Anarchist Paper - 1987-1991

This paper was born from the need to accompany the review "Anarchismo" with an agile publication capable of developing 'circumscribed and condensed' analyses. Political and social analyses, leaflets, communiques and documents of the anarchist movement as well as of other groups and organisations, as well as many short and very short articles concerning attacks on the structures of power, news items testifying forms of spontaneous rebellion, that are manifesting themselves with different modalities and often turn out to be quite extraneous to the specific ambit of the anarchist or antagonist movement.
Starting from a series of analyses - concerning among other things, the modifications in the productive structures, the perfectioning of information technology, transformations in the world of work and school, the progressive cultural emptying - a perspective of struggle is outlined: not only the attack on the 'great temples of death', on the 'visible complexes that attract everybody's attention' but also and principally small and often simple objectives, peripheral structures spread over the whole territory that are beginning to take on increasing importance for capital: factories, commercial structures, seats of power, but also electricity pylons, communications cables, everything that combines in the development of capital and the continuation of exploitation. These analyses and proposals precede the publication of 'ProvocAzione' in part, but in this paper they are gone into further and turn out to be still, valid at the present time.

ISSUE TWENTYTWO

To the eternally undecided
The empty ideological delirium of those who, in spite of what is happening inside and outside the movement, are continuing unperturbed to consider themselves neutral judges of such situations, denounces a flight of one’s responsibilities. No one finds themselves above the parts. Everyone, even without wanting it, finds themselves in the condition to operate their own choices on reality, choices which, no matter how insignificant or microscopic they might be, in one sense or another, they influence the course of events more than one might imagine.
If one parts in cause always and communiqué, why deny it?
One can pure say one is outside the situation, just as one can affirm one can leave the social scene. but in the last analysis one always finds oneself operating a choice of the field. Either integrate oneself into the stomach of the whale, and therefore drown one’s desires, one’s passions, one’s anguish, one’s subversive existential motives in the sea of a cotton woolly and mortifying social peace reached thanks to an apparent rediscovered domestic tranquility: or radically refuse this new paradise of boredom, alienation and torment, choosing open and violent conflict against this present state of affairs: then it is social war led at all levels from the internal existential one, from that singular existential to the external relational.
In this informaticised society where everyone ends up in competition recycling themselves, in changing one’s skin, in looking for compromise to better integrate oneself, feel oneself oppressed, exploited, alienated, is now a awareness left to who hasn’t resigned themselves. Just as the dignity of strong men seems to have become an illness to protect oneself from. The important thing is to be accepted so as to be like all the others, that is the new christianity. Clarity, solidarity, come to be dealt cheaply by our humanist blackmailers and recuperators, by the gravediggers of passions, in the shadow of the old political rationality of the State administrator and manager of society and that social-economic of capital which from mercified bodies make an indiscutible front of income and profit.
The desert in human relations is growing and extending on the proletarianisation of individuals.
The end of the social spectacle is passing for the end of misery rigged up in the proximity of our freedom - liberation full of mortifying goodness.
NUMBER TWENTYTWO
Nov. ‘89

