponsor mass demonstrations.
The 'nonviolence' tactic works only if the organisation can guarantee the 'non-physical' behaviour of its militants: Nonviolence training sessions and general control over the activist personnel of the movement are therefore vital for this tactic. The leadership of the movement has to be able to control its own class composition and exclude less valuable labour-power (like minority people, blacks, factory workers) which could endanger this tactic. Unless the movement can accumulate substantial 'lumps' of pure, highly valuated labour-power, nonviolent civil disobedience is useless. The exclusion of other class sectors is not enforced on a formal level, but through the whole process of recruitment and 'socialisation' of the movement. Thus, a material aspect of affinity groups is the availability of substantial amounts of spare time as well as ideological qualifications most people do not have.
'Nonviolence' not only requires labour-intensive preparation, it also demands the maintenance of 'nonviolence' discipline and self-repression. For nonviolent civil disobedience implies the acceptance of and submission to violence done to you or to your brothers and sisters. Watching your friends being dragged away by the hair requires additional reproductive work, elaborate ideological motivations (nonviolence ideologies, historical justifications, religious and moral support), physical compensation activities to get rid of accumulated anger and frustration (body politics, acting out therapies), psychological work (love, verbalisation-techniques, art), which, in general, are not available to less valuable, less qualified workers. Underemployed intellectual workers can obtain this type of therapy (even if they cannot afford it directly) because they are largely qualified to do it themselves, being psychologists, philosophers and therapists. The New England region has been a 'greenhouse' for the developments of methods dealing with advanced problems of reproduction. Such levels were rarely attained before, certainly not in Europe, where, consequently, nonviolence tactics could not be applied in the same way.

Violence and Brutality

Much confusion has been created around the question of 'nonviolence' because different points of view - tactical, political, historical, anthropological and philosophical - have been mixed in a jumbled way. From the tactical point of view, non-violent civil disobedience can be very effective under certain class conditions. However, 'non-violence' is not compared to other forms of struggle from the standard of effectiveness by the leaders and ideologists of the antinuclear movement. They give nonviolence an almost holy and ahistorical status. Nonviolence ideologies go far beyond tactical considerations because they are deeply embedded in the class composition of the movement, which then generalises its particular interests into a general philosophical system.
Nonviolent ideologists maintain that humans are by nature nonviolent and that to resort to violence is to begin an endless catastrophic cycle, for 'violence generates anger and more violence'. There is no evidence, however, that there is any 'human nature' either violent or nonviolent. For every 'primitive people' - an ultimately imperialist category - living in 'peace and harmony' there is another glorying in war and slaughter. Facts no more support this 'nonviolence' conception than they support its 'conservative' opposite that views humanity as universally rapacious. However, even a superficial glance at history and literature shows that violence can end violence as well as propagate it.
What is most confusing in this ideology is the defintion of violence itself, for to make a distinction between violence and nonviolence dependent upon whether someone's body is hurt or not is to lend support to the most questionable 'philosophy': the State's. There is no borderline between mind and body, unless we accept criminal laws as our philosphical guideline and framework of our lives, i.e., only 'Bodily damage' is recognised as a crime. The West German State can appear 'humane', therefore, by only psychologically and intellectually torturing political prisoners in sensory deprivation calls. Though the prisoners are sometimes driven to insanity and suicide, the German State can escape censure since it has not 'hurt' them!
The basic problem is not whether we express our feelings, class interests or political aims violently or nonviolently. Our problem is: who controls our actions? In a class society like ours, this comes down to the ultimate question: do our actions express the interests of our class (the working class) or the interests of capital?
One of the more dangerous implications of certain nonviolence ideologists is the identification of the violence of the oppressed with the brutality of their oppressors, which completely merges the working class with capital into an abstract 'humanity'. For the argument that 'violence breeds violence' distorts the real class relations and leads them to blame the State's brutality on the resistance of the working class. Such a logic ends by equating the violence of the Warsaw ghetto fighters with the brutality of their Nazi executioners! But who provokes whom? The State has been in a state of being provoked since it came into existence!
By not making the crucial distinction between working class violence and State brutality we are led to adopt the ideology of our oppressors. On the one side, brutality is a repressive procedure of State agents. A typical example of brutality is Hitler: he was a gentle man in private, loved children, dogs, was a vegetarian and could not stand the sight of blood, the Holocaust, the war, the slaughtering of left-wing militants was a mere bureaucratic operation for him, a 'job' that had to be done. That was Hitler's brutality as well as the 'little Hitlers' that preceded and followed him. For the 'job' of the State is to impose work on the rest of us and this 'job' can only be done if the State has the power to kill or torture us when we refuse to work: this is the brutality of the State. On the other hand, working class violence attacks work. A typical example is the violence of a strike like the one in 'Harlan County' where the struggle against mining wages and working conditions became an armed battle against company guards and scabs. This violence can in no way be equated with the State's brutality. Only the destruction of work, not the destruction of violence, can destroy brutality (Or as the French writer Jean Genet put it: "If we are able to mobilise all our violence, we might, perhaps, be able to overcome brutality.")

Crises of Non-Violence

On a purely tactical level, nonviolence is not a general recipe independent of the class composition of a movement. The interrelation of class composition and nonviolence tactics is illustrated by the development of the Black Liberation Movement.
Started in the South in the fifties as a movement of educated, valuable black intellectual workers or students, it was centred in the colleges and organised around the churches. Personalities like M.L. King himself or Andrew Young are typical representatives of this class composition. The necessary self-disciplining and ideological work was done through the church organisations which played a role comparable to the affinity groups or non-violence training sessions of the antinuclear movement. The accumulated value of this black intellectual labour force was then used against single capital factions, which refused to grant the corresponding wages and positions. Nonviolence was therefore a possible tactic. When later (Birmingham 1963) less valuable labour joined the movement, this tactic broke down as violent struggles in the urban ghettoes developed. It is significant that leaders like Stokely Carmichael, a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNNC), first committed to nonviolence turned later (Selma, 1965) into a propagandist of armed struggle. It was not an ideological critique of nonviolence or 'moral degradation' that brought this change, but the simple fact that the class-composition of the movement, and therefore its relationship with capital, had changed. Later, in 1971, the brutal repression of the Attica revolt showed drastically how capital deals with an unarmed 'cheap' labour force in rebellion.
It is no coincidence that at present, when capital has begun a devaluation-attack on certain sectors of the intellectual labour-force (expressed in the 'dim job-perspectives'), and when the class composition of the anti-nuclear movement is bound to change, the discussion about certain levels of non-violence (damaging private property or not) and the 100% consensus principle (which is linked to the problem of guaranteeing a certain class composition) arises sharply within the Clamshell Alliance and in the antinuclear movement in general. It is easy to see that a growing number of militants are beginning to reject the rigid non-violence-contract with capital because it is not useful anymore.
The discussion concerning the destruction of private property arose in response to the practical question of what to do with the fence around the Seabrook construction site and again when in the street-blockade of March 9 1979, some militants proposed to pour oil on the road to make it slippery and dangerous for the truck delivering the reactor vessel.

Civil Disobedience /Legalism

Nonviolent civil disobedience is a militant activist tactic. Some of its ideologists go as far as saying that it requires more courage than violent struggle because it is more risky for you can be easily caught by the police and jailed!
In this regard, nonviolence is in opposition to the legalism of most antinuclear protests by 'local' residents. In most illegal sit-ins and blockades, it was not possible to concretise the alliance of local residents and antinuclear militants on the level of participation.
The Clamshell Alliance felt so weak after these experiences, that it began to reject, temporarily, nonviolent civil disobedience and return to legalism. This happened, e.g., with the rally of June 24, 1978, which turned out to be a legal 'alternatives fair'. This decision, made by the informal leaders of the movement, was a first reaction to the changing class composition of the movement and to the 'leaks' in the social and ideological control over it. This was marked by the emergence of such groups as the Bostonian Clams for Democracy who were beginning to propose less 'peaceful' methods like breaking down the fence surrounding the plant put up by the authorities to prevent another occupation at Seabrook.
Harvey Wasserman, the most prominent supporter of the 'return to legalism', wrote in the June 22 1978 issue of WIN Magazine: "Nonetheless, it is time the movement recognised its growth and divisions. It seems almost inevitable that if the anti-nuclear movement is to proceed - which it must - then those who are dedicated to non-violence must proceed with their own organisations, and those who are not must move into new ones." (Our emphasis.) This is a clear declaration of his will to divide the movement in order to preserve its class-composition. Problems of consensus or democracy (what is they want to stay?) are put aside in such an emergency.
The division of the movement in order to guarantee its class-composition and the control of its leaders over it is a well known procedure of reformist and trade-union politicians which serves capitalist domination. The history of the organisations of the working class is in fact a history of 'expulsions' of 'left-wing' factions. Real social movements, revolutions, are always parties which are taken over by uninvited guests. The threat to divide the movement if it does not accept the (informal) line must be rejected, while the recognition of `its growth and divisions' must occur within the movement.
As for legalism, this is not another possible compromise with capital, like nonviolent civil disobedience. Legalism always means disarming and paralysing the real social movement (direct action, 'subversive' behaviours, autonomous organisation) in order to get a broad representation on the level of anonymous, formalised, hierarchically controlled institutions (bourgeois democracy, media, unions). On this level, it is possible to get a representation which goes beyond limited class sectors. Capital allows the 'breakdown' of all class-divisions within the working class if this process is controlled by the State, i.e., by its own institutions. Referendums, elections, legal rallies, for example, 'overcome' such class-divisions as those between intellectual workers and local residents. But the price paid is that the movement no longer acts as a social movement. In reality, it is not acting at all but is only symbolically present. It exists only in relationship to State-institutions or the media. Going to such a legal rally does not mean that you are 'a lot of people', it means that you are 'nobody', only an abstract number, an element in a piece of 'art'. Totally legal gatherings demonstrate not the strength of the movement but the strength of State-control over it. It shows the that the State can allow such huge accumulations of people without any practical consequences - unless, the rally 'gets out of control'. At the same time, this type of legalism is a weapon against genuine autonomous organisation. First, because it drains away a lot of energy and time from (possibly modest) direct actions. Second, it discourages day-to-day activities and imposes rhythms on the movement which are not its own. Legalism is not a compromise with capital, it is the way capital deals with oppositional movements in 'normal times' (if it doesn't revert to fascism or armed repression).
This process of disarmament is exemplified by the struggle of the Granite State Alliance (Manchester, NH) against the electricity rate hikes and particularly the Construction Works in Progress (CWIP) rate hike. The CWIP increase was to be about 25% and was to finance the building of the Seabrook nuclear power plant. The class structure of the initial group was substantially the same as that of the Clamshell Alliance. However, starting with the rate-hike, which meant an attack on all wage-income levels, it was possible to extend the class-composition of the movement potentially to the whole working class and especially the elderly and low-income urban people. The GSA wanted to build a social movement on this basis, but it was used indirectly by the Democratic candidate for Governor, Gallen, who promised not to introduce CWIP and used this issue (in combination with clever TV tactics) for his campaign in the Fall 1978. Against the explicit will of the GSA, the social potential of the rate-hike was transformed into electoral, institutional powerlessness. The possible broad class-composition got diluted into individual votes. Gallen won, but the construction of the Seabrook plant goes on, with all the financial consequences for the rate payers. There will be no CWIP. However, the State of New Hampshire is now considering the purchase of a part of the shares of the Seabrook plant, through a new State Power Authority. Thus, the plant will be financed with tax money directly, instead of electricity rates, providing a further pretext to cut back vital social services. The defeat would not have been so painful if a lot of free work and political energy had not been exploited by institutional legal activity.

The European Movement

The main difference between the European and American antinuclear movements consists in the greater 'impurity' of the former. Though a strong tendency in Europe as well, the strategy of non-violent civil disobedience never became dominant or 'compulsory' as in the US. Urban unemployed or underemployed workers (mainly intellectual, but also service workers and manual workers), urban youth gangs, the political groups of the old and new New Left (in Germany certain sects of Marxist-Leninists: in France and in Switzerland, Trotskyites), 'regional' movements (the ETA in the Basque country, the Occitan-movement in Southern France) were the uninvited guests who spoiled the party from the very beginning. The control over the class-compositior was therefore loose. Demonstrations were proportionately much larger than in the US but at the same time unpredictable and often poorly organised. No formal grassroots model with the coherence of the affinity groups emerged. Alliances such as the Clamshell Alliance came into existence, but there was more instability and they were never `left alone'.
After the massive and deceptive wave of demonstrations in 1977, the informal leaders and leading organisations went back to legalism as in the US. In Germany, 'Gruene Listen' participated in local and regional elections. In France, several ecologist parties took part in the national elections. In Switzerland, various ecologist and left-wing organisations used the anti-nuclear issue in elections and in a national referendum (which was defeated by 49 to 51%). All these attempts had initial successes, but failed in the longer run. As the disaffection with political institutions is very strong among the European working class, the situation did not allow for such electoral games. Ecologists seldom took more than 3-5% of the votes, a percentage which does not correspond to the anti-nuclear attitudes found in the polls (in most countries a majority of the population is against nuclear plants).
The different and more 'diffuse' class composition of the European antinuclear movement found its most visible expression in the tactics of the police, which were much more belligerent than the police response in New Hampshire, despite the fact that NH is a 'law and order' State. In Europe, unprovoked police responded physically against the demonstrators, using tear gas, clubs, dogs, even grenades, causing hundreds of injured and even death (as in the case of Malville in 1977). Civil war-like street blockades, dozens of miles away from the demonstration-sites and at national borders (which despite 'European Unification' are now more intensively used than ever to control 'undesirable mobility'), were set up to hassle and withhold demonstrators. Trains were stopped, buses and cars blocked for hours, all 'weapons' (like lemons, handkerchiefs, motor-cycle helmets, raincoats and car tool-kits) were confiscated. In Kalkar, West Germany, on September 24 1977, 60,000 demonstrators made it to the the site, mostly walking dozens of miles. But more than 10,000 were blocked on the road. Using the official hysteria created around the Schleyer kidnapping which was going on simultaneously, the West German government mobilised 13,500 policemen, the largest police gathering in German history.
1977 marked a temporary defeat for the European antinuclear movement mainly on the military level. Nonviolent civil disobedience reached a threshold which made it obsolete as an effective or even possible tactic.
While a part of the movement went back to legalism, other antinuclear activists experimented with acts of sabotage against power-lines (France), railroad lines (Switzerland), construction sites (Spain), factories supplying nuclear plants (Switzerland; France), and installations of utility companies (bombs at the information pavilion in Kaiseraugst, Switzerland in the spring of 1979). Sometimes bombs were placed near nuclear cons-truction sites or plants, not to damage them but to demonstrate their general vulnerability.
This wave of 'violent' acts has triggered an intensive debate within the European antinuclear movement. At first the 'official' nonviolent organisations denounced these actions as 'directed against the movement and harmful for its growth'. But later this 'hard line' weakened and they sometimes accepted bomb-attacks, if the bombings were carefully and 'cleanly' executed without damage to the environment, nature or 'living creatures'. This debate concerning tactics is still going on, though it is often conducted on an ideological level. Significantly, Anna Gyorgy in her No Nukes mentions neither the violent (or technical) actions of the European movement nor this important debate on the future of the movement.2 By this nonviolent censorship, she withholds information from the US movement which could endanger the ideological control of its class-composition.
At this moment, especially after the Harrisburg accident, the European antinuclear movement seems, to have overcome its legalistic apathy. The 'politicisation' of the movement by traditional or new 'ecological' parties has only temporarily dis-armed the movement, while a more creative combination of 'nonviolence' and 'violence' has appeared in recent activities and demonstrations.

Chapter Four
Strange Victories: The Antinuclear Movement and the Nuclear Industry

The immediate enemy of the antinuclear movement is the nuclear industry. This industry is apparently a 'single capital' which, however, has financial and technological roots in many other capitals and represents the most 'general' single capital so far. In practically all countries, the nuclear industry is tightly linked to the State which has developed and financed its technology through the nuclear weapons industry. This fact alone makes it clear that the struggles around the nuclear cycle, from inside or outside, are immediately concerned with a State/capital and reach the highest levels of class-contradiction.

The Nuclear Plan

The nuclear industry was planned throughout the fifties and sixties as a response to the unreliability of domestic coalminers and oil workers in the Middle East (of the Suez crisis in 1956). It was conceived as the source for a new capitalist accumulation, a new model of capitalist command, control and territorial organisation. The 'nuclear worker' was to be the standard for a new class-composition: a model of discipline, responsibility and political reliability.
The higher level of discipline was to be achieved by a militarisation of the nuclear cycle. 'Atoms for Peace' was to be a mere extension and toned down version of the terroristic impact of the nuclear weapons industry. In the late sixties the construction of 1,000 power plants by the year 2,000 was planned. This Plan meant the full 'nuclearisation' of US territory and would have been a marvelously powerful but subtle means of social control. The Plan envisiongd that the production of 30% of the energy supply would be nuclear. If this had succeeded, the industry would have been able to bust all the struggles of the coal miners and oil workers. The planned location of the plants was also dictated by the need for class control. The plants were sited around the major metropolitan areas, so that the State could impose evacuations or other emergency measures and blackmail the population with radioactive danger in times of 'social unrest'. (It would not make any difference if the danger were real, for with radioactivity 'you don't feel anything' until after the damage is done). The same command-functions could have been exerted on an international level through the control of the uranium cycle. For example, the European nuclear industry depends completely on US and Canadian uranium and to a large extent on US nuclear technology.
This plan suffered one major internal contradiction: though planned as a profitable single capital, the nuclear industry turned out to be completely unable to function capitalistically. One problem was the immaturity of nuclear technology itself. The political pressure of the working class did not give capital enough time to resolve all the technological problems ('safety', waste, environmental problems). Another problem was the over-extended circulation period of nuclear capital. It takes ten years to plan a plant, four years to build it, another 15 years to completely pay off the investments, by which time it is technologically obsolete. This makes the costs of a nuclear plant virtually incalculable, for in this long period many external influences (inflation, changes in the supply costs, changes in the environment) can intervene. Thus the huge cost overruns.
The extended circulation-period of nuclear capital is not a mere financial or economic risk, it is also politically dangerous. It imposes a rigidity on capital which can be 'exploited' by the working class's power of surprise. Between the planning stage of the recently built plants and today, there was the students' movement, the anti-war movement, a new situation in the Middle East, a general loss of credibility in the ideology of 'progress', a breakdown of the family, the crisis after 1973. The antinuclear movement itself is both a part of these general developments as well as their expression. Capital has invested deeply in a future it really does not control. In a sector with short profit-return periods, capital can adjust, quickly to new situations without losing huge amounts of already invested money - not so in the nuclear industry.
All these working class surprises forced capital to give up the idea of a really profitable nuclear industry. One response was to make energy in general artificially more expensive. This began in earnest in the oil-crisis of 1973. Once oil was made two times more expensive than before, nuclear energy became more competitive. At the same time, the additional oil-profits could be used to finance the nuclear industry which is connected with the oil-trusts through the banking system. Further, the oil companies are directly interested in the nuclear industry because they control a large share of uranium mining and can coordinate the price of uranium with that of oil (e.g. between 1973 and the present the delivery price of uranium oxide has gone up from seven dollars to more than twenty.)
This profit injection into the energy industry as a whole has been paid for by the working class in the form of higher gasoline prices and inflation. The State organises the inflation of energy prices since it guarantees the electric companies' profit with money taken from the working class either in the form of taxes or by granting higher utility rates. Further, the State lowers the real cost of nuclear plants because decommissioning costs are not charged, while the liability of the companies is reduced by a law which artificially lowers their insurance costs (the Price-Anderson Act limits liability to a ridiculously low 560 million dollars.)
The nuclear industry is not operating on conventional capitalist cost-principles or, rather, far less so than other industries. It is more like a branch of 'State socialism' where the State pays and the industry receives 'fake' profits. Its economic function can best be compared to that of the war industries, for it is only under such 'para-military' conditions that the nuclear engineering and utility companies survive financially. The 'flip side' of this State/capital relation is that the nuclear industry has become a subtly powerful instrument of State planning in the crisis.
Higher energy prices and the ease of price manipulation afforded by the nuclear industry impose higher basic costs on all capitals. Nuclear prices force them either to raise their capital-intensity (rationalisation, automation) or, if they are not able to do this, to raise the rate of exploitation (lower wages, longer hours, faster work rhythms) or both. Not only are workers forced to work more, but single capitals are forced by general capital (the State) either to exploit them more effectively or face bankruptcy.
If we compare the nuclear plants with their actual achievements we find them in a very critical situation. Only 72 plants are operating in the US and most of them are operating far below their capacity. In 1978 no new nuclear plants were ordered while almost every day we read that plants have been cancelled or will be shut down. In March 1979, five plants in the Northeast were shut down by the nuclear Regulatory Commission because of 'earthquake dangers'. The Seabrook plant is struggling with serious financial problems. The Three Mile island plant is lost. In Europe, dozens of plants have been cancelled or delayed. In Austria, a completed plant will not go into operation after a referendum on nuclear development. It will become a silent and ugly monument of the 'nuclear age' in that country. If we compare this situation to the original plans, we can speak of a 'victory' against the nuclear industry. But whose victory? And is it really a victory?

Bad Surprises

These victories cannot be due to the antinuclear movement alone because the movement had a direct impact only in a few situations (as in Whyl, West Germany). For example, the referendum in Austria was supported by the conservative Volks-partei against the Social-Democrats and was not started by the anti-nuclear movement. This 'victory' occured, moreover, in a period of open defeat of the movement in Europe.
The nuclear industry puts the blame on, 'rising costs' and not on the anti-nuclear movement. This is superficially true. But 'costs' are only an expression of the social processes that cause them. One very important (if not the most important) element of these 'costs' are the nuclear workers themselves, including all types of scientists and the social context in which they move. Nuclear plants were designed for the responsible progress-abiding, intellectual-technical workers of the fifties. The high capital-intensity and the centralised existence of nuclear capital require stable, socially settled 'family men', 'militarily' disciplined workers, truly 'scientific' Stakhanovites of the second half of the 20th century.' It is no accident that the race to develop the atomic bomb also produced the first 'peaceful' atomic workers. War has always been capital's laboratory for developing new production processes and forming new types of workers.
The sixties and seventies put this 'new' worker in crisis. Wives, mothers and lovers no longer produced stability and discipline, the universities didn't produce reliability, while academic unemployment ruined the 'pride' of these workers.
As this disillusioned, cynical, unstable intellectual proletariat emerges, the future of such capital-intensive industries like the nuclear industry is endangered.
Because of its long planning period, the long term future affects the immediate behaviour of the nuclear industry more than any other branch of capital. The nuclear industry is in crisis because its future is in crisis: not its technological future, but the relationship between its technology and labour force, between technology and 'humanity'. The last few years have seen a whole wave of nuclear 'desertions'. Scientists and even members of the NRC went over to the 'enemy'. Some of these deserters helped make the film China Syndrome. In West Germany, the most spectacular case was that of Traube, the director of the national nuclear power plant programme, whose telephone was tapped by the police because he was suspected of having contacts with the Red Army Faction of Baader-Meinhof. This accusation could not be proven but Traube was fired and then joined the ecological movement. Recently, Kathy Boylan, whose husband is an employee of the nuclear department of the Long Island Lighting Company, pronounced herself against nuclear power. Asked whether her stand against nuclear power could jeopardise her husband's job, Mrs Boylan replied, "It might." (N.T. Times, April 6 1979)
The undermined discipline of the nuclear workers imposes, high 'Costs' on the nuclear industry, i.e., costs for 'safety and protection' against its own employees. Sabotage or 'human error' are in fact main concerns of the NRC. In 1978 the NRC demanded that all plants apply new, tougher safety procedures: more personnel, introduction of the 'Two man rule' (all employees dealing with vulnerable operations should always be accompanied by another employee to prevent sabotage), installation of TV-supervision and new safety clearances of two-thirds of all employees (which costs 6000 dollars per person). It seems that a number of companies refused to apply these rules and risked the loss of their licenses (the deadline was first August 1978 and later extended until February 1979)2 : But these new procedures did not do the job. In fact, the NRC blamed the Three Mile island accident on 'human errors', for the system itself worked fine! Nuclear workers have protested against the 'two man rule' and other safety procedures because they consider them a declaration of mistrust. They are right: capital does not trust them. For capital must not only deal with the question: who educates the educators? but, most crucially in the nuclear industry, it must pose the question: who controls the controllers?3
Though no nuclear plant has been shut down due to a wage dispute, nuclear workers have been visibly struggling for more safety for themselves against radioactive dangers.

Karen Silkwood has become something of a national martyr because she was murdered in 1974 when she tried to make public information about health dangers in the nuclear processing plant where she worked. In 1976 workers in a nuclear reprocessing plant in La Hague went on strike for about six months protesting radioactive contamination at the plant. Most recently in February 18, 1979, nuclear workers at the nuclear power plant of Caorso, Italy went on strike demanding safety guarantees from the company against radioactive dangers. The 'leaks' of discipline within the nuclear cycle seem to be enlarging and capital must have strong doubts about the command-creating function of the nuclear industry.
This crisis of command-creation within the plants (or the nuclear cycle in general) is intensified by the crisis of command over the socio-political environment around the plant. Site planning is obviously sensitive to this environment. Thus, in Italy the nuclear programme is relatively modest (11 million people per plant site). This is not surprising in a country with high levels of 'mass terrorism' and a general credibility gap between the State and the working class. Capital-intensive industries like nuclear power are too risky there. At the other extreme is Switzerland which has the largest nuclear programme proportional to the population (900,000 people per plant) supplying 25 per cent of its electricity.4 Again this is not surprising for Switzerland is known for its political and social stability. Instead of increasing control over the site environments, however, the construction of nuclear plants has provided an ideal target for social movements of different origins. Many times, the plants 'organised' social insubordination around themselves. The high concentration of capital and the 'visibility' of this capitalist 'fortress of confidence and progress' attracted all types of protest, attacks and threats. For example, in the US, 175 threats or acts of violence against nuclear plants were reported. One of the most spectacular occurred on August 27, 1974 when an incendiary bomb exploded near Pilgrim 1 in Massachusetts while the plant was at one of its rare moments of full power. Nuclear capital could not anticipate this type of reaction which was based on social processes that emerged after the nuclear plants had been put on line. Attacks on the nuclear industry were not only used by the anti-nuclear movement. They were also enmeshed with other political purposes (e.g. struggles for national or regional liberation or for more traditional 'party-games'). Thus the anti-nuclear movement is only one of the social movements which forced higher 'costs' on the nuclear industry from the outside: These 'costs' include: expenses for the military defence of the plants, propaganda and lobbying efforts, additional safety measures, legitimation (safety studies, legal actions), 'lost time' and interest charges.
Even the accident at Three Mile island, the first real-life rehearsal of nuclear command-creation, indicated more symptoms of the decay of command than of its strengthening. Thousands of workers took advantage of the situation and did not show up for work, while the credibility of State and nuclear officials reached only 16 per cent in the polls. On the one side, workers who were told not to leave did leave; on the other side, those told to go often did not go. As Woodrow Miller, 63, former mayor of the town of Goldsboro (near the reactor) explained the attitude of the later type of refusers: "What is the difference if you stay in New York and die from carbon monoxide or I stay in Goldsboro and die from radiation?" Given the fact that the crisis, the higher costs of living, the cut-backs of social services have generally created so many risks for health, many people are perhaps willing to take the additional radioactive risk, stay in an evacuation area and try to make use of the situation in the form of looting or riots. The renewed interest by the government in 'civil defence' and mass, police-run evacuations indicates that nuclear plants are not terrorizing and commanding enough for the working class of the seventies.
Even in this critical situation, with all these 'strange victories', the nuclear industry (and even less capital in general) is not yet defeated and has other choices. State/capital wants us to pay a high price for our unexpected victories and lack of devotion to its plans. For if splitting atoms cannot do the job of controlling our lives, maybe decaying dollars can.
At this moment, capital is obviously testing out two possible futures: a risky, capital intensive nuclear future and a labour-intensive, low-energy version. Neither is very tempting though there will always be, after the priority is set, a combination of both. The choice we are offered is one between cancer and misery. The. 'loyal opposition' to capital within the anti-nuclear movement seems to accept such a blackmail and is campaigning for the 'misery' version: 'Solar jobs', conservation and 'labour-intensive' production. In this sense, they are 'educating' the masses, but they face the same problem the dominant capital faces with its cancer-option. Imposing labour-intensive production on a working class that has. been fighting around the refusal of work is as hopeless as the search for responsible high capital-intensity workers. However, if we are not able to reject the choice between cancer and misery, we will surely get both.

Chapter Five

The Anti-Nuclear Movement in the Cities

One of the major achievements of the anti-nuclear movement and its militants (even its 'solar capital' planners) is to have created a social movement practically from zero. In the midst of the general decay of old 'New Left' organisations, anti-nuclear militants took a practical chance that lots of 'pure revolutionaries' didn't even perceive. But this world is ungrateful and militant merits are not eternally respected because all movements, if they remain alive, change continuously. The anti-nuclear movement emerged with a class composition linked to a type of highly valued intellectual labour force in rural and suburban regions. Will this be the social and geographic limit of the movement? With the Three Mile Island accident and the energy price attack, capital is saying to this movement: "Okay, folks, you got a point. But what about food-riots in the cities, which side will you be on?"
This may appear exaggerated, but this question expresses the main problem the anti-nuclear movement will necessarily face in urban areas. The urban working class forces a choice on the movement: will it stick to its old class-structure or will it try to extend beyond these limits? Will it be a movement of concerned intellectual workers, dealing with problems of antiplanning, restricting its form of struggle and organisation to this class sector or will it deal with more immediate issues such as rate hikes and food prices. The anti-nuclear movement is still pondering over the risks of enlarging its class composition (which could mean self-devaluation) versus the advantages of conserving its own value as a labour force. (For example, at one of the first major occupations of a nuclear plant site after Three Mile island - the one at Shoreham, New York on June 3, 1979 - nonviolence training has still been declared compulsory by the organisers).
The anti-nuclear movement has developed a certain rigidity and a fear of uninvited guests. While being harmless in rural areas, this rigidity can become a danger in cities where different class-sectors live closely together. 'Doing your own thing' in a city can immediately mean doing it against others, for everything is so directly interrelated. The apparently innocent act of installing a windmill on the roof and saving energy is an attack on a neighbour who probably doesn't have the necessary money for such an installation and is left alone in the struggle against rising electricity bills. One arm of the anti-nuclear movement, 'alternative energy' can become just another hobby for higher income people or people with special educations. Thus, Carter's energy bill subsidizes the installation of solar heating devices through tax write-offs, but only those who have houses to install them and taxes to write off can take advantage of the deal. In general, such individual or class restricted energy solutions put poorer sectors in an even tighter squeeze and deepen the divisions within the class. If a nuclear shut down only means solar privileges for some people, capital can divide the possible movement of all energy consumers and we will lose the nuclear battle.
Not to deal with the problem of energy prices at the urban community level means to automatically play the game of capitalist class division, consciously or not. All types of symbolic or legal activities, like 'making the link with the atomic bomb' (can you practically attack an atomic bomb by 'attacking' the Pentagon?) divert from possible activities in the community. If we are not able to deal with the local, electric company, how can we deal with the Pentagon? Why should we go to Washington if we have never been to the corner utility office?
These questions concerning the movement's direction must be asked now, for the anti-nuclear movement has a real chance to play a role as a catalyst for struggles in a very critical situation in the cities. The Harrisburg accident has legitimated this movement on a mass level and has 'educated' people about the lies of the government and the nuclear industry. Being anti-nuclear means to be against capital, against the energy squeeze, against the 'Choice' of cancer or misery. The anti-nuclear issue is a possibility of autonomous organisation outside of all types of compromised party, union and ethnic organisations, and open field of creativity for all types of people. The characteristics of the 'rural' anti-nuclear movement are partly an obstacle for such a function. The urban anti-nuclear movement has to develop its own ways of organis-ing, making decisions, and acting. It must insist on its own rhythms and cannot just be an appendix of the established organisations.
April 26, 1979

Notes

Chapter 1

1) Whyl in Germany was a christian-democrat (conservative) stronghold, the political attitudes could be described as 'law and order', 'defense of private property', 'anti-communist'. Nevertheless, it became the centre of a very militant activism of local people against the planned nuclear reactor and against the christian-democrat government.
2) In Whyl, the quality of the wine would have declined due to climatic changes; the value of the real estate would have gone down; milk production would become problematic, etc.
3) Similar 'factors' emerged on a lesser scale in other places, including the Denver-Aspen area of Colorado; around Chapel Hill, North Carolina; Madison, Wisconsin; etc; in sum, in centres of 'alternativism' which co-exist with centres of the education industry.

Chapter 3

1) Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation In America (New York, 1967).
2) Anna Gyorgy and friends, No Nukes: Everyone's Guide to Nuclear Power, Boston, 1979).

Chapter 4

1) According to G. Daneker and R. Grossman, Jobs and Energy (Washington, D.C., 1977) p. 15, the ratio of professional and technical workers in atomic plants is 33 per cent of the total plant employment; in manufacturing this ratio is 10.2 per cent while in mining it is 12.6 per cent, Handbook of Labour Statistics 1976 (Washington, D.C., 1976).
2) Interview with R. Jungk, Tages Auzeiger, March 6, 1979.
3) The typical nuclear plant employs about 733 persons a year according to Ron Langue, Nuclear Power Plants: The More They Build, The More You Pay (New York, 1976). The average cost per plant completed in 1976 is about $ 2 billion, e.g. Seabrook will be about $2.5 billion on the basis of 1978 estimates. Thus the average investment a worker handles in a year is $2.7 million. The investment per worker per year in petroleum is $150,000 while in textiles it is $18,600, Statistical Abstract of the US 1978, Washington, D.C., 1979), p. 567. Thus the nuclear worker has to be 16 times more reliable than the petroleum worker and 145 times more disciplined than a textile worker.
4) Calculated from the Statistical Abstract.

Dissonances

2010-08-21T09:55:00.000-07:00

Alfredo M. Bonanno

W o r k i n P r o g r e s s / 4

Original titles:
Che ne facciamo dell’antifascismo?, Anarchismo 74, September 1994;

Inattualita sulla droga, ProvocAzione 17, November 1988;

Inattualita sul razzismo, ProvocAzione 24, June 1990;

Come giocarsi la vita e perche, ProvocAzione 21, June 1990;

Mal di ‘Comunita’, ProvocAzione 5, May 1987.

Translated by Jean Weir

CONTENTS

What can we do with anti-fascism?
Non-news about drugs
Non-news about racism
Loss of language
Illness and capital
One’s life on the line
‘Community’ sickness

...The dissonance lies in the content of these arguments. But by remaining in the content, crystallising itself in the place for saying (and even doing) they could also become elements of recuperation, food for future conservative thought, new uniforms (of a different colour), new ‘idols’ (in a more agreeable format). There are no definitive recipes, not even dissonances, capable of breaking the rhythm that constantly envelops us.
Yet dissonance has something else to offer.
Something meaningful appears in the crossroads of rhythms between re-evoked facts, the time of writing and the time of fruition, that is, in the task freely taken on by the reader. One perceives a content which is something other than the single arguments, the ways of saying and the saying of ways. In letting oneself be struck by dissonance one is not illuminated, one does not fall prostrate on the road to Damascus but simply creates air around one’s thoughts, that is, one lets inadvertence enter the field of codification. The range of arguments itself opens the way to unpredictable unions that were not intended during the phase of writing, and were probably not problems as such even in the factual phase. Dissonance therefore acts like a catalyst for casual openings that cannot be controlled. Just one warning: do not let yourself get panicky about meaning.
If dissonance is an integral part of harmony and constitutes the other outcome, one that is always foreseeable and even desirable, its free coagulation in processes of aleatory fruition produces something else, a rupture that is not easily amendable. May others respect the complete cycle in the reassuring riverbed of meaning, with which the watercarriers quench our fears, but elsewhere. Here one is proposing a reading that is itself a risk: a chance, a journey open to other possibilities.
Chance is yet to be discovered, if nothing else in its connection with chaos. But even that is yet to be discovered, at least in connection with spontaneous order. See you elsewhere. AMB

W H A T C A N W E D O W I T H A N T I - F A S C I S M ?