To the Eternally Undecided (editorial)
Solidarity in Antagonism
Trial of AMB and Pippo Stasi
Drugs as Progect of Control
El Paso Leaflet
Social Centres Meeting
Support Resistance
Leoncavallo
A New Squat in Rome
Against Dispensers of
The Eggheads rig up Telematic control
Immigration and Racism
CULTURE AND LIFE AMB
Watch Out for Cogefar
The Computer Cop
China: Deng’s Guarantee
Deng’s slaves
Italy and china
Moralism as Blackmail
Aids: Betond Illness
What Better Solidarity?
Is Sabotage Dangerous?
I Am For Destruction
Who’s Afraid, But of Whom?
USA. Drugged by Repression PLP
USA You Die From Penitentiary Shock
Antimilitarism, Not Reform
The Affairs of an antimilitarist
Yankee Go home
Yankee Go Home
Solidarity With Bonanno and Satsi
Communiques B and S
Stalinism and Poetry
White on black
The Revolt of solidarnosc
Vigilantes in USSR
A Letter That Would Have Been Better Not Written
The Only Justice is Proletarian
Comrades Never Forget. Franco Serantini
The Militants of Delegitimation
Speculation or Revolution?
Electric Main Line in Flames
Apology to Commit a Crime
A Few Notes on Recuperation
What Social Relations?
The Roots of Racism
Sabotage against apartheid
We Are all Racists
Leaflet
London ALF in Revolt
Ai and the Taste of Freedom
In conclusion: We are Awaiting the Tempest
The Bureaucrats’ Latest Find
Attack on Edilmarmi
Questions of Thought
Pylon Sabotaged
Pacifism and Mass Conformism
Beyond the Wall
Atrocious Doubts about Normality
Copenhagen: Assault on South African Consulate
Normality and Dissolution of Individuals
A Mano Armato
The Value of the Homeland
A Struggle against enel
Enough of ACNA: Let’s Pull it Down
Raids Looking for Saboteurs
Students in Movement
From the East Towards capitalism?
Death to Necromania
Sabotage
From Virus to Virus
Poison
Occhetto’s Example
Warsaw: anarchists Against Capitalism
600 Minks Freed
Struggle to Free
Prealpi Mine attacked
“de facto”\ death Sentence in Italy
To Strike Antagonism
Leaflet - Raids
Inquisition at Work - Digos
Police Provocations continue
The Joy of Life
El Paso
Come Down, Pylon
Enemies of the State, Not victims
Control is Sharpened by Sabotage
Experiment Freedom
Michele Pontolillo - Declaration
Letter From Opera Prison
Attack Against the NATO in Comiso
In the Labyrynth of the Students’ Movement
Irpinia
The FNLC Strikes Back
Bomb against a School
Police Torture in Austria
LET’S PUT AN END TO THE CHATTER AMB
Notes for the Exclusive Use of Those Given to Pleasure
From Between Clenched Teeth
“Dudilaa”
No Recuperation, No Communities
Reinsertion? No Thanks!
Question of Choice
A Delegitimising Robbery
Attack against “Casa d’Italia” in Athens
Earth First


NUMBER TWENTYTHREE

Against rumours, For Documented Clarity
Correspondence Between Pippo and Giacomo
Sabotage Against Italia ‘90
World Cup Controls
A Spit in the Face
Two Model Prisoners Escape
El Paso
Attack on Laboratory
God is a Dead Body That continues to Stink
Demolition Derby
El Paso
Fenix
Horst Fantazzini Takes His Freedom Back
Assassins in Uniform at Work
Attacks against shell
“Vicenzaoro”\Exhibition Contested

Editorial

Number 24

Going forward
We are decidedly for the attack against the class enemy and against the structures of power. We said it two years ago or so in the first issue of this paper, we are saying it again today with the same projectuality but more firmly and with more grit, in the awareness that the project of restructuring of capital is now in an advanced phase.
Beyond the critique of the organisations of synthesis, it is the sectorialisation of social reality deriving from the postindustrial development of capital......



NUMBER TWENTYFOUR
June ‘90

Going forward
Germinal: Last Act
NON NEWS ABOUT RACISM AMB* (Dissonances)
Anarchist Anti-electoralism and Co-management
Bombs in Carrara
Don’t Vote
Trial in Catania against AMB
Jump Pylon, Jump
Preventive Sabotage
Notes on the Trieste Conference PLP
To anarchist Comrades in the East
Bombs Against Lenin Mausoleum
1° May in Berlin
Mass Escape
Bombs against Superprison
Dear Prisons
Galera
Them again
The Fascination of the Bygone
Adventure in the County of the Homologated, or the Possibilist Anarchism of the year 2000
Why One Shouts Wolf
Pertini and the King of Prussia
Banks aimed at
Order Reigns in the Universities. But For How Long?
The Students Between Being and Non Being
Solidarity with the Students of Bari
GOOD TECHNOLOGY AMB*
Alternativism or Burn the Existant
Appeal Trial Pippo and Alfredo
A Few Criticisms of the Student Movement
Leave Them to Simmer
An Act of Social War Does Not Need to be Justified
Who Rehabilitates Who?
Pudic Bankruptcy
Attacks in Greece
Attack on a Doctor in Saragozza
The Rage of the Evicted
Calabresi Murderer
New University Objectives
Attacks against Shell
Bombs in Poland