The fox knows many things.
The porcupine only one, but it is great.
Archilochus

Fascism is a seven-letter word beginning with F. Human beings like playing with words which, by partly concealing reality, absolve them from personal reflection or having to make decisions. The symbol acts in our place, supplying us with a flag and an alibi.
And when we put ‘anti-’ in front of the symbol it is not simply a question of being against what absolutely disgusts us. We feel safe that we are on the other side and have done our duty. Having recourse to that ‘anti-’ gives us a clear conscience, enclosing us in a well-guarded and much frequented field.
Meanwhile things move on. The years go by and so do power relations. New bosses take the place of the old and the tragic coffin of power is passed from one hand to the next. The fascists of yesteryear have complied with the democratic game and handed over their flags and swastikas to a few madmen. And why not? That is the way of men of power. The chit-chat comes and goes, political realism is eternal. But we, who know little or nothing of politics, are embarressedly asking ourselves whatever has happened given that the black-shirted, club-bearing fascists we once fought so resolutely are disappearing from the scene. So, like headless chickens we are looking for a new scapegoat against which we can unleash our all-too-ready hatred, while everything around us is becoming more subtle and mellow and power is calling on us to enter into dialogue: But please step forward, say what you have to say, it’s not a problem! Don’t forget, we’re living in a democracy, everyone has the right to say what they like. Others listen, agree or disagree, then sheer numbers decide the game. The majority win and the minority are left with the right to continue to disagree. So long as everything remains within the dialectic of taking sides.
If we were to reduce the question of fascism to words, we would be forced to admit it had all been a game. Perhaps a dream: ‘Mussolini, an honest man, a great politician. He made mistakes. But who didn’t? Then he got out of control. He was betrayed. We were all betrayed. Fascist mythology? Leave it at that! There’s no point in thinking about such relics of the past.’
‘Hitler’, Klausmann recounts, sarcastically portraying the mentality of Gerhart Hauptmann, the old theoretician of political realism, ‘in the last analysis ... my dear friends! ... no bad feelings! ... let’s try to be ... no, if you don’t mind, ... allow me ... objective ... can I get you another drink? This champagne ... really extraordinary—Hitler the man, I mean ... the champagne as well, for that matter ... an absolutely extraordinary evolution ... German youth ... about seven million votes ... as I have often said to my Jewish friends ... these Germans ... incredible nation ... truly mysterious ... cosmic impulses ... Goethe ... the saga of dynamic ... elementary irresistible tendencies...’
No, not at the level of small talk. Differences get hazy over a glass of good wine and everything becomes a matter of opinion. Because, and this is the important thing, there are differences, not between fascism and antifascism but between those who want power and those who fight against it and refuse it. But at what level are the foundations of these differences to be found?
By having recourse to historical analysis? I don’t think so. Historians are the most useful category of idiots in the service of power. They think they know a lot but the more they furiously study documents, the more that is all they know: documents which incontrovertibly attest what happened, the will of the individual imprisoned in the rationality of the event. The equivalent of truth and fact. To consider anything else possible is a mere literary pastime. If the historian has the faintest glimmer of intelligence, he moves over to philosophy immediately, immersing himself in common anguish and such like. Tales of deeds, fairy-tale gnomes and enchanted castles. Meanwhile the world around us settles into the hands of the powerful and their revision-book culture, unable to tell the difference between a document and a baked potato. ‘If man’s will were free’, writes Tolstoy in War and Peace, ‘the whole of history would be a series of fortuitous events... if instead there is one single law governing man’s actions, free will cannot exist, because man’s will must be subject to those laws.’
The fact is that historians are useful, especially for supplying us with elements of comfort, alibis and psychological crutches. How courageous the Communards of 1871 were! They died like brave men against the wall at Père Lachaise! And the reader gets excited and prepares to die as well if necessary, against the next wall of the communards. Waiting for social forces to put us in the condition of dying as heroes gets us through everyday life, usually to the threshold of death without this occasion ever presenting itself. Historical trends are not all that exact. Give or take a decade, we might miss this opportunity and find ourselves empty handed.
If you ever want to measure a historian’s imbecility, get him to reason on things that are in the making rather than on the past. It will be a mind-opener!
No, not historical analysis. Perhaps political or political-philosophical discussion, the kind we have become accustomed to reading in recent years. Fascism is something one minute, and something else the next. The technique for making these analyses is soon told. They take the Hegelian mechanism of asserting and contradicting at the same time (something similar to the critique of arms that becomes an arm of criticism), and extract a seemingly clear affirmation about anything that comes to mind at the time. It’s like that feeling of disillusionment you get when, after running to catch a bus you realise that the driver, although he saw you, has accelerated instead of stopping.
Well, in that case one can demonstrate, and I think Adorno has done, that it is precisely a vague unconscious frustration—caused by the life that is escaping us which we cannot grasp—which surges up, making us want to kill the driver. Such are the mysteries of Hegelian logic! So, fascism gradually becomes less contemptible. Because inside us, lurking in some dark corner of our animal instinct, it makes our pulse quicken. Unknown to ourselves, a fascist lurks within us. And it is in the name of this potential fascist that we come to justify all the others. No extremists, of course! Did so many really die? Seriously, in the name of a misunderstood sense of justice people worthy of great respect put Faurisson’s nonsense into circulation. No, it is better not to venture along this road.
When knowledge is scarce and the few notions we have seem to dance about in a stormy sea, it is easy to fall prey to the stories invented by those who are cleverer with words than we are. In order to avoid such an eventuality the Marxists, goodly programmers of others’ minds that they are (particularly those of the herded proletariat), maintained that fascism is equivalent to the truncheon. On the opposite side even philosophers like Gentile suggested that the truncheon, by acting on the will, is also an ethical means in that it constructs the future symbiosis between State and individual in that superior unity wherein the individual act becomes collective. Here we see how Marxists and fascists originate from the same ideological stock, with all the ensuing practical consequences, concentration camps included. But let us continue. No, fascism is not just the truncheon, nor is it even just Pound, Céline, Mishima or Cioran. It is not one of these elements, or any other taken individually, but is all of them put together. Nor is it the rebellion of one isolated individual who chooses his own personal struggle against all others, at times including the State, and could even attract that human sympathy we feel towards all rebels, even uncomfortable ones. No, that is not what fascism is.
For power, crude fascism such as has existed at various times in history under dictatorships, is no longer a practicable political project. New instruments are appearing along with the new managerial forms of power. So let us leave it for the historians to chew away on as much as they like. Fascism is out of fashion even as a political insult or accusation. When a word comes to be used disparagingly by those in power, we cannot make use of it as well. And because this word and related concept disgusts us, it would be well to put one and the other away in the attic along with all the other horrors of history and forget it.
Forget the word and the concept, but not what is concealed under it. We must keep this in mind in order to prepare ourselves to act. Hunting fascists might be a pleasant sport today but it could represent an unconscious desire to avoid a deeper analysis of reality, to avoid getting behind that dense scheme of power which is getting more and more complicated and difficult to decipher.
I can understand antifascism. I am an antifascist too, but my reasons are not the same as those of the many I heard in the past and still hear today who define themselves as such. For many, fascism had to be fought twenty years ago when it was in power in Spain, Portugal, Greece, Chile, etc. When the new democratic regimes took their places in these countries, the antifascism of so many ferocious opponents extinguished itself. It was then that I realised the antifascism of my old comrades in struggle was different to mine. For me nothing had changed. What we did in Greece, Spain, the Portuguese colonies and in other places could have continued even after the democratic State had taken over and inherited the past successes of the old fascism. But everyone did not agree. It is necessary to know how to listen to old comrades who tell of their adventures and the tragedies they have known, of the many murdered by the fascists, the violence and everything else. ‘But’, as Tolstoy again said, ‘the individual who plays a part in historical events never really understands the significance of them. If he tries to understand them he becomes a sterile component.’ I understand less those who, not having lived these experiences, and therefore don’t find themselves prisoners of such emotions half a century later, borrow explanations that no longer have any reason to exist, and which are often no more than a simple smokescreen to hide behind.
‘I am an antifascist!’, they throw at you like a declaration of war, ‘and you?’
In such cases my almost spontaneous reply is—no, I am not an antifascist. I am not an antifascist in the way that you are. I am not an antifascist because I went to fight the fascists in their countries while you stayed in the warmth of Italian democracy which nevertheless put mafiosi like Scelba, Andreotti and Cossiga in government. I am not an antifascist because I have continued to fight against the democracy that replaced these soap opera versions of fascism. It uses more up to date means of repression and so is, if you like, more fascist than the fascists before them. I am not an antifascist because I am still trying to identify those who hold power today and do not let myself be blinded by labels and symbols, while you continue to call yourself an antifascist in order to have a justification for coming out into the streets to hide behind your ‘Down with fascism!’ banners. Of course, if I had been older than eight at the time of the ‘resistance’, perhaps I too would be overwhelmed by youthful memories and ancient passions and would not be so lucid. But I don’t think so. Because, if one examines the facts carefully, even between the confused and anonymous conglomeration of the antifascism of political formations, there were those who did not conform, but went beyond it, continued, and carried on well beyond the ‘ceasefire’! Because the struggle, the life and death struggle, is not only against the fascists of past and present, those in the blackshirts, but is also and fundamentally against the power that oppresses us, with all the elements of support that make it possible, even when it wears the permissive and tolerant guise of democracy.
‘Well then, you might have said so right away!’—someone could reply—’you are an antifascist too.’
‘And how else could it be? You are an anarchist, so you are an antifascist! Don’t tire us by splitting hairs.’
But I think it is useful to draw distinctions. I have never liked fascists, nor consequently fascism as a project. For other reasons (but which when carefully examined turn out to be the same), I have never liked the democratic, the liberal, the republican, the Gaullist, the labour, the Marxist, the communist, the socialist or any other of those projects. Against them I have always opposed not so much my being anarchist as my being different, therefore anarchist. First of all my individuality, my own personal way of understanding life and nobody else’s, of understanding it and therefore of living it, of feeling emotions, searching, discovering, experimenting, and loving. I only allow entry into this world of mine to the ideas and people who appeal to me; the rest I hold far off, politely or otherwise.
I don’t defend, I attack. I am not a pacifist, and don’t wait until things go beyond the safety level. I try to take the initiative against all those who might even potentially constitute a danger to my way of living life. And part of this way is also the need and desire for others—not as metaphysical entities, but clearly identified others, those who have an affinity with my way of living and being. And this affinity is not something static and determined once and for all. It is a dynamic fact which changes and continues to grow and widen, revealing yet other people and ideas, and weaving a web of immense and varied relations, but where the constant always remains my way of being and living, with all its variations and evolution.
I have traversed the realm of man in every sense and have not yet found where I might quench my thirst for knowledge, diversity, passion, dreams, a lover in love with love. Everywhere I have seen enormous potential let itself be crushed by ineptitude, and meagre capacity blossom in the sun of constancy and commitment. But as long as the opening towards what is different flourishes, the receptiveness to let oneself be penetrated and to penetrate to the point that there is not a fear of the other, but rather an awareness of one’s limitations and capabilities—and so also of the limits and capabilities of the other—affinity is possible; it is possible to dream of a common, perpetual undertaking beyond the contingent, human approach. The further we move away from all this, affinities begin to weaken and finally disappear. And so we find those outside, those who wear their feelings like medals, who flex their muscles and do everything in their power to appear fascinating. And beyond that, the mark of power, its places and its men, the forced vitality, the false idolatry, the fire without heat, the monologue, the chit chat, the uproar, the usable, everything that can be weighed and measured.
That is what I want to avoid. That is my antifascism.

N O N - N E W S A B O U T D R U G S
There are at least two ways to make music. The negative one and the positive one. We can screech as long as we like on the strings of a violin and still not succeed in making what comes out music. But a whole portfolio of scores of the great composers still does not make a musician. It follows that one should not pay attention to how things are said as much as to what is being said.
There is as much violining about drugs today as there is about everything else. Each plays their own way, with their own purposes. There are those who talk with an air of personal authority, although when it comes down to it, all they know is hearsay. This science reaches them through others’ experience, it is an outside affair. They have observed matters that are not their own, gathering ‘eye-witness accounts’ that are mere signals, not reality. It matters little then in my opinion whether one adopts a permissive attitude or makes apocalyptic forecasts.
Then there are the usual scoundrels who call for politically opportunistic projects great or small, but here again the difference is irrelevant.
And there are those who are disarmingly in good faith, those ‘in good faith’ by profession, who almost make a shield of their state of grace to hide behind, timidly insisting that ‘something must be done’ (which usually results in no more than a worthy refurbishment of some of the more antiquated forms of social services).
Not forgetting the antimafia violinists who combine their prolific activity with the ‘drugs problem’—the two are clearly interdependent— and it becomes a point of honour to repeat the paradoxical rubbish that is said about the ‘mafia’ when talking about ‘drugs’ word for word.
And finally there are the more advanced ‘revolutionaries’ who can be divided into roughly two positions, each one comical, but for different reasons. The first is permissive, but only up to a point. They are for the use of ‘light’, not ‘heavy’ ‘drugs’. They are broad-minded to the point of becoming consumers themselves at times. With revolutionary asceticism of course, using small amounts of ‘light drugs’, taking care to have only a little close at hand so as not to have problems with the law, as that would be out of keeping for a revolutionary. The second position is the absolute condemnation of all drugs, ‘light’ or ‘heavy’, it makes no difference: they all ‘dull your faculties’. These ‘revolutionary’ positions are clearly lacking in something. The difference between ‘light’ and ‘heavy’ drugs has always seemed spurious to me, partly because the difference is defined by the legal laboratories of the system. And it seems to me to be too hasty to establish once and for all that drug addicts are idiots with no backbone, incapable of self-managing their lives and so are like lumps of wood at the mercy of the whirling river of power relations.
The stupid and superficial, the weak and uncertain, those desirous of uniformity at any price, will rally under any flag, including the revolutionary one. Next to me under the same flag I have heard them gasp in situations that were too strong for their humanitarian palates or whatever lies under their lion’s disguise. I have even seen them hide their weaknesses behind attitudes worthy of mountain-crushing judges. We nearly all need some kind of prop, I’m not saying that I do not include myself in this. If nothing else, I take a sleeping pill when I can’t sleep, I eat too much when I am nervous, or other such things. But we are not talking about our weaknesses but of our attitudes towards what we consider to be the weaknesses of others.
That is why, if I consider my position carefully, I find the ‘drugs problem’ to be ‘non- news’. I do not feel like subscribing to any of the positions cited above. Nor to the positions of superiority from which some regard ‘drug addicts’ (but it’s more ‘hip’ to call them ‘junkies’). I see things differently.
Once again we must start from something obvious: freedom. Of course someone could reply that the young person with very little perspective on choices for gaining knowledge or points of reference, does not have the possibility to start from freedom. So? what should I do? It would be like saying that I am sorry that the exploited have little chance of rebelling because the power structure has been clever enough to sew everything up. In actual fact I am not sorry about such a thing. They have asked for it, with their miserable and petty suggestions of how to force the State to satisfy their needs. And so needs go on being satisfied or postponed, allowing a reorganisation of control and a restructuring of the economy. To such a point that, if not today, then sometime in the near future, the space for rebellion will be reduced to the point of becoming almost nonexistent.
If the individual wants to establish a relationship with drugs he is free to do so, but don’t tell me that only one kind of relationship is possible. For a long time now I have considered the situations in which one lived during the Fifties to be different. At the time we were ‘seekers of fire’. Today we can look for a long time, but all we find are zombies crying for a ‘fix’. But I’m not taken in by this kind of whining, which is the same as what can be heard outside any proletarian’s door or any hovel of the most repellent and shameful poverty, without anyone lifting a finger when they walk past the armoured windows of a bank where the safe is open and waiting to be emptied. Of course a ‘social’ problem of poverty and exploitation exists. But there is also a social problem of submission, respectability, piety, acceptance, sacrifice. If the exploited really is a rebel he will certainly not begin by resolving the social problem of ‘all’ the exploited, but will at least try to solve his own without dwelling on the wickedness of capitalism. In the case of his not being physically capable, he must still evaluate what to do with his life himself, before reaching the abjection of simply denouncing his poverty. In saying this I am not saying that I am against the exploited or the poor things who take drugs and stagger about prey to their own ghosts. I feel sorry for them, yes. After all I am a human being too. But I am not prepared to do anything for them. What should I do? Address them to the same old struggle for housing, water, lighting or a pension, just so they can move on to new levels of poverty and discouragement? And what should one do with those larvae in a trance? Give them methadone? Or build them a libertarian and humanitarian hospice? Don’t even mention it to me.
I know for certain that the exploited proletarian can rebel, and that if he doesn’t he is also responsible, at least as much as those that exploit him. I know for certain that drug addicts can rebel, and that if they don’t they are also responsible, just as much as those who get rich on their misery. It is not true that privation, work, poverty, drugs, take away one’s will power. On the contrary, they can make it greater. It is not true, as many people without any experience of their own maintain, that heroin (to dwell on the ‘heavy’ stuff for a moment) takes away one’s will power or makes us incapable of acting with a determined project and an awareness of class reality, i.e. of the functioning of the mechanisms that produce, among other things, the drugs market. Anyone who says otherwise either lacks competence or is a mystifier. There is always an awareness of self and self-projectuality in the drug addict, even in those supposedly in the final stages (but what are the final stages?). If the individual is weak, a poor stick with a character already marked by a life of privation or ease (at this point it does not make much difference), he reacts weakly, but he would have done the same thing in any other situation in which he happened to find himself. One could reply that drugs as a prop tend to be sought more by weak subjects. I must admit that this is true. But that does not alter the reasoning (‘non-news’) that I made at the outset, that of pointing out the responsibility of the weak concerning their own weakness.
I consider the time has come to say things without mincing words.

N O N - N E W S A B O U T R A C I S M
Racism can be defined in many ways, most of which tend to justify an attitude of defence and attack against other persons who, it is thought, might damage our interests in the immediate or near future. At the root of racism, under its disguise of myths linked to various fantasies and irrationalities, there is always a precise economic cause, in defence of which the fears and fantasies we all have concerning the different are addressed or opportunely solicited.
I read a number of articles recently concerning the growth of racism in Italy, in which incredible falsehoods are stated. It seems to me therefore that it would be useful to begin these uncomfortable pieces of ‘non-news’ with a few precise remarks, bearing in mind the context in which I am writing [Bergamo prison] and the consequent impossibility of obtaining precise historical documentation.
Racism has existed throughout the history of mankind and has always been linked to a fear of the ‘different’ which has been depicted in the most incredible and fantastical ways. Without going back too far, we can see that for centuries the Catholic church was an instrument both of violent racism and destruction, well before the racist theories of the last two hundred years. It developed the racial theory of blood for the first time, applying it against the Spanish Jews and their desperate attempts to convert to Catholicism in order to survive.
In the struggle against the Church and its doctrines last century, scientific theory incongruously introduced a theoretical stream from Chamberlain to Gobineau which took up the blood theory again and used it as a weapon against the Jews. It was placed within a kind of deterministic evolutionism which the modern orthodox racist theory founded by the Nazis based itself upon.
But, from the ‘reconquest’ of Spain to our time, these theories would have remained in the locker of the historical horrors of human thought, had they not occasionally found an economic base on which to exercise themselves, common interests to protect, and fears of possible expropriation to be exorcised. The Catholic crusade against the Jews was a consequence of the fear that it would not be possible to control the the extremely wealthy Spanish provinces left by the Arabs unless they proceeded to their immediate persecution. Their ghettoisation and consequent control was due to the fact that, having been left almost completely free by the Arabs, they had the levers of the Spanish economy in hand.
The vicissitudes of the repression and genocide of the Jews by the Nazis are well known, along with the economic justifications where concrete events were mixed with mythical elements. It is in fact true that with the inflation of the mark—decided mainly under the influence of Jewish managerial groups—the German government had damaged the small savers and salaried workers following their defeat in the first world war. But there was no justification in the subsequent deduction that this was because the Jews acted as a ‘foreign nation’ en bloc, which led to their being condemned to extermination. In this way a significant number of industrialists met their deaths, and along with them, millions of poor souls whose only fault was that they were Jewish.
In the same way the problem of the Jamaicans in Great Britain is based on the fact that they have now become a burden to the State. Brought over in tens of thousands immediately after the second world war to bear the brunt of rebuilding the country, the British State would now like them to go back from whence they came, without taking into account the fact that most of the youth, those who make up the most restless element, were born in Britain and have no intention of going off to a place that is quite unknown to them, and from which they never came.
Israeli racism against the Palestinians has the same economic basis. Zionist interests can no longer tolerate a reduction in territory, or even a cohabitation which might turn out to be destructive in the long run, possibly resulting in a Palestinian State that is capable of becoming the economic cutting edge of a potentially wealthy Arab world. We should not forget that the Arab intelligentsia is nearly all Palestinian and this scares the Israelis, providing them with a far more powerful motivation to fight than the mythical symbol of the great Israel that was to extend between the two historic rivers.
Arab racism, manifested in its continual declarations of ‘holy war’, although never all that solid, also has an economic foundation and is aimed at preventing political isolation and exploitation by other nations during the favourable and limited period of petroleum extraction.
Italian racism has also known significant periods which have not limited themselves to theory. Nothing compared to the ‘Teutonic order’ of course, but it reached a considerable level all the same. During its years of publication, the Italian review Difesa della razza, (Defence of Race) edited by Almirante, included many names from the official anti-fascist democratic culture at the time. But never mind. That is trivia compared to the massacres perpetrated by the Italian army in Libya, Ethiopia and Yugoslavia. Each according to their own capabilities.
Now the ‘black man’ is making his appearance in the sacred territory of our [Italian] homeland and is starting to become ‘visible’. So long as it was a question of a few dozen ‘blacks’, things could be tolerated. In fact, it excited the superficial democratic sentiments of some, prompting heroic declarations of anti-racism. The same went for the occasional ‘gypsy’ camp and the communities of Chinese, Philippinos, Slavs, Poles, and so on. One continually hears, ‘Very well, these people, even if their skin is a different colour, eat different food, move differently, speak another language, are just like us. But only as long as they stay in their place.’ There, that sums up our anti-racism: the black man, who embodies the most extreme characteristics of racial difference, is just like us, a man, not a beast. But he must understand the ‘good’ we are doing him by giving him the chance to eat the crumbs that fall from our tables laden with every imaginable consumer product. He must learn to work long and unflaggingly and put up with the hardest of labour, be nice and polite, pretend not to understand, get accustomed to putting up with exploitation in the black economy (not because he himself is black), doing temporary work in very small enterprises, pay extortionate prices for a single bed in a rat-infested room, learn our language—given that we are all so ignorant that we do not know how to speak any language other than this useless, peripheral Italian one—and so on.
But the ten commandments of anti-racism were valid before the great, more or less rationally planned influx became as consistent as it is now, without any prospect of reduction or regulation. Now it is not just a question of economic damage, but of a real fear of the black man. Although it might sound strange, I have an idea that the real danger at the moment is not some group of Nazi-skins, but comes from a far more profound, deep-rooted feeling that is being experienced irrationally by vast social strata. It is not simply a question of shop-keepers seeing their trade damaged by illegal street sellers, but is also the middle-class white collar workers (among whom you find practically the whole police structure of every order and grade, including the professional military one) and even some salaried but insecure parts of the old factory proletariat who have been leading a trade union battle over the past few years to safeguard the few jobs that are left.
The fact that fascist action squads have been recruited in Florence is just a sign, a dangerous one, certainly, but still a sign. More serious still is the consistently racist behaviour of those who possibly consider themselves to be anti-racist. It is this behaviour that is capable of transforming itself within seconds into real conscious racism at some time in the future, and precipitating a catastrophe. The danger comes from the millions of racists who believe themselves to be democratic and anti-racist. This is the ‘non-news’ that we are proposing to comrades to reflect upon. I am from the South, so I am different, and have felt, not only at skin level, how this ‘diversity’ of mine came to be noticed by, and almost disturbed, those used to living in ‘northern’ circles therefore feel superior and even upholders of a ‘language’ they consider superior.
I perceived this latent hostility at the end of the Fifties, in the mittel-European cultural circle in Turin, where my stubbornness in continuing to underline my Sicilian accent was considered inaptitude and provincialism. I have participated in conferences and outdoor meetings both in and beyond the anarchist movement, more or less all over Italy, and most of the difficulties I encountered were in Florence and the rest of Tuscany. I am not saying that the Tuscans are worse than others. I have Tuscan friends and comrades who are among the best people in the world, but there is in them, in all of them, the conviction that they ‘speak Italian’, that they are the recipients of the mother tongue without having had to face the obstacle of getting rid of their dialect. This mistaken starting point, which makes them not only speak badly but write even worse (always with the obvious exceptions), is an element of latent racism. Knowledge is acquired by study, not from the natural gift of being born in a given place. This is a dangerous concept. Italian is an artificial language that is composed of many elements which, like all other languages, are still in the course of transformation. This goes for dialects too of course, but the lesser capacity of dialects and languages reduced to such a range, to ‘build’ their own literature and make it known, encloses them within a fairly circumscribed territorial space.
I have always refused to ‘refine’ my accent in a ‘correct’ way, precisely so as not to be colonised like most of those who breathe the so-called ‘air of the continent’. After a period in Milan they sound like pure-blooded Milanese when they return to their native Canicatti. Defence of one’s identity, along with an—intellectual and practical—consistency, always gives rise to a reaction of annoyance and fear.
This happens with the homosexual, whom our democratic antifascist culture considers ‘different’ and tolerates so long as he is recognisable, i.e. assumes the attitude of a ‘would-be woman’ that allows us to identify him and keep him at a distance, naturally with great tolerance. But the homosexual who to all appearances is ‘a man like us’ puts us in difficulty, scares us, is the one we fear most. Basically, we have all built a well-ordered world with our certainties and reassurances, and we cannot accept someone ‘different’ turning up and upsetting everything in just a few seconds. In the same way there is latent, therefore unconscious, racism in any attempt at defence that demonstrates the importance and validity of one ethnic reality without linking it to another and pointing out their intrinsic diversity as well as the profound community of interests that exists between them. When I took up the subject of the national liberation struggle many years ago, there were two reactions, both wrong in my opinion. On the one hand, there were those who said right away that such a thematic was right-wing, with goodbye to all the work of Bakunin and comrades and almost the whole of the international anarchist movement. On the other, there were those who took it up, turning it into a local affair aimed at going into its social characteristics, ethical or otherwise, without linking it to the international context as a whole.
Another undercurrent of racism, which runs through the whole of present-day anti-racism, is that of the political verbalism in favour of this or that struggle for the liberation of the South African blacks, the Palestinians, the British blacks, the Kanaks and so on. International solidarity in words alone is a form of latent racism, in fact it is even subscribed to by illuminated governments and respectable groups who spread the good word throughout the world. But when it comes to examining what could be done to support that solidarity concretely, what could be done to damage the economic interests of those responsible for the repression, then things change, and a respectable distance is taken from them immediately. It is another aspect of the anti-racism that tolerates the black man so long as he stays in his place, a different way of keeping a distance, of putting one’s conscience at rest and have racism carry on at a safe distance from one’s own doorstep.
So, here in this country, we have reached the point of believing it possible for police and carabinieri to become the paladins and defenders of the blacks, in other words the supporters of the anti-racist politics of the Italian government. But is such a thing possible? Anyone who has seen these murderers in uniform at work even once can have no illusions on the subject. These armed corps, for the most part composed of people from southern Italy, once their ‘bread and butter’ is safe, become the most ferocious jailers of other people from the south, those who dream of the possible clash that could bring about changes capable of putting the old ideals of their fathers—a piece of bread—in question once again. And if that is what they thought and continue to think as far as the South is concerned, imagine what their attitude will be concerning blacks, Philippinos, gypsies, Poles and so on. Anything but democratic tolerance. The other day, in their haste to beat up their victims (quickly and well do not go together), they did not realise that they were also beating up one of their (parliamentary) colleagues who unfortunately has a black face. Here the racism is anything but latent, but let us put it all in the same category of possible, not certain, danger.
But even workers can be convinced of a ‘black’ danger from the immigrants who have arrived to take what little work is left from them. Massive shifts in this direction find the trades unions and political representatives, who have always worked out their strategy on the element of economic and normative safeguard alone, disarmed. Any humanitarian discourse would rebound on them. In a short time they would be obliged to become the defenders of an institutionally separate working strata, underpaid and guaranteed in a different way, with lower wages and fewer protective measures, in short a kind of apartheid. Such a logic is applied in the United States regularly without half terms, and differentiated conditions have only begun to be reduced in recent years parallel to an unprecedented growth in the rage, not only of the blacks, but mainly of other immigrants such as Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Mexicans and so on.
At the root of this problem, which can supposedly be resolved by power, there is one great obstacle: real, concrete anti-racism, should start from real equality between everyone, men and women, of any race whatsoever, wherever they come from, whatever their culture and religion. But no State could ever bring about, or even consider, concrete equality, so all States are destined to become hotbeds of racial conflicts that no verbal respectability will succeed in camouflaging very well. Explosions of violence, in the one and the other sense, will always be possible unless the social and economic conditions that produce class stratification and differences are eliminated. Racism is an economic problem, and like all economic problems it can only be resolved with a revolutionary break.
One concludes that it is indispensable for revolutionaries to differentiate themselves from all those—and they are numerous—who say they are anti-racist, starting from democratic governments of half the world to the so-called governments of the ex-real socialist States, where racism has also always existed, just as inequality has. It is necessary to differentiate oneself in practical terms from the scoundrels who say they are antiracist, by attacking with precise actions all the symbols of racism and its supporters as they develop and emerge. At the same time it is necessary to work out a critique of the fears and irrational impulses that lurk inside us all concerning everything that is different, in order to reduce the subsoil where the most stupid, visible, racism finds its inexhaustable fuel.

L O S S O F L A N G U A G E
One of the projects that capital is putting into effect is the reduction of language. By language we mean all forms of expression, particularly those that allow us to articulate complex concepts about feelings and things.
Power needs this reduction because it is replacing straightforward repression with control, where consensus plays a fundamental part. And uniform consensus is impossible in the presence of multiform creativity.
The old revolutionary problem of propaganda has also changed considerably in recent years, showing up the limitations of a realism that claimed to show the distortions of the world to the exploited clearly, putting them in the condition to become aware of their situation.
Still in the historical sphere of anarchism, we have the quite exceptional example of Malatesta’s literary capacity based on a language that was essentialised to the maximum degree, constituting a model unique for its time. Malatesta did not use rhetoric or shock effects. He used elementary deductive logic, starting off from simple points based on common sense and ending up with complex conclusions that were easily understood by the reader.
Galleani worked at quite a different linguistic level. He used vast rhetorical constructions, attaching a great deal of importance to the musicality of the phrase and to the use of outdated words chosen to create an atmosphere that in his opinion would move spirits to action.
Neither of the above examples can be proposed as models of a revolutionary language fit for the present time. Not Malatesta, because there is less to ‘demonstrate’ today, nor Galleani, because there are fewer and fewer spirits to be ‘moved’.
Perhaps a wider range of revolutionary literature can be found in France due to that country’s great tradition that has no equal in Italy, Spain or Britain, and due to the particular French spirit of language and culture. At about the same time as the Italian examples mentioned above, we have Faure, Grave and Armand for clarity and exposition, while for research and in some aspects rhetoric, there are Libertad and Zo d’Axa.
We should not forget that France already had the example of Proudhon, whose style even surprised the Academy, then Faure who was considered to be a continuation of this great school along with the methodical, asphyxiating Grave. Self-taught, he was an enthusiastic pupil of Kropotkin. The latter’s French was good and basic precisely because, like Bakunin’s, it was the French of a Russian.
One could go on forever, from the linguistic, literary and journalistic experiments of Libertad, Zo d’Axa and others, as well as their predecessor Coeurderoy. But although they represent some of the best examples of revolutionary journalism, none of these models is valid today.
The fact is that reality has changed, while revolutionaries continue to produce language in the same way, or rather worse. To see this it would suffice to compare a leaflet such as the Endehors by Zo d’Axa with its huge Daumier drawing on one side and his writing on the other, to some of the lapidary leaflets we produce today—looking at our own situation—such as the one we did for the meeting with the comrades from Eastern Europe in Trieste.
But the problem has gone beyond that. Not only are our privileged interlocutors losing their language, we are losing ours too. And because we must necessarily meet on common ground if we want to communicate, the loss is turning out to be irreversable.
This process of diffused flattening is striking all languages, lowering the heterogeneity of expression to the uniformity of the means. The mechanism is more or less the following, and could be compared to television. The increase in quantity (of new items) reduces the time available for the transmission of each one of them. This is leading to a progressive, spontaneous selection of image and word, so on the one hand these elements are being essentialised, while on the other the amount of transmittable data is increasing.
The much desired clarity bemoaned by so many generations of revolutionaries desirous to explain reality to the people, has finally been reached in the only way possible: by not making reality clear (something that is impossible in any case), but making clarity real, i.e. showing the reality that has been built by technology.
This is happening to all linguistic expression including desperate attempts to save human activity through art, which is also letting past fewer and fewer possibilities. Moreover, this endeavour is finding itself having to struggle on two fronts: first, against being swallowed up by the flattening that is turning creativity into uniformity, and second, against the opposite problem, but which has the same roots, that of the market and its prices.
My old theses on poor art and art as destruction are still close to my heart.
Let us give an example: all language, in that it is an instrument, can be used in many ways. It can be used to transmit a code aimed at maintaining or perfecting consensus, or it can be used to stimulate transgression. Music is no exception here, although because of its particular characteristics the road to transgression is even more difficult. Although it seems more direct, it is actually further from it. Rock is a music of recuperation and contributed to extinguishing much of the revolutionary energy of the Seventies. According to Nietzsche’s intuition, the same thing happened with the innovation of Wagnerian music in his time. Think of the great thematic and cultural differences that exist between these two kinds of musical production. Wagner had to build a vast cultural edifice and completely discompose the linguistic instrument in order to captivate the revolutionary youth of his time. Today rock has done the same thing on a much wider scale with a cultural effort that is ridiculous in comparison. The massification of music has favoured the work of recuperation.
So we could say revolutionary action operates in two ways, first according to the instrument, which is undergoing a process of simplification and stripping down, then in the sense of its use, which has become standardised, producing effects that cannot always be reduced to a common denominator that is acceptable to all or nearly all. That happens in so-called literature (poetry, narrative, theatre, etc.) as well as in that restricted microcosm, the revolutionary activity of examining social problems. Whether this takes the form of articles in anarchist papers, or leaflets, pamphlets, books, etc., the risks are fairly similar. The revolutionary is a product of his time and uses the instruments and occasions it produces.
The chances of reading about the actual conditions of society and production have been reduced, because there is far less to be brought to the surface, and because interpretative instruments have undergone a recession. In a society that was polarised in two clearly opposing classes the task of counter-information was to bring the reality of the exploitation that the power structure had every interest in hiding, out into the open. The latter included the mechanisms for extracting surplus value, repressive stratagems, authoritarian regressions of the State and so on. Now, in a society that is moving further and further towards a democratic form of management and production based on information technology, capital is becoming more and more comprehensible. This is precisely because it is more important for it to be seen, and less important for it to discover new methods of exploitation.
Today we need to interpret society with cultural instruments that are not merely capable of interpreting facts that are unknown or treated superficially. We also need to identify an unconscious conflictuality that is far from the old extremely visible class conflict, to avoid being drawn into a simplistic refusal that is incapable of evaluating the mechanisms of recuperation, consensus and globalisation. More than documentation we need active participation, including writing, in what must be a comprehensive project. We cannot limit ourselves to denouncing exploitation but must bring our analyses to within a precise project which will become comprehensible during the course of the analysis itself. Documentation and denunciation are no longer enough. We need something more, so long as we still have tongues to speak with, so long as we have not had them all cut off.
It is this new interaction between ways of expressing oneself and one’s project that is the strength of this way of using linguistic instruments, but also leads to the discovery of its limitations. If language has been allowed to become impoverished, adapting to the tendency to its reduction that has been studied and applied by power, then this is inevitable.
I have always fought against a kind of detached objectivity in writing that looks at revolutionary questions. Precisely because it is an instrument, linguistic expression always has a social dimension that is summed up in its style. It is not just ‘the man’ as Buffon says, but is ‘man in a given society’. And it is the style that solves the problem, certainly a difficult one, of supplying the so-called deeds of the event along with the indispensable content, their insertion within a project. If this project is alive and up to the conditions of the conflict, the style could be livened up, whereas if the latter is not suitable or is lost in the illusion of objectivity, even the best project will run the risk of losing itself in a ghostlike forest of impressions.
Our language must therefore take a form that is capable of supporting our revolutionary content and have a provocatory thrust that is capable of violating and upsetting normal ways of communicating. It must be able to represent the reality we feel in our hearts without letting ourselves get wrapped up in a shroud of logic and only understood with great difficulty. The project and the language used to illustrate it must meet and recognise each other in the style used. Without wanting to take things to the logical extreme of this well-worn thesis, we know today that the instrument constitutes a considerable part of the message.
We need to look out for these processes, not let a new pragmatic ideology submerge us in throwaway phrases where there is no relationship between the project and the way of saying it.
So, advancing linguistic impoverishment is also reflected in the instruments of communication that we use as revolutionaries. First of all because we are men and women of our time, participants in the reductive cultural processes that characterise it. We are losing instruments like everyone else. This is normal. But we need to make more of an effort to get better results and acquire the capacity to resist these reductive projects.
This reduction in stylistic ability is a consequence of the lowering of content. It is also capable of producing further impoverishment, leading to the inability to express the essential part of the project that necessarily remains tied to the means of expression. It is therefore not the ‘genre’ that saves the content, but above all the way this content takes form. Some people make out a schema and never manage to free themselves from it. They filtre everything they come to know through this schema, believing it to be ‘their way of expressing themselves’, like having a limp or brown eyes. But it is not like that. One must free oneself from this prison sooner or later, if one wants to make what one is communicating come alive.
There are those who choose irony to transmit the urgency they feel, for example. Very well, but irony has its own peculiarites, i.e. it is pleasant, light, a dance, a joke, an allusive metaphor. It cannot become a system without turning out to be repetitive or pathetic like the satirical inserts in the daily papers, or comic strips where we know beforehand how the story is going to end otherwise we wouldn’t be able to understand it, like barrack-room jokes. In the same way, for opposite reasons, the call of reality—the attempt to make reality visible and palpable through communication, starting from the supposition that there can be no immediate fruition from anything that does not seem real—ends up becoming tedious, is unrealisable. We get lost in the constant need to insist, losing the conceptuality that is at the basis of true communication.
One of the hackneyed phrases in the museum of everyday stupidity is that we do not know how to say something, whereas the problem really is that we do not know what to say. This is not necessarily so. The communication flux is not unidimensional, but multidimensional: we do not only communicate, we also receive communications. And we have the same problem in communicating with others as we have in receiving from others. There is also a problem of style in reception. Identical difficulties, identical illusions. Again, limiting ourselves to written language, we find that when we read newspaper articles we can reconstruct the way the writer of the article receives communications from the outside. The style is the same, we can see it in the same articles, the same mistakes, the same short-cuts. And that is because these incidents and limits are not just questions of style but are essential components of the writer’s project, of his very life.
We can see that the less the revolutionary’s capacity to grasp the meaning of incoming communication, even when it reaches us directly from events, the poorer and more repetitive the interpretation of the latter. The result is, in word and unfortunately also in deed, approximation, uncertainty, a low level of ideas that does justice neither to the complexities of the enemy’s capacity, or to our own revolutionary intentions.
If things were otherwise, socialist realism, with its good working class always ready to mobilise itself, would have been the only possible solution. The latest aberration dictated by such ignorance and refusal to consider reality differently was the intervention of the good Rumanian miners to re-establish Illiescu’s new order.
Power’s attempts to generalise the flattening of linguistic expression is one of the essential components of the insurmountable wall that is being built between the included and the excluded. If we have identified direct, immediate attack as one instrument in the struggle, parallel to it we must also develop an optimal use of the other instrument at our disposal and take, whatever the cost, what we do not possess. The two are inseparable.