GOOD TECHNOLOGY
Basic common sense tells us that if we want to do something we must acquire suitable means for doing so. So I happen to read that comrades who, like myself, feel not just the need but also the urgency to attack and destroy the telematic network are thinking of mastering a knowledge of computers as a first step in attacking all the rest.
I share this cognitive premise in the sense that knowledge is always, or nearly always, something positive. So long as we are aware of what we are learning and how the knowledge can be used, avoiding falling into the traps laid for a long time now that make us learn not what we but what our enemies want us to. This is not a simple problem, but it can be approached fairly simply by starting from what is defined as the limits of “good” technology. Nearly all ecology theses are based on what is believed to be the solution of this problem, including a presumed identification of these limits. In that perspective it seems to me that it would be possible to use the less damaging technology, and in any case who wants to go back to the stone age. Not all technologies are equal and we agree that there is a considerable difference between that aimed at developing nuclear power and that aimed at realising the telematic network.
The nuclear production sector is at risk. It represents a danger that involves everyone so, up to a point, it can sensitise social strata who are in contrast with each other. The fear of total war has led us to a world order that depends on small wars and a progressive reduction of the atomic arsenal. Here we are faced with a problem which, even when considered in antithetical terms, is understood by those on both sides of the class barricade.
The information technology sector is certainly also a risk, in that it is causing an upheaval in world order as we know it. But it is a risk that the included gradually eliminating by cutting the excluded off from them, proposing a different interpretation of the interests to be defended due to the spreading of this technology. In other words, the consequences, which we will come to further on, will not be the same for everyone as in the case of atomic death, but will be perceived and controlled by the included , while for the excluded they will be unknown, therefore uncontrollable, therefore lethal. Information technology separates what nuclear power basically brought together into a social hybrid, and is erecting a wall that will allow a far more rigid division than the one we know so far.
But whatever could these consequences be? What harm is there in information technology and computers, many ask. Why this neo-luddism? Isn’t that out of date? In their fury do these opposers not risk attacking good technology that we could also use after the revolution, and which moreover we need to use today to fight the class enemy. These are questions we need to find answers to.
Information technology has opend up a new world, one that in order to be technologically managed and utilised requires a considerable reduction in human resources in terms of intelligence, analytical capacity, self-awareness, individual autonomy, thinking and projectuality. There is no such thing as good technology. We need to see what use it is being put to. But the technology in question is not bad for the same reason that nuclear technology is (bad for everyone), but because information technology is only bad for the excluded. In fact, the whole of technology, even that derived from nuclear sources, is always a reductive prothesis.
In order to spread to the level of world conquest, information technology must diseducate man to use it. Not being able to reach individuals at their own level, not even that of basic common sense, it needs to bring the latter down to the level of the machine. The new person that information technology wants to fabricate, corresponding to the requirements of a substitutive technology, is one doted with low intelligence, a poor capacity to communicate, reduced imaginative and creative possibilities, but who is highly capable in the field of mobility, reflexes and decision-making, all within a precise, pre-ordained framework.
In order to do this, information technology is profoundly changing man’s creative capacities. Now, if we think just a little of how fundamentally important these capacities are to us, we realise the dramatic situation that would come about were this project to succeed in being applied totally and pass unobserved. What they are changing without our noticing is the relationship between our bodies and technology.The relationship with any technology is that of a prothesis, i.e. of an increase in the body’s capabilities. A short-sighted person sees better with spectacles, and with the right lenses can even reach the point of seeing as though they had good eyesight. The digital image supplied to us by information technology however has nothing to do with such a reality. If we see a house in front of us we reconstruct it through mental processes of perception and memorisation, a complex system of “analytical reconstruction” which allows us to state that there is a house in front of us. But if we see a house on the computer screen, what we are really seeing are thousands of luminous impulses which suggest a picture that in no way resembles a house. In order to see a house we must be educated to see it, we must reduce ourselves to the level of the machine.