I L L N E S S A N D C A P I T A L
Illness, i.e.a faulty functioning of the organism, is not peculiar to man. Animals also get ill, and even things can in their own way present defects in functioning. The idea of illness as abnormality is the classic one that was developed by medical science.
The response to illness, mainly thanks to the positivist ideology which still dominates medicine today, is that of the cure, that is to say, an external intervention chosen from specific practices, aimed at restoring the conditions of a given idea of normality.
Yet it would be a mistake to think that the search for the causes of illness has always run parallel to this scientific need to restore normality. For centuries remedies did not go hand in hand with the study of causes, which at times were absolutely fantastical. Remedies had their own logic, especially when based on empirical knowledge of the forces of nature.
In more recent times a critique of the sectarianism of science, including medicine, has based itself on the idea of man’s totality: an entity made up of various natural elements—intellectual, economic, social, cultural, political and so on. It is in this new perspective that the materialist and dialectical hypothesis of Marxism inserted itself. The variously described totality of the new, real man no longer divided up into the sectors that the old positivism had got us used to, was again encapsulated in a one-way determinism by the Marxists. The cause of illness was thus considered to be due exclusively to capitalism which, by alienating man through work, exposed him to a distorted relationship with nature and ‘normality’, the other side of illness.
In our opinion neither the positivist thesis that sees illness as being due to a faulty functioning of the organism, nor the Marxist one that sees everything as being due to the misdeeds of capitalism is sufficient.
Things are a little more complicated than that.
Basically, we cannot say that there would no longer be such a thing as illness in a liberated society. Nor can we say that in that happy event illness would reduce itself to a simple weakening of some hypothetical force that is still to be discovered. We think that illness is part of the nature of man’s state of living in society, i.e. corresponds to a certain price to be paid for correcting a little of nature’s optimal conditions in order to obtain the artificiality necessary to build even the freest of societies.
Certainly, the exponential growth of illness in a free society where artificiality between individuals would be reduced to the strictly indispensable, would not be comparable to that in a society based on exploitation, such as the one in which we are living now. It follows from this that the struggle against illness is an integral part of the class conflict. Not so much because illness is caused by capital—which would be a determinist, therefore unacceptable, statement—but because a freer society would be different. Even in its negativity it would be closer to life, to being human. So illness would be an expression of our humanity just as it is the expression of our terrifying inhumanity today. This is why we have never agreed with the somewhat simplistic thesis that could be summed up in the phrase "make illness a weapon", even though it is one that deserves respect, especially as far as mental illness is concerned. It is not really possible to propose to the patient a cure that is based exclusively on the struggle against the class enemy. Here the simplification would be absurd. Illness also means suffering, pain, confusion, uncertainty, doubt, solitude, and these negative elements do not limit themselves to the body, but also attack consciousness and the will. To draw up programmes of struggle on such a basis would be quite unreal and terrifyingly inhuman.
But illness can become a weapon if one understands it both in its causes and effects. It can be important for me to understand what the external causes of my illness are: capitalists and exploiters, State and capital. But that is not enough. I also need to clarify my relationship with MY ILLNESS, which might not only be suffering, pain and death. It might also be a means by which to understand myself and others better, as well as the reality that surrounds me and what needs to be done to transform it, and also get a better grasp of revolutionary outlets.
The mistakes that have been made in the past on this subject come from lack of clarity due to the Marxist interpretation. That was based on the claim to establish a DIRECT relationship between illness and capital. We think today that this relationship should be INDIRECT, i.e. by becoming aware of illness, not of illness in general as a condition of ABNORMALITY, but of my illness as a component of my life, an element of MY NORMALITY.
And then, the struggle against this illness. Even if not all struggles end in victory.

O N E’ S L I F E O N T H E L I N E
Since the beginning of time man has had a taste for risk and adventure and distorted forms of play such as duels and hunting. Games that put the player’s life on the line also date back to ancient times. But to avoid going too far back in history, it is enough to think of Russian roulette, which everyone remembers from the pages of a great Russian novel, or from scenes in a fairly recent American film. In the Fifties a film about violence in rural America depicted a game called the ‘rabbit jump’, a race between youths, each at the wheel of a car heading towards a cliff edge. The one who jumped out last was the winner. In recent months there have been reports in the news of a ‘motorway roulette’, which consists of driving along a stretch of motorway the wrong way: whoever gets furthest wins. Another game in fashion with Israeli boys, some under ten, consists of placing a schoolbag in the middle of the road and snatching it back when a car approaches. The one who retrieves his last wins. According to news reports a number of children have died playing this game.
So why put one’s life on the line?
The answer might simply be that it is due to the ‘crisis in values’of an advanced post-industrial society which has no future to offer young people. Another recent American film showing gang warfare in Los Angeles ended up with a youth who, rather than let himself be arrested, shot a policeman shouting ‘There’s no future!’ And that might be a good answer. The everyday experiences that form the personality have been seriously affected by the profound changes that have taken place in the social and economic structures of advanced industrialised countries over recent years. The thoughts, emotions and actions of individuals are immersed in a situation that has no pre-existing categories to put them in any kind of order and give them any sense of security.
This is leading the younger strata, those not able to cope with such a situation or who are not yet in possession of well-rooted interests and ideas, to feel ‘value-deprived’ and unable to ‘give any meaning to life’.
Why is this too simple an answer? First, because it does not seem right to me to relegate everything to an underlying social mechanism that explains everything. Behind this mental attitude lurks a kind of neo-determinism that prevents us from grasping the real motivations at the root of things which, if brought out into the open, might give us a better indication of what to do.
The social disintegration resulting from economic restructuring in the Eighties is certainly one of the reasons for the chipping away at the values that emerged in the postwar period and remained more or less intact until the end of the Seventies. An institution such as the family, which is turning out to be less and less solid or capable of resolving the important task assigned to it by the bourgeois capitalist society of the last century, is being hit not only by the changing conditions of the world of work and production, but also by the circulation of different ideas, culture, concepts of time and space, and so on. Each of these elements, which it would be simplistic to group together under the term economy, has produced conditions that need to be examined individually. They are of great importance and make up the connective tissue onto which emotions are grafted the thoughts and actions of so many of the young people who come face to face in today’s football stadia and play with their lives in a thousand ways, finding themselves as they do with no future, certainties or hope.
Here we are not simply looking at the marginal phenomenon of the late integration of young people into the conditions imposed by social life. This has always existed. What we can see now is a phenomenon of a consistency and extension unknown in the past. And if we want to understand it we must also look at our own thinking patterns. We once thought, and rightly so, that working conditions were central to comprehending the reasons as to why the proletariat engaged in the class struggle, including the revolutionary perspective. But objective conditions are changing. We used to think that the struggles of the working class could at any moment transform themselves into revolutionary consciousness, precisely due to the defects in the system of production as a whole. We can no longer think in such an automatic way.
We used to say that one thing that put a brake on the class struggle was the educational integration of young people through the family, the foundation stone of the uniformity of judgement that was completed at school, in the army and at work. Many of these things have now changed. Various concepts have entered the family since its disintegration set in, leading it to breathe an air of paternalism, when not downright puerocracy. Information reaches households directly through television, so the censuring filtre of parents no longer functions. The latter have also lost some of the authority that once came from simple physical strength, as there are stricter controls by the State concerning violence towards the underaged. The old affection, the stuff of seventeenth century oil paintings upon which the family was supposed to be based—for the most part a fantasy of writers and poets—is no longer able to cover up the real lack of feeling that exists within this institution. And we anarchists were among the first to put forward a serious critique of the family as the origin of many of the horrors of the class society.
The same goes for school, where, with far-sighted clarity, we saw its limitations and defects in the nineteenth century, proposing a libertarian form of education that has now been taken over by the intellectuals of the regime. I don’t known if we are capable of understanding what is really happening in school today, but it does not seem to me to be a sector in which we are any further behind than others. The level of anarchist analysis today does not seem to be up to comprehending the rapid changes that are taking place in society and the economy. This is demonstrated by what is being said about the problem of production, and, with a constancy worthy of greater things, the insistence on the validity of more or less revolutionary syndicalism.
In our opinion, new problems are presenting themselves on the social scene that cannot be faced by using old analyses, even though they might have been correct at one time. In a way, we have not been able to take what we ourselves formulated to its logical conclusion. The example of the family is significant. We were among the first to denounce the repressive functions of this institution but are nowhere near first, today, in drawing the relevant conclusions.
The general loss of traditional values does not see us capable of proposing, I would not say substitutes for, but even critiques of other people’s proposals. In the face of the many young people who are asking for a good reason not to put their lives on the line, we do not know what to say. Others have given what we know are not real answers, but the young take them to be such, extinguishing their liberatory aggressiveness and reducing themselves to passive instruments in the hands of power. Others tell them life has a value in itself, because God gave it to us, because it serves pleasure, the Revolution, the continuation of the species, and so on. We know that, taken individually, these statements are not right, but we do not know what to propose as a valid alternative to the game of risk for its own sake.

"C O M M U N I T Y" S I C K N E S S
Anarchist practice has fallen sharply in recent years, with few actions either at mass level or at the level of specific groups. As a result we see a revival of the issue of how to get closer to ‘communism’ or to building situations that not only express our ideas and ethical and cultural values but are also capable of satisfying our fundamental personal and collective need for freedom. In other words, there is a proposal to create points of reference that go beyond the classical division between the personal and the political.
This corresponds to a growing need within the whole movement against capital today, not just the anarchist one. As hopes of profound changes in the social structure vanished with the spreading of desistance from the struggle, the concern with not letting oneself be engulfed by increasing restructuring has become greater: ‘We must continue to struggle for our own essential needs, because in any case it is not the time to talk of great macroscopic changes.’
The problem is that these impulses end up taking two roads which, if examined closely, both lead to the same dead end in the same ghetto. The first, more direct, road is that of desistance: nothing can be done, the enemy is too powerful. We might as well just rely on spreading our ideas (which are superior anyway) and not insist on attack, which only leads to repression, creating more difficulties for the movement in its fundamental activity of propaganda and spreading anarchist theory. The second, more tortuous, road is that of an organisational proposal linked to the idea of community.
Many comrades talk of ‘community’, although not always as something confined to one geographical area or in order to satisfy (or try to satisfy) certain needs, even basic ones. It should mean a different way of seeing life, culture, novelty, diversity. ‘Community’ thus escapes the dangers of conservatism or of becoming a mere repetition of empty slogans.
But very little is said about this ‘community’ in terms of its structural or other arrangement that could give some idea of its ‘operative’ side. It is seen in terms of a sense of participation, an awareness of the specific contradictions of anarchism (in truth never clear), and the desire for freedom and equality, without the former being realised at the cost of the latter, or vice versa.
Why do we believe that this road is equal to the first, that of declared and open desistance? It is easily said. Because the revolutionary struggle is an organisational fact, here and now, not simply a ‘cultural revolution’ (by the use of this term I am not referring to Mao’s cultural revolution, which has nothing to do with us, and which was ‘cultural’ in name only). Because the clash between classes leaves no room for ‘margins’ or free spaces that can be reached through operations carried out within the somewhat polluted currents of philosophical thought. Because the revolutionary always pays in first person, so is aware he will also have to face ‘sacrifice’, i.e. the postponement of projects, delay in the satisfaction of needs. Because anyone who really decides to attack the power of the oppressors cannot reasonably think that the latter will leave them in peace with their ‘ideal’ tensions of freedom and equality. Because if they really want these places of ‘communitarian’ living to be at all tangible in practical terms (and not just a cerebral exercise), they must also give some sign of good will, i.e. pronounce themselves to be against violence, against expropriation, especially in the individual sense, and against active solidarity with those who are really struggling and facing death every day, either at the workplace or in the other places where opposing interests clash.
At this point the provocation needs to be put in these terms, or so it seems to me:
We can talk about the idea of ‘community’ and limit ourselves to that. Very well. Then we should be clear about it.
Or we can try to put the idea of community into practice. All right. In that case we should be more specific about communitarian structures, activities, limitations and possibilities.
As far as the second point is concerned, we have only a vague critique of self-managed attempts within capitalist situations today, which do not take the many other problems into account.
I must say when one finds oneself faced with a myriad of not always edifying historical examples, it is always best to take a step back from an idea, no matter how important, useful or pleasant the latter might be. And the problem of ‘community’ is undoubtedly of this kind.
Let us take a look at it. The idea of ‘community’ is not specific to anarchists. On the contrary it has been developed throughout philosophical thought (the academic codification of the ideas of the dominant class) in opposition to the concept of ‘society’.
Leaving aside the specific use that Plato, Fichte and Hegel made of the idea of ‘community’, one example that needs to be borne in mind is Marx and Engel’s analysis of the primitive community in which the history of humanity began. This was to become a final community where the history of the proletariat and the class struggle were to resolve themselves. Such philosophical determinism reaches its full tragi-comic expression in Stalin’s theories of ‘community’ that stand up well alongside the theories of the National Socialists, who were not just theoreticians but ‘almost’ architects of a ‘community of a sacred culture and people’ (by force, of course).
So far we are clearly within the area of a supra-national interpretation of the concept of ‘community’.
But another elaboration of this concept has been realised in the workshops of academia, one that comes closest to the ideas that are being discussed in the anarchist movement today. This sees ‘community’ not as a supranational entity, but as a particular link between individuals, in other words as a ‘social relation’. According to this way of seeing things, individual relations are brought about by common interest, creating interaction that serves to amalgamate the ‘community’.
This concept was first formulated by the German Romantic school, by a theoretician of religion (Schleiermacher) to be precise, in 1799, and his ideas are undoubtedly linked to his concept of ‘religion’ which means ‘to bound together’ or ‘tie together’.
Then in 1887 Tonnies, in a more detailed formulation, described community as a natural organism within a kind of collective will aimed at satisfying prevalently collective interests. In this organism, individual urges and interests atrophy to a maximum degree, while the cultural orientation tends to reach an almost sacred dimension. There is global solidarity between all members. Property is held in common. Power (at least as it is understood today) is absent.
The model presented by Tonnies for his analysis is that of European rural society, in the peasant villages. Kropotkin, for his part, drew on other realities (that of the Russian ‘mir’) and from other anthropological literature (in the English language), but had a fairly similar model in mind.
In my opinion the error lies in believing that it is natural to act in a way that is both specific to certain communitarian situations, and to the historical course of a communitarian feeling that existed among certain peoples before the disintegration of the social order. In other words it was thought that some communitarian institutions had survived destruction by the modern State and continue to exist in incomplete forms that are still visible today, such as the family (or extended family), neighbourhood groups, co-operatives, etc. This is all really quite naive. Less naive, but just as mistaken (therefore dangerous), is the point of view of those who say that community is a ‘union’ that is felt ‘subjectively’ by its members, whereas society is only understood through an objective arrangement.
None of this detracts from the feelings of solidarity, equality and the refusal of individual power and property that the exploited have been capable of realising in quite well-defined forms. Just as it does not detract from the concept of self-organisation, spontaneous creativity and projectuality of those who are against power.
What I want to question here is the validity and possible use of the concept of ‘community’, if only for the following reasons:
a) in the light of the history of this concept, we cannot consider community to indicate a value that is superior to that of society;
b) it follows that we cannot consider ‘community’ to be part of a cultural heritage of progress against reaction;
c) point b) is demonstrated by the fact that the fascist and reactionary movements also—in their own way—made reference to the concept of community;
d) it is not easy to free community from the aura of the sacred or the bearer-of-truth. This has a distorting effect on the undeniable solidarity that spreads within it, a solidarity that often extends acritically under a flag or slogan;
e) it would be far from easy to separate the concept of ‘community’ from its original rural and peasant base with all the implications that are now far off in time and certainly in contrast to a general situation of profound technological change.
It seems to me that we can wind up by simply saying that there is no need to have recourse to concepts such as ‘community’, which carry pollutants that are not easy to filtre out, in order to point to the effective capacity for self-organisation that the exploited possess.
When this concept is used to refer to a possible organisational form, deceiving oneself that it would overcome the limits and contradictions, dangers and traumas that revolutionary anarchist activity inevitably carries with it in a situation of profound social laceration such as the present, I must stress my disagreement.