Of course at first we instinctively rebel against this strange image of the house, but everything depends on the passing of time without reacting. Gradually a new behavioural map emerges within our awareness. We react differently to the image and with greater difficulty do we manage to rebel against the idea that it is really a drawing of a house. At this point the computer is already penetrating us. Technology is no longer something outside us, a mechanical hand of immense strength has now become an inverted prothesis that is penetrating our brains and conditioning us.
At this point we have become capable of receiving a whole, even a long sequence of images, for example a whole TV programme, and exchange it for a reproduction of reality. Our TV conditioning no longer allows us to rebel. Moreover, with a slightly better definition, the integrated circuit will close on us definitively.
But information does not only concern itself with the problem of our reception (perception), but also our transmission (language). Here again it is necessary to adapt in a reductive way. A continual selection of our linguistic heritage is taking place through information technology, and a vast number of words are falling into complete disuse and are being forgotten and substituted by other more essential ones. Here one could make a few interesting reflections. For example, the expression “sales philosophy” or “economic return” or “there’s no problem” and so on are traceable to this impoverishment of language. In a preceding article in this paper entitled “From virus to Virus” (in itself rather enigmatic) we read at a certain point that “Jerusalem virus of Friday 13th, is programmed to destroy all the files it finds…”. Whyever was the term file used to indicate spomething which in Italian could quite adequately be called “data archive”? For precisely the reasons we are discussing here.
At the present time a problem central to the history of the struggle against the class enemy is emerging: whether to decide to go for an immediate, defused attack to a maximum degree on the structures of information technology or not. This decision must be made before advances in the samw technology deprive us of the capacity to even decide to struggle against it. Before long we will be unable to understand the generalised effects of computer technology, and our ignorance on the subject could grow parallel to our knowledge of the means of computer technology itself precisely because it is not possible to have any knowledge of this technology that is not in some way vicarious; that does not depend on the acceptation of generalised intellectual submission.
There are a number of not very clear aspects that i would like to point out on this problem of computer knowledge that some say is necessary in order to fight them and contribute to their destruction.
I ask myself what it means to say there is a need to “supply oneself with computer knowledge”. At this point something from my own indirect experience comes to mind. At the beginning of the ‘sixties two mathematician friends of mine, attracted by a proposal by the Olivetti and coordinated by the mathematics institute of Pisa university, accepted a transfer to this faculty to participate in the construction of the first wholly Italian calculator. About two years later i met one of them who told me of his vicissitudes in Pisa. At one point the whole project ran aground due to difficulties concerning the resolution of a few more complex logarithmics. The director of the project had had the brilliant idea of getting around to a solution of the logarithmic which required a great deal of time and frankly a large dose of mathematical creativity, by putting an announcement in the weekly puzzle magazine “Settimana enigmistica” and asking for the collaboration of enthusiasts in the sector who, in exchange for a modest recompense came forward and solved the problems indirectly, i.e. through tables or matrixes developing all the possibilities of binary logic, an incredibly long but also incredibly stupid piece of work. When the olivetti calculator of the so-called first generation was ready, it solved the aforementioned logarithmics easily, so they were able to go ahead. The sad reality of electronics is that apart from the strictly technical aspects of components there is hardly any trace of real cognitive problems. Many comrades, perhaps attracted by clamorous electronic thefts or sabotage through programmed “viruses”, imagine realising themselves in such great enterprises, therefore deduct that it is necessary to learn how they make programmes and so on. Then there is the passage to more or less sensate fantasies concerning the validity of attending “courses” or “studying” manuals.
In my opinion the problem is no different to that which leads one to conclude that, although it is possible to make explosives in one’s own kitchen, it is best to avoid it: it is quicker and less dangerous to buy them and learn, quite simply, to use them.

NUMBER TWENTYFIVE

Not to Stand and Stare
On Sabotage and Terrorism
Technology of Death and Revolutionary terrorism
Pinochet Boia Killed
Counterfeit Sabotage against BNL
Guerilla for the Beginning of the World Cup
World Chaos and Direct Action
Students in Rome Against the World Cup
Resistance Inside Israel
Justice is Done
But What is the Real Problem?
Letter to Milan Tribunal
Luddism Against the Car
USA: Sabotage Develops
Nails against Motorcycle Race
The Factory of Quality
Unconscious Residuals of Workersim
The Poverty of Music PLP
La Lega Dei Furiosi communique
THE LOSS OF LAGUAGE AMB*
Libertarian Municipalism Zerzan
Clashes in Seul
Sabotage against Shell
Revolt in Venezuela
TUS Blacked Out in Tuscany