What’s going on in Italy?

2010-08-21T09:10:00.000-07:00

act for freedom
2005
Translated by Barbara Stefanelli

sources:
http://www.anarcotico.net/
http://squat.net/filiarmonici/crocenera/
http://www.guerrasociale.org/
http://digilander.libero.it/tempidiguerra/

CONTENTS

Introduction
Operazione Nottetempo in Lecce
The Borders of Democracy
Letter from Salvatore
Letter From Salvatore from Salerno
Letter from Cristian
What’s going on in Italy?
Operazione Fraria in Sardinia
Investigations in Rome and Bologna
Statement from Massimo, Regina Coeli
Florence, June 4
Barcelona, June
Letter from Albertino
Direct Action Against Fascists and their Instigators
Outbreak at San Foca
Shoot the Red Cross!
Recent Judicial Attacks on Italian Anarchists
Cervantes Occupation Communique
Chronology

Introduction
Concentration camps for immigrants where torture is the rule, arrests of anarchists all over the country, police raids and the storming of solidarity demonstrations: this is Italy today.
While deportations and murder of immigrants have become everyday events, a great number of anarchists are now under investigation following the nth judicial frame-up, and many of them are in jail.
It is the State’s revenge against those who have always struggled against the brutal system of deportation and in solidarity with prisoners and the exploited.
In this scenario of repression, where the anarchist movement is being struck by a ferocious counter-attack of the State, fascist groups are holding their filthy heads high. Ignored and often backed by police, they are going around armed with knives and other weapons, stabbing comrades and launching assaults against squats.
This pamphlet is a contribution to exposing what’s going on in Italy and is in solidarity to all the comrades in jail.
Walls are made to be scaled, chains are made to be broken: we want our comrades free, all prisons and borders smashed down.
random anarchists

Operation ‘Nottetempo’
in Lecce
May 12, Lecce, southern Italy: one hundred and fifty cops, backed by helicopters and anti-explosives units, raid the houses of 16 anarchists and arrest five of them on charges of ‘subversive association’. Salvatore, Saverio and Cristian are taken to prison, whereas Marina and Annalisa are under house arrest.
This charge, which was also used in the infamous ‘Marini frame-up’, is now being specifically connected to the struggle against the detention camp for immigrants ‘Regina Pacis’, (San Foca, Lecce). Public Prosecutor Lino Giorgio Bruno, in fact, is accusing the arrested anarchists of ‘repeatedly threatening’ the director of the camp and his family, carrying out an arson attack against his house, stirring up one of the many uprisings that broke out in the camp, setting fire to the entrance of the prestigious ‘Duomo’ cathedral in Lecce, damaging various ‘Banca Intesa’ cash machines (the bank that finances ‘Regina Pacis’), and so on.
As usual, there is no real evidence for the specific charges; only suspicion, insignificant phone tapping and a bugging device placed in the car of one of the comrades, which was immediately found and destroyed by the comrade himself.
It must be pointed out, however, that the prison for immigrants ‘Regina Pacis’ has recently been closed down and its manager, priest Cesare Lodeserto, is under arrest for abuse and mistreatment of immigrants. His crimes and those of his collaborators had become so obvious that they could not be ignored any longer, despite a united front formed by rightist and leftist politicians, all claiming Lodeserto’s innocence.
Lecce anarchists had started to expose the true nature of ‘Regina Pacis’ long before the recent judicial intervention against that centre of torture; and they had been doing that through coherent and firm work of counter-information and strong denunciation. Their ‘crime’ is therefore ideological: they are anarchists and want all prisons and borders to be destroyed once and for all. With all means necessary, without any reserve.
The five anarchists have been locked up because they practised concrete solidarity towards the ‘indesirables’, the exploited, excluded or deported on the grounds that they do not have the necessary papers. Solidarity among the exploited: this is the spectre power fears most, the possibility that terrorises those who are attacking our comrades in Germany, Italy, Spain, Greece and everywhere in the world. The bosses build detention camps and deport immigrants to fulfil the needs of capital; then they criminalize social struggles and put in jail whoever shows effective solidarity towards the excluded.
If the latest arrests are intended to stop such solidarity and the war on this system of death, they will not attain their goal. Today our comrades are prisoners, tomorrow they will be with us again in the struggle… as long as there are exploiters and prisons, concentration camps and imperialist wars.
FREE SALVATORE, SAVERIO, CRISTIAN, MARINA, ANNALISA
NO BORDERS NO PRISONS

The Borders of Democracy:
Immigrants Murdered,
Rebels in Jail
5 anarchists were arrested in Lecce on the 12th May following the usual investigations for ‘conspiracy’. ‘Capolinea Occupato’, the anarchist squat in Lecce, was raided and closed down.
These comrades, well known for their continuous, strong and uncompromising struggle against the detention camp for immigrants, were becoming a real pain in the neck. Detention camps are true concentration camps, even if the language of the State calls them ‘temporary stay centres’, and the brutality of the local ‘Regina Pacis’ towards immigrants emerged so clearly that its director, priest Cesare Lodeserto, has ended up in jail. Added to this, a great number of imprisoned immigrants have started to revolt bravely and firmly; so the voice of those who have been denouncing the crimes of the whole system of immigration had to be silenced.
These comrades have been accused of attacking ‘Regina Pacis’ property and its financial supporters, of sabotaging a few Esso petrol stations and carrying out direct action against Benetton shops.
We do not care if they are innocent or guilty, for us what is right cannot be found in the penal code. If they are innocent they can count on our solidarity. If they are guilty they can count on it even more. To struggle against people who lock up men and women whose only ‘crime’ is that they are poor and without the right papers; to present a small bill to those who get rich thanks to the genocide in Iraq (Esso) or by deporting Mapuche people (Benetton): these are practises we totally agree with. The attack on the exploited is always the same: bombardment, detention camps, banks, multinationals, etc etc.
The same day as our comrades in Lecce were arrested, police in Turin raided and evicted a gypsy camp, killed a man from Senegal at a road block, caused another immigrant to die while he was attempting to escape. You think that’s enough? Well, it’s not.
Immigrants in via Corelli camp (Milan) have been on hunger strike for weeks, protesting on the roof and shouting out their desire for freedom. Meantime, hundreds of the refugees arriving in Italy are imprisoned in ‘welcome centres’ from which they will soon try to escape at any cost.
These are the cries from the remains of a rotten world in ruins. We can pretend not to hear them. We can hypocritically celebrate the struggle against nazi-fascism without realizing that concentration camps are part of the present, not the past. We can find shelter in respect for the law, the same law that is waved at millions of ‘undesirables’.
Alternatively, we can decide to stand up and find the sense of what is right in ourselves, using our hands and our hearts.
We can either hide or fight.
The best way to solidarise with the Lecce anarchists is to carry on the struggle to close the detention camps and stop the machinery of expulsion.
For a world without borders.
anarchists under investigation

THE TRIAL
The first hearing of the trial that the anarchists from Lecce must stand will take place on November 9 in Lecce court.
Besides, Salvatore, Saverio, Marina, Cristian, Annalisa, another13 comrades are also on trial

Letter from Salvatore
From the Maximum Security wing
of Borgo S. Nicola prison,
Lecce.
19 May 2005-06-01

Warmest greetings and a big hug to all those who have been involved in manifesting their solidarity with demonstrations, leafleting, pickets, letters, telegrammes, etc. these past days. Everything that reaches me from outside keeps my spirits up and shows the ‘great minds’ of the State that they have concocted yet another judicial frame up, that they can’t stop the struggle and that the walls, the barbed wire, the bars and the guards of human meat are not enough to isolate us from the social context we live in.
Here in prison the other prisoners are also showing great solidarity. After spending two days in the main prison we are now in maximum security, but in the midst of splendid humanity, a humanity that continues to live, hope and dream, in spite of the 20 hours a day that we are forced to stay up to three in a cell two metres by four, without anywhere to socialise apart from the exercise yard. Over a thousand individuals in this prison alone, that holds their bodies but whose minds are free.
The aim of this nth judicial frame-up is obvious: they want to immobilise and silence anyone who is not prepared to bow their head, anyone who for too long has been breaking the monotony of constituted order, struggling for a different world, for a life worth living and freedom for everyone. They want to eliminate any form of radical dissent and critique of the existent; especially if this critique is aimed at people who are very high up such as archbishops and their servants, people who have political protection there where the gangrenous heart of the State beats.
There can be no doubt, in fact, that this operation fits in perfectly with a wider project: to draw attention away from the judicial affairs of those who have tortured, psychiatricized, violated, kidnapped and imprisoned thousands of individuals in the name of the State and democracy, while waiting to rehabilitate them in the not too distant future, in the dominant logic in these times of war.
In this upside down world, reality is upturned and the language of the State justifies it: that is why we are described as terrorists and violent. But the real terrorist is the State, and history demonstrates this amply, and as far as violence is concerned, I only consider revolutionary violence to be acceptable. They have said that the violent ones are those who set fire to cash machines, but, as someone already said a long time ago ‘the real thief is not he who robs a bank but he who founded it’.
Terrorism and violence on the other hand is bombing entire populations and causing thousands of dead; it is the Ilva of Taranto and Porto Marghera that kills slowly and legally, it is the white deaths at work, the concentration camps for immigrants and those of them who are drowned, the roundups, the deportations, the suicides in prison.
Terrorism and violence are environmental devastation and the plundering of resources, industrial production and its continual delocalisation in the search for ever greater conditions of exploitation and new slaves in the name of profit, uprooting peoples and leaving behind thousands of undesirables, expropriated of their very lives… and I’ll stop here because the list would be too long.
Once again I thank all of you outside who are supporting and continuing our struggle, it means that they have not stopped us.
They can’t, because, as one comrade wrote, ‘the enemies of all borders have freedom in their hearts, no one can imprison them’.
Today I am also there with all of you. Today I’ll be a little more free, me too.
A big hug.
Salvatore

Letter from Salvo from Salerno prison 11 June 2005
From today at 14.30 I find myself in Salerno prison. Yesterday they informed me that I’d be transferred and only this morning in the meat wagon did I understand where I was being taken. They woke me at 5.30, at 6.00 I came down and at 7.00 was in the van along with some other prisoners, including Saverio.
… Unfortunately once we were in the van we asked the cops and they told us that Saverio was going to Melfi, but I was going to Salerno… This prison is not one of those new ones but is old and has been restructured, ‘embellished’. What struck me immediately (could be wrong) is the severity of the guards: you must keep in a certain position, always walk close to the wall and they informed me that when the count takes place (8, 16, 20 hours) I must stand up, near the bed. After the formalities in the matricula, they put me in the isolation cell and there are no other prisoners near me, so I can’t find out anything at the moment…
12 June 2005.This morning I came down for exercise: they put me alone in a tiny yard 7 x 8 metres behind my cell, for an hour. Coming outside I was able to see that it’s an old prison, the structure is completely different from Lecce. Unfortunately I cannot even ask the prisoner who brings the food anything because, contrary to what happens in Lecce, here two screws follow him. I have no idea where the other prisoners go for exercise, from where I was I couldn’t hear any voices; the air (that’s a manner of speaking) where I was taken had seven metre high walls but, unlike Lecce, doesn’t have a metal net over it.I have no idea what kind of prison this is, although when I arrived it didn’t seem all that small, at least from the little I could see from the van.
13 June 2005. Things are pretty bad here, this morning around 8.00 about 15 guards turned up, they did a body search in the cell, after which they made me go and they searched the cell and when I got back all my few belongings were all over the place. I asked for a shower and they sent me: two disgusting showers that have never been cleaned and with cold water. At nine I went out into the usual yard, which they also searched, and I’ve just come back; think, they prevent me from taking a book out with me, and it’s boring staying there alone doing nothing. ... It’s an incredible situation, I don’t know what they think anarchists are, or why they’re doing all this. You know, what we say about prison, that it’s a means of physical and psychological annientamento, now I think I really know what that means, I really think that’s the case.
About 13.30. a well dressed man came up to the cell and asked me to come over… he introduced himself as the prison director. I asked him why on earth I was in this situation of isolation, and he told me that these are orders from the Ministry, that I must be kept in a single cell, he doesn’t know for how long. He was also surprised that I’m here, as I haven’t been to court, he said that they can’t keep me outside my own territory and that in his opinion the isolation shouldn’t last all that long and that anyway there’s nothing I can do about it.
14 June…I can’t wait to get post also here in Salerno. It would be a great help.
…I have the impression that the prisoner who brings the meals has told them in the kitchen that I’m vegetarian and asked them to give me something without meat or fish, because today there was a portion of beans only for me. If that’s the case then I’m really pleased because it means that they can’t destroy solidarity between prisoners. And anyway isn’t that what we’ve always said, that solidarity is at the root of the struggles of the exploited?

LETTER FROM CRISTIAN

23rd may 2005
Dearest comrades,
I could hear you, and how I could hear you!!! What a joy yesterday, what an unforgettable afternoon. I was stuck to the window all the time, I waved a black Tshirt as high as I could (with the help of a broom) and I shouted, I shouted like hell. I recognized all of you, one by one, listening to you was like seeing all your faces. And if my ears received everything strong and clear, my eyes—despite my efforts—could distinguish only one thing, which is however worth everything else: a high and beautiful black flag, waving behind this damned prison wall.
I know you and how great your solidarity is, but you still surprise me: I’ve got mountains of letters and telegrams, extraordinary initiatives have followed one after the other, things like this had never been seen before in this sleepy town, and this great support was once really unimaginable here. All this fills my heart with joy and makes me even more convinced that the love bonding us is even stronger than any obstacle, be it bars and concrete or be it hundreds of kilometres.
Solidarity is strong inside this place too, anything I needed came to me quickly. We are three people in the cell: there’s me, who sleeps half a metre from the ceiling, and two people from Naples who make me laugh with their funny way of speaking (I never imagined I would laugh like that in jail). These people have already spent many years in prison and they will be locked up for many more (we are in high surveillance section C2, ‘mafia association), so they learnt the best way to make the days pass, they have lots of tricks and only go to bed to sleep at night. They are helping me enormously and we have become friends spontaneously.
Saverio is in the section downstairs (obviously they didn’t put the three of us in the same section), we go out into the yard walking in two ‘cages’ close to one another so that I can see Saverio and he can see me while we walk. We can’t talk to each other, but those few flying kisses and greetings we manage to exchange make us stronger and cheer us up.
Unfortunately Salvatore is in the other wing, so besides some random encounter during the very first days in prison, now I can only see him through windows and bars when he walks in the yard and I’m taken to see someone (lawyer, visitors, etc), but I have never met his gaze, despite my efforts. I miss him!
Guess who came to see us..Well, no less than MP Maritati bothered to visit us. He wanted to ride the protest, but such a clumsy attempt ended up as it deserved: I know that Saverio refused to speak to him, whereas I only realized who he was once he was in front of me. I let him speak 30 seconds (I was curious to see how he set the relation ‘politician-anarchist’), he said he had come back from abroad as soon as he heard about the ‘wave of repression’ and other bullshit such as ‘the defense of freedom of thought, legality inside the prison, respect for human rights, denunciation of any abuse’, etc. I said to him: ‘You are my enemy like my jailers are and if you hasn’t understood this yet it is because you are blind’. Then I asked to go back to my cell.
I must admit that it was funny to see him clutching at straws as only politicians can do.
The decision of the judge about our release will come in a few days. In spite of this terrible question hanging over us, I’m quite confident.
Love you all!!!
CAPTURED BUT NOT CONQUERED!
THE STRUGGLE MUST GO ON!
THEY WILL NEVER CONQUER ME!
Yours Cristian

· An English ALF prisoner once said: ‘What gave me strength was to look out from the window of my cell and watch the car headlights far away; and think that one of them could be a van full of animals freed from a vivisection laboratory by liberators….’

WHAT'S GOING ON IN ITALY?

Over 20 arrests and more than100 raids are the result of a huge police operation carried out all over Italy in May 2005 against the anarchist movement.
The arrests and raids in Lecce, in fact, are only the first of a long series: comrades have been arrested and many houses raided also in Cagliari,Viterbo, Roma, Pescara, Bologna. Anarchist squats have been seized and closed down in a number of towns.
All the arrested anarchists have been charged with “conspiracy” or “subversive association” (article 270bis of the Italian penal code), some of them have also been charged with “subversive anti-national propaganda and apology” (article 272 of the I.p.c.).
All the arrested comrades were already well known by the authorities for their ideas, which they have always expressed openly. But now they are in prison or under house arrest, accused of having committed “crimes” for which their responsibility is still to be proved. Sometimes the inconsistency of the accusations is so obvious that even some judges or journalists have raised doubts.
But why is this happening? A great number of actions, from small acts of sabotage to explosive attacks take place every year in Italy. Police, of course, investigate to find out who is responsible. Despite their powerful means, their investigations and the massive deployment of cops, however, they don’t succeed in finding those responsible for these actions. So they arrest anarchists indiscriminately, those who have expressed the necessity of direct action here and now. The comrades in jail are not necessarily the authors of the actions they are accused of but they are certainly supporters of ideas of revolt.
That is why anarchist papers, leaflets, posters and even chats between comrades are being used by judges as “evidence”.
This politic of zero tolerance towards social struggle has two precise goals: on the one hand to push a part of the movement back, towards reformism, and on the other to push some forward, into a situation of clandestinity. It is as if to say, either you are a White Overall or you are a terrorist, you can be tolerated even if you are an “activist” (but one who is respectful of the law) or you are imprisoned as a dangerous criminal. There is no space for anything in between.
But it is exactly in this “in between” that social movements of rebellion emerge and develop. And it is this “no man’s land” that the State wants to turn into a land where nothing can grow.
The disproportion between the reaction of the State and the extension of the movement’s action is clear, but it has a few strong reasons: the social situation is becoming more and more explosive. The world is falling into pieces, that is why such strong measures are being taken against the enemies of power.
Instead of claiming for meaningless constitutional rights, of asking for leftist politicians’support or just organising protests outside the prisons, where more and more comrades are jailed, it is time to spread the fire of revolt especially as social rage is about to explode.

Article 270 bis
‘Whoever promotes, creates, organises or leads associations whose aim is to carry out acts of violence in order to subvert the democratic order of the State is sentenced to from 7 to 15 years’ imprisonment.
Whoever takes part in such associations is sentenced to from 4 to 8 years’ imprisonment.’

Operation ‘FRARIA’ in Sardinia
May 19: public prosecutor Paolo De Angelis orders house arrest for 7 anarchists of ‘Circolo Fraria’ (Cagliari, Sardinia). Once again it is article 270bis that comes into play: the arrested comrades, in fact, besides being accused of carrying out a series of minor explosive attacks, are also charged with ‘conspiracy’. As one of the comrades from Cagliari says, power needs to stop the movement which has been struggling for years against the militarisation of Sardinia, the multinationals responsible for bringing about ecological disaster in the island, the waste of its natural resources in order to incentivate the tourist trade, etc.
Power, in fact, aims at destroying the most effective and radical part of this movement, so as to make it as tameable as possible. Added to this, public prosecutor De Angelis and most of his colleagues are longing to climb the ladder of success. Hence the exaggerated attention given by the media to these police operations: the home secretary Pisanu and his servants the judges, through TV screen and the press, boast about having demolished a dangerous structure that was threatening all ‘respectable people’s’ lives.
On the contrary, it is exactly LIFE that anarchists want to take back, the life which power has stolen from all of us, including the ‘respectable people’.
To quote the comrade from Cagliari again, ‘The terrorist is the State’.

Investigations in Rome and Bologna

May 26: Judge Salvatore Vitiello, public prosecutor in Rome, orders the arrest of Danilo, Valentina, Claudia (anarchists from Pescara), Massimo and Stefano (anarchists from Viterbo). They are accused of carrying out a series of explosive attacks and are also charged with ‘conspiracy’. One piece of ‘evidence’ used against Danilo is an editorial of ‘Croce Nera Anarchica’ (Anarchist Black Cross) bulletin, in which the comrade writes about ‘the decision to issue a paper reflecting our refusal of any authoritarian system’ and ‘considering how democracy controls and exploits the individual through the creation of social categories and in the name of consumerism and production of goods’.
26 houses of anarchists are raided in the area.
The same day public prosecutors Morena Plazzi and Luca Tampieri order raids on about 80 houses in the Bologna area and the arrest of 7 anarchists. Valentina and Danilo, who were arrested on Vitiello’s orders, are also included in the Bologna investigation. The charges are related to a series of explosive attacks, such as the one addressed to Romano Prodi (former EU president) in December 2003.
The anarchists are also accused of having promoted, through the ABC bulletin, the subversion of the judicial and economic order of the State. Furthermore, the public prosecutors order the closure of the ABC website.
While Danilo and Valentina are still being held in jail following the investigation of public prosecutor in Rome, the 5 anarchists arrested in Bologna were released on 11th June and the ABC website has been re-opened.

Statement from Massimo sent from 'Regina Coeli' prison
June 7 2005
First of all I refuse the appellation 'anarchist-insurrectionalist', an expression used and abused by judges and journalists, and the one of 'leader'! Luckily I'm only the leader of myself.
I have nothing to say as regards the accusation, which is a theorem created to accuse me not on the basis of real evidence but of suspicion; in fact no evidence exists, only their conjectures. It is sufficient to read the acts to see what a miserable colander they are, leaking like a sieve.
This investigation is the prosecution of ideas, so it is political.
I therefore consider myself a political prisoner, as I'm anarchist.
All these precautionary arrests, following which other people under investigation have been locked up for almost one year, are intended to justify the millions of euros spent for police operations, to let judges and police officers climb the career ladder and most importantly to give media resonance to home secretary Pisanu. The latter, who wants to draw public attention away from precariousness, work deaths, poverty, repression and beatings in the detention camps, is repeating his mistakes. Maybe he forgot that I was completely cleared from the charges related to the events that occurred on October 4.
I am writing on my behalf, associations don't belong to me.
LONG LIVE THE ANTIAUTHORITARIAN CLASS STRUGGLE!
HONOUR AND DIGNITY TO ALL THE CAPTURED COMRADES!
Massimo Leonardi from 'Regina Coeli'

Florence, June 4
On June 4 anarchists of Vicolo Del Panico (Florence) organise a benefit gig outside their squat in support of the arrested comrades. At the end of the event, the ‘celere’ (anti-riot cops) attack. Most of the anarchists take shelter inside the squat, but three of them are captured, beaten and taken to the police station. They are held for two days and go on trial on June 6. Finally they are given a two-month suspended sentence.
Here are a few extracts of the leaflet distributed outside the court.
‘We had taken back an open space in the street as an answer to the threat to evict our squat and to raise money following the recent wave of repression against anarchists. At the end of the concert, around 1.00am, when the music had stopped and we were clearing our stuff out, brave vice-police chief Giancarlo Benedetti and the anti-riot cops turned out. The diktat is as sharp as it is provocative: we must leave in 10 minutes. Tension increases rapidly and after five minutes the cops attack. Most of us take refuge inside the squat. Unfortunately three people are captured, beaten and dragged along the ground. After being held for two days in the police station, they go on trial today. They are accused of resisting and wounding the police, according to a typical cop style: first they attack, then they arrest and denounce. They create the ‘guilty’ in order to appear ‘innocent’.
This police operation is part of a politic of zero tolerance towards any demonstration of life which doesn’t create any profit. Those who stormed Vicolo Del Panico are the same ones who attack the so-called ‘unauthorised’ sellers in san Lorenzo market every day, , who constantly patrol squares and meeting places, who take the town away from its inhabitants to make a funfair for tourists so that shoppers and building speculators get richer.
‘As was clear from the beginning, police arrived at Vicolo Del Panico with the precise intent to storm. In fact they marshalled in military parade when the concert was over. It was an ostentation of power as well as clear intimidation meaning that the town doesn’t belong to us and that repression can strike whoever cracks this suffocating atmosphere of social peace’.
‘This nth episode of repression is part of the anarchist hunt so dear to home secretary Pisanu: from Lecce to Bologna, from Cagliari to Rome, the State has kidnapped 22 comrades in a month.
All our solidarity and complicity to them’.

Barcelona, June 25
It was an Italian-style afternoon the one which took place in Barcelona, when 300 people gathered in the town for a demo in solidarity with the comrades hit by the repression in Italy. The appointment was in Urquinaona square. Searching and identification points had been set up all over the area, a number of people had been stopped before reaching the square, spray cans and banners had been seized. A Mexican comrade was taken to the police station for a ‘check’ and released when the demo was over. The tension was high, the provocative attitude of the cops in uniform and civilian dress suggested that something bad was about to happen. Neverthless, the demonstrators were well determined to go on: slogans were written on the walls with the few spray cans saved from the searches, communiques were read along the way and banners were hung in front of the Italian Institute of Culture and the Embassy. As the demo arrived at Passeig De Gracia, a big ‘avenida’ full of people doing shopping, the cops got out of their vans and formed two suffocating lines on each side of the demo. Their intention to provoke and attack was obvious. The comrades were compelled to walk alongside the cops; once they arrived at Gran de Gracia and their ‘patience’ wore off, the anarchists tried to halt the cops’ advance. Soon the first attack started and the demonstrators split up. Those who ran towards the Gracia area found themselves surrounded by cops in civilian clothes. A Greek comrade holding a megaphone was the first to be captured. Meantime a group of hooded demonstrators started fighting against the ‘secretas’ cops, managing to keep them back. Banks and post offices were attacked.
At the end of the evening, 7 comrades in total had been arrested: three Greek, two Spanish, a Chilean and an Italian. All but one were released after a few days, whereas Albertino (from Pisa, Italy) is still being held in jail.
‘Once again our solidarity and complicity towards prisoners have been attacked in order to be destroyed. We don’t intend to surrender to this nth attack nor are we thinking of keeping quiet following this Italian-style display of power inflicted on our comrades. It seems that politicians, judges and cops do not want us to choose our own way. Well, this won’t stop us. Maybe they don’t know, but our decision to go on had already been made. If freedom has a price, their ‘peace’ has a price too.
SOLIDARITY TO ALBERTINO AND THE COMRADES IN SPAIN!
SOLIDARITY TO THE PRISONERS OF THE FIES REGIME!
SOLIDARITY TO THE COMRADES CAPTURED IN ITALY!
FREEDOM FOR ALL PRISONERS!’

Alberto has now been released but he must sign at the police station every day and can’t leave the country.

Letter from Albertino
First of all I’d like to greet all those who are close to me and those who support prisoners in any way.
I was kidnapped by the Spanish State on June 25 and am now locked up in the ‘carcere modelo’ in Barcelona. Compared to Italian prisons, this one is even harder: prisoners are piled up inside here without considering the reason for their arrest, and most of them have been locked up for months without knowing whether they will be held or not, as they haven’t gone on trial yet.
If there’s anyone who still doesn’t know why I’m here, I was arrested while demonstrating in the streets of Barcelona and following the fights that occurred during that demo in support of the Italian ‘presos’
Four other people and I are charged with public disorder, criminal damage, assault and resistance against the police. Two of them were released after two days. Stilios, Karolina and I made a statement together but it was not considered and we were taken to the ‘carcere modelo d’hombre’, Karolina to the female prison.
Soon after I entered the prison I was moved from the 5th section, where people are held when they are arrested, to the 1st, where it is said that better ‘living conditions’ can be found; but I want to remind you that prison is just brutality.
Whoever breaks whatever law is locked up here, be it rapists or pedophiles. My cellmate is accused of having killed his son by throwing him out of the window, as he thought his son was ‘possessed’.
People coming to see their loved ones imprisoned here always risk waiting for hours, maybe in the sun, outside this filthy prison, sometimes for a visit of just 20 minutes. They also risk not visiting at all, it depends on how many people are waiting. This is a place where drug dealing, as well as the buying and selling of goods and even handicrafts, are everyday business, as it is elsewhere, but with the consequences that can be imagined.
I try to fill my days of boredom and emptiness by making friendships and taking advantage of some useful things, such as Castilian classes.
Still I can’t do anything else but struggle more and more with those who, like me, are prisoners of bosses and exploiters. I truly hope the latter will be crushed one day.
Waiting to be free again in the streets of the world, I send a big hug to all of you.
Siempre vuestro, nunca del estado
Alberto

·As I got out of this hell, I know it is not at all supernatural. It is a hell made by men for men, so it must be destroyed by men. (Reza Baraheni)

· The only association I belong to is the one of the excluded and the exploited, the one of those who are stolen their existence every day. The fact that I am anarchist and consider anti-authoritarianism and the individual as absolute priority is much more than a valid factor to avoid whatever kind of other ‘association’, which would really be a very small thing. (Salvatore from the prison)

Direct Action against Fascists and their Instigators!
Italian fascists have always taken advantage of periods of crisis to gain visibility and safeguard capitalist order. Harrassed by an atmosphere of intolerance and hatred spread around by both the government and the opposition, they gain ground all over the country. In fact, fascist attacks and provocations towards those who have always struggled against the system have multiplied in the last months.
A few examples...
June 2. Around 2pm, 20 fascists armed with knives and sticks enter the square in front of ‘Forte Prenestino’ squat in Rome shouting ‘duce!’ (Mussolini’s appellation). They start destroying bikes and cars parked there and assault anyone who gets in their way. A comrade is wounded in the neck and has to be operated on immediately.
June 12. Around 5am four cars carrying a dozen fascists approach ‘Barocchio squat’ in Turin. They attack two comrades with sticks and knives and try to enter the squat, fortunately without any success, as the comrades gathered on the roof throw tiles and bottles over them.
Danilo received two knife-wounds, one in his forearm cut an artery. Massimiliano received a very deep wound close to his eye, another in his chest and another one in his diaphragm. He must also be operated.
July 18. Police attack the antifascist demo in Turin, organized following the fascist assault at ‘Barocchio squat’ on the 12th. Massimiliano and Silvio are arrested.
July 8. A group of fascists of ‘Forza Nuova’ armed with knives approach a few comrades outside a record shop in Taranto. A fight follows, and eventually the fascists withdraw. In the night police raid the house of Flavio, one of the comrades who were on the spot, looking for a bloodstained shirt and a knife, which are not found. Neverthless Flavio is arrested on charges of attempted murder. One of the fascists, in fact, who had received a knife-wound in his chest, accuses him of having lashed at him with intent to kill him. No real evidence supports this accusation, on the contrary Flavio and the other comrades didn’t have any weapons at all.
Originally imprisoned in Taranto, Flavio was transferred to Catanzaro ‘for security reasons’ on 26 July. His address is now:
Flavio Tratto
Contrada Sangue di Cristo 1
88100 Catanzaro
July 17. At dawn 20 nazis armed with knives, sticks and chains stop the car of five comrades of ‘La Chimica’ squat in Verona. They drag the comrades out of the car and beat them cowardly. One of the comrades has his jaw fractured, another is very seriously wounded.
July 20. ‘Fenix’ squat in Turin is closed down by police. 17 comrades are investigated, 7 of them are arrested. The charges are related to the demo on 18th June in Turin, organized to support ‘Barocchio squat’ after the fascist assault against it. During that demo, police had attacked.
The charges are ‘resistance to police’, ‘assault’ and ‘damages’.
Mario Lussu, Tobia Imperato, Andrea Grosso, Darco Sangermano, Fabio Benintende, Sacha Contu and Emanuele Trimboli were all released from le Vallette prison in Turin on August 8 and are now under house arrest.

Outbreak at San Foca

There are more and more undesirables in the world, so many people coming from the poorest countries and escaping war and famine. They search for a better life in ‘Fortress Europe’, in the same countries whose governments are responsible for their misery.
Because it’s rich Europe and the US who spread war, famine and desolation all over the world in the name of capitalist needs, and compel thousands and thousands of people to leave their homeland. Many die during their journey to the rich world, shopwrecked in crammed old boats or hidden in the rear of suffocating vans. Those who manage to arrive safely are soon arrested and taken to concentration camps for immigrants. These are actually prisons for men, women and children, guilty of being ‘clandestine’. The few who are finally given temporary stay permits and get out of prison have to cope with sweat labour, terrible living conditions and all kinds of humiliation. Most are given an expulsion order and, now deprived of any means of support, are deported to their countries to face almost certain death.
‘Fortress Europe’ shows off its capacity to defend itself from the undesirables: border guards and police stations are to be found everywhere and, as if this wasn’t enough, detention camps for immigrants are built throughout the land.
In Italy these are called ‘Centri di permanenza temporanea’, temporary stay centres, and were first introduced by a law passed in 1998 by the leftist government of Massimo D’Alema. From that moment Italian anarchists began a struggle not just to have such concentration camps closed, but also to destroy the conditions which make them exist.
Anarchists find it disgusting for any human being (or animal) to be locked up, in this case only because they don’t have documents. This particulart infamy is part of a general one, the whole prison-society, but the management of a camp of immigrants is a very concrete fact and can be attacked.
Anarchists don’t want detention camps to be nicer, more colourful and respectful of human rights, they want them to be raized to the ground.
In Salento, in the Puglia region of southern Italy, one of the worst prisons for immigrants is to be found. Located on the Adriatic shore, the Regina Pacis centre in San Foca, is run by the Italian Catholic oprganization ‘Caritas’, or more precisely by Cesare Lodeserto, a priest who is the manager of the camp, and Cosmo Francesco Ruppi, his boss and archbishop of Otranto. A number of terrible deeds have occured in Regina Pacis since it was created, including beatings, forced administration of psychotropic drugs, attempted suicides. Not to mention the many escape attempts, most of which unfortunately have been unsuccessful. Father Lodeserto was even officially charged with ill treatment and injuries but he was not removed and he is still the manager of this centre of torture.
The local anarchists are engaged in the struggle against prisons for ‘clandestine’ people and they do this both through demos, debates, distribution of leaflets, meetings, etc. and by plannig a series of attacks against the core of the Regina Pacis management. San Foca, where the camp is located, is a little seaside town which is full of people on holiday in summer. During that period the anarchists carry out work of counter-information in order to let the inhabitants and the tourists know what really happens in those prisons. At other times the anarchists strike anything and anyone connected to the camp and are responsible for the ill treatment of immigrants, banks that keep the money of Regina Pacis, etc.
The forces of repression were just waiting for a good occasion to make the Salento anarchists pay dearly for such obstinate hatred towards Regina Pacis. Unfortunately they found the occasion last July 11 (2004), when they displayed their brutality against their worst enemy (the anarchists) as well as, once again, the imprisoned immigrants.
The anarchists were distributing leaflets and holding a public protest, one of the thousands, in front of the camp. Soon they realised that the immigrants locked up inside were protesting too, beating the bars and throwing objects out of the windows.
At a certain point a man, a north African immigrant, tried to escape after breaking a window pane. He jumped down and reached the outside gate. Both the cops and the anarchists ran after him, the former in order to stop him, the latter to help his escape. It was then that the cops got their truncheons out and started their brutal attack. That day in San Foca twenty anarchists were seriously beaten, a girl had her knee fractured whilst escaping towards the beach, a comrade was arrested (he has now been released until the trial) as he was giving his help to another who was surrounded by a group of furious cops. As for the prisoners in revolt in the camp, they were probably beaten and almost certainly deported immediately.
It must be said that never before had such violence been displayed against demonstrations in front of Regina Pacis, even if in the past high levels of tension had often occurred. This time, however, the anarchists were alone and no member of the social forum anxious to restore ‘peace’ was on the spot to advance some cowardly pacifist mediation.
No need to say that the Salento anarchists, and us with them, are now even angrier than before. Their hatred, and ours, for concentration camps and for all prisons has grown and soon it will explode again.

Shoot the Red Cross!

The saying ‘Shoot the Red Cross’ means to attack the best and most vulnerable people in the world. But is this the case? The Red Cross is not at all a humanitarian organisation. It is, on the contrary, a paramilitary institution which has been backing the wars of the State for one hundred years.
The Red Cross is supposed to appease the terrible suffering brought about by military operations, without ever denouncing the latter. This is the other face of militarism, the one which gives credibility to all the lies used to justify bombardment and massacres. In a context of war, the Red Cross must discourage any attempt of rebellion against the occupying troops. Moreover, this charitable organisation must take over the question of survivors, the homeless, the refugees...under the control of army and police.
In Italy the Red Cross is responsible for the management of a number of CPT (‘temporary stay centres’), detention camps for immigrants. These are actually concentration camps for people guilty of being poor and without the right papers. CPT are not simply prisons, they are true concentrations camps where foreigners are locked up waiting to be deported. When the inmates attempt a protest that breaks the passivity of captivity, the Red Cross delivers them to the beatings and abuse of the police. The hypocrisy of humanitarianism turns into the brutality of repression.
The Red Cross, careless about the destiny of the immigrants deported to their countries of origin, keeps on its work of collaboration in the name of ‘humanity, neutrality, impartiality, independence, voluntary work, unity and universality’, as stated in its constitution.
After all, if war is a ‘humanitarian operation’ and concentration camps are ‘welcome centres’, why should not the Red Cross be a ‘charitable organization’?
From the Iraqi resistance to the struggle against CPT, however, this veil of hypocrisy is being ripped off. The murderers’ uniform is becoming more and more visible under the white coat.

The C.O.R. investigation
In June 2004 eight comrades of ‘Il Silvestre’ from Pisa were arrested and accused of belonging to clandestine organisation C.O.R. (Revolutionary Offensive Cells), which had claimed various explosive attacks against right-wing members of parliament and institutional unionists.
This is the nth frame up: Il Silvestre has nothing to do with the actions of C.O.R., as C.O.R. themselves stated in one of their communiques.
The comrades of Il Silvestre have always been on the front line struggle against biotechnology and any other form of oppression and dominion, and have given voice to rebels all over the world through the periodical Terra Selvaggia.
At the moment 11 comrades are under investigation, three of them are under arrest: Francesco was captured on May 11 2005 while on hiding in Spain and is now in Fies regime, William is in jail in Italy and Alessio is under house arrest after months spent in prison in spite of his serious health conditions.
All the investigated anarchists are charged with article 270bis. The trial will start on December 5 2005 in Pisa court.
Francesco Di Gioia William Frediani
Mod XII Via Maiano
Carretera Comarcal Km 37,6 06049 Spoleto (PG)
28761 Soto de Real Madrid Italy
Spain

Operation ‘Cervantes’
‘Operation Cervantes’, another judicial frame up against anarchists, was orchestrated in July 2004. The investigation started in June 2003, when an explosive attack broke out against Cervantes Secondary School in Rome. A great number of anarchists, who were accused of committing this attack and others that followed and were claimed by the F.A.I. (Anarchist Informal Federation), are still under investigation. Eight of them are being held in jail, one is under house arrest. Needless to say the judges and police have never found those responsible for the actions that the anarchists are accused of: our comrades were arrested on the grounds of suspicion, and once again article 270bis was used to justify ‘preventive’ arrests. The first hearing of the trial will be held on November 30 at Corte D’Assise in Rome.
David Santini Simone Del Moro
Casa circondariale Via Provinciale S. Biago
Via delle Campore 32 81030 Carinola (CE)
51000 Terni (TR) Italy
Italy

Marini’s farce: the last act
It must be remembered that four anarchists, arrested in April 2004, are still being held in prison following the last act of judge Marini’s farce, the infamous frame-up that began in 1996. They are Angela Maria Lo Vecchio, Alfredo Bonanno and Orlando Campo. Gregorian Garagin and Francesco Porcu arrested previously are serving long sentences.

Occupation of the Cervantes Institute, Athens 12/7/2005

What follows is the text which was sent in four languages with fax and e-mail from inside the occupied institute to Spanish embassies and Ministries around the world as well as to several Italian addresses.
Athens 12/7/2005
The penalization of every action taken by anarchists in the name of "anti"-terrorism measures has led, during last May, many comrades to the prison cells of the Italian "Democracy".
One month later the State's suppression attacked those that expressed their solidarity to those resisting it. In June 25 in Barcelona, the solidarity march to the imprisoned Italian anarchists was ended before it was even commenced resulting to most of the demonstrators being wounded by the riot police, 7 arrests and the imprisonment of the Italian comrade Alberto Maria Bettini till this day.
We have just taken over the Spanish Institute "Cervantes" in Athens, as the least symbolic manifestation of solidarity to all those that were arrested in Barcelona in June 25th and the imprisoned and persecuted anarchists in Italy, while at the same time demanding the immediate release of the Italian imprisoned comrade Alberto Maria Bettini and Francesco Goia who are still detained inside Spanish prisons.
We denounce the State's attempt to legitimatize preventive imprisonment and compulsive measures towards people that have done absolutely nothing more than demonstrate in solidarity to political prisoners, whether they are in Italy, Spain, Greece or anywhere in the world.
We demand an end to the current persecution of people for their political beliefs in Italy, Spain and Greece.
For As Long As There Is Even One Prisoner In The Hands Of The State, No One Will Be Free
Anarchists inside the seized Spanish Institute "Cervantes"

CHRONOLOGY

May 12. LECCE. Operation ‘Nottetempo’. Police raid 16 houses of anarchists and arrest five of them on a series of charges including the one of ‘conspiracy’ (article 270bis of Italian penal code).
May 13. LECCE. Anarchists block the traffic, distribute leaflets and hang a banner: ‘The Struggle never stops’
May 14. LECCE. Demo in solidarity to the arrested anarchists, against prisons and detention camps (most of the charges are connected to the struggle against the detention camp for immigrants ‘Regina Pacis’, San Foca, Lecce). TURIN. Demo against the detention camps and in solidarity to the arrested comrades.
May 19. CAGLIARI. ‘Operazione Fraria’. Police raid 50 houses. 7 anarchists are put under house arrest on charges of ‘conspiracy’.
May 21. LECCE. 400 anarchists from all over Italy demonstrate in solidarity to the arrested comrades
May 22. LECCE. Meeting to discuss about prison and repression, detention camps and deportations. Gathering outside the prison.
A mail explosive devixce is sent to chief police inspector Manara.
Explosive devices are also sent to Turin metropolitan police and to the director of the detention camp for immigrants in Modena. It is said that the three devices have been sent from Milan.
May 26. BOLOGNA and ROME. Police raid about 100 houses and arrest 10 anarchists on charges of ‘conspiracy’. The investigations are led by public prosecutors in Bologna and Rome.
Croce Nera Anarchica website is closed down, it will be freed a few days later.
May 29. CAGLIARI. Demo in solidarity to the arrested anarchists.
May 30. CAGLIARI. Another anarchist is put under house arrest for entering the chief police inspector office. He is sentenced to 7 months.
June 1. FORLI’. Demo outside the prison in solidarity to all the arrested anarchists.
June 3. LECCE and CAGLIARI. Preliminary investigation judges (GIP) reject all the request of release presented by the comrades’ lawyers.
June 4. FLORENCE. At the end of a benefit gig in Vicolo Del Panico, police attack the comrades. Three of them are arrested. TERAMO. Demo outside the prison.
June 5. LECCE. Solidarity concert outside the prison.PESCARA. Demo outside the prison. Valentina is moved to Lecce, Danilo to Rome.
June 6. FLORENCE. The three anarchists arrested on June 4 are sentenced to a three-month suspended sentence. And are given a three-year expulsion order from Florence.
June 7. BARCELONA (Spain). A few police vans are attacked in solidarity to Italian anarchists. ROME: Stefano Del Moro is moved to Velletri prison.
June 8. FORLI’. Gathering outside the prison.
June 9. MOLFETTA (BARI). Demo in Mazzini square in solidarity to all the prisoners and against detention camps.
Benefit dinner at ‘Le Macerie’ squat.
June 9. LONDON benefit gig.
June 11. Saverio and Salvatore are moved from Lecce prison to Melfi and Salerno respectively. Salvatore is put under isolation regime. Massimo is moved from Viterbo to Benevento. BOLOGNA. The anarchists investigated by Bologna public prosecutors are released, but Valentina and Danilo are still being held in jail following Rome public prosecutor investigation iin Rome. MOLFETTA (Bari). Benefit concert at ‘Le Macerie’ squat.
June 12 ROME. Demo outside ‘Regina Coeli’ prison, where Danilo is being held.
June 13. FOGGIA. Benefit at ‘Agit-prop Jacob’.
June 14. CAGLIARI. Demo in solidarity to all prisoners.
June 15. ATHENS (Greece). The Italian Institute of Culture is squatted in solidarity to the arrested anarchists. BOLOGNA. Benefit festival against repression and judicial frame-up.
June 18. ATHENS. Solidarity demo at Propilea in city centre.
June 18. GENOVA. Benefit at ‘Ferrer’ library.
June 19. LECCE. Demo outside the prison.
June 21. MILAN. Benefit concert at Circolo Z. Point.
June 24. BARI. Demo in solidarity to prisoners and against detention camps.
June 24. SALONIKA (Greece). Anarchists occupy offices of Italian consulate.
June 25. BARCELONA (Spain). During a demo in solidarity to Italian anarchists, police attack and arrest 7 people.
FORLI’. Concert outside the prison.
June 26. WARSAW (Poland). Demo outside the Italian embassy.
June 27. BARCELONA (Spain). 4 of the 7 comrades arrested on the 25th are released. ATHENS (Greece). A Benetton shop is attacked in solidarity to Italian and Spanish anarchists.
June 29. ATHENS (Greece). Explosive devices are put on a few FIAT cars in solidarity to Italian anarchists.
July 3. Danilo is moved to Pesaro.
July 5. BARCELONA (Spain). Demo in solidarity to Italian and Spanish prisoners, against FIES regime. SAINTS (Spain). A FIAT car shop is attacked in solidarity to Italian anarchists. FLORENCE. Demo in solidarity to Albertino from Florence, the only anarchist still held in perison following the demo on June 25 in Barcelona, and to Francesco, another anarchist prisoner in Spain. Francesco, who was in hiding in Spain after being convicted in Italy in 2004, is now in isolation and is being inflicted very harsh treatment.
July 7. ATHENS (Greece). Demo outside the Spanish embassy. BARI. Demo against detention camps. TARANTO. Demo outside the prison in solidarity to Flavio. ALESSANDRIA. Benefit at ‘Forte Guercio’ squat. LECCE. Meeting to discuss about immigration and detention camps.
July 8. ATHENS (Greece). Demo outside the Italian embassy. ROME. Benefit at ZK squat. CREMA. Meeting to discuss immigration and detention camps.
July 9. GENOA. Benefit concert at ‘Pinelli’ squat.
July 11. TARANTO. Demo outside the prison in solidarity to Flavio.
July 12. MONTBRISON (France). Benefit dinner and concert for Italian anarchists. ATHENS. About 100 anarchists occupy Cervantes institute in solidarity with Italian anarchists.
July 15. TRENTO. Demo outside the court. ROME. Benefit concert for Massimo. EL PRAT (Spain). A FIAT car shop is attacked with an explosive device. Danilo is moved to Prato.
July 16. PESARO, CAGLIARI, VELLETRI, SAVONA, TARANTO. Demo outside the prisons. MILAN. Demo in Piazza cadorna against ’Alitalia co.’, responsible for the deportation of immigrants. Demo outside ‘San Vittore’ prison BARCELONA (Spain). 500 anarchists gather in solidarity to prisoners. RAGUSA. Demo outside Via Colajanni detention camp.
July 19. Saloniki, Greece. Solidarity demo in citycentre. CAGLIARI. Demo outside ‘Buoncammino’ prison. Three of the 7 anarchists arrested on May 19are released.
July 20. TURIN. ‘Fenix squat’ is closed down by police. 17 comrades are investigated 7 of them are arrested. The charges are related to the demo on 18th June organized in solidarity to ‘Barocchio squat’ after the fascist assault against it. During that demo police had attacked and arrested two comrades.
July 26. TARANTO. Demo outside the prison. Flavio is moved to Cagliari.
July 30. PRATO. Demo outside the prison where Danilo is being held.
July 27:MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay. During the night 3 explosive devices are thrown against the Italian-Uruguayan chamber of commerce, the Italian cultural institute, and the Italian consulate. Posters were put up on the walls and doors written in Italian and Spanish with the phrase, ‘The repression of the anarchist movement in Italy continues.’ Leaflets were also left denouncing Operazione Cervantes, the Marini trial, Operazione Fraria...Sardinia, Rome, Pisa..

July-October. A great number of solidarity initiatives (benefit events, demos, meetings, etc) are organised in Benevento, Bologna, Buenos Aires, Cagliari, Capodimonte, Cesena, Florence, Genoa, Lecce, Messina, Milan, Naples, Pinerolo, Rome, Taranto, Terame, Turin, Viareggio.

Update Cervantes
The final hearing concerning operation Cervantes took place in Rome on February 28. The main charge, ‘subversive association’ (articles 270 and 270bis), dropped and all the investigated anarchists, apart from Tombolino (Marco Ferruzzi), Simone Del Moro and Massimo Leonardi, were cleared.
Tombolino was sentenced to 9 years imprisonment (the public prosecutor had proposed 16 years during the previous hearing) and found guilty of having sent a mailed explosive device that caused a cop to lose two fingers while opening it (this episode occurred in 2003).
Simone Del Moro was sentenced to 6 years imprisonment (to 10 years during the previous hearing) and accused of having carried out an attack against the court in Viterbo in 2004.
Massimo Leonardi was sentenced to 3-year imprisonment (the public prosecutor had proposed 12 years for him) and accused of having attacked a McDonald’s restaurant.
None of the accusations justifying the sentence against Tombolino, Simone and Massimo are proved by reliable evidence. Tombolino and Simone are under house arrest, whereas Massimo was taken to prison. At the moment we don’t know his address.
The lawyers will appeal.

Update Nottetempo
The second hearing concerning the anarchists investigated in the operation Nottetempo took place in Lecce on March 2.
As the judges wasted a lot of time in discussing bureau-cratic questions, the lawyers didn’t get the chance to present any requests in favour of the accused, particularly those who are still in jail, Saverio and Salvatore, who faced trial in two separate cages.
Moreover Marina, who is under house arrest, couldn’t attend the hearing because the judicial police failed to take her to the court.
On the occasion of the trial, anarchists from all over Italy came to Lecce and took part in a great number of solidarity initiatives. The next hearing will be held on April 7.

Marini Trial
Rose Ann Scrocco, sentenced to 30 years plus another 30 by the court of Cassation in Rome, is arrested by the ROS in Amsterdam in collaboration with the Dutch immigration authorities on January 17 2006. She was extradited to Italy and is now imprisoned in Rebibbia prison, Rome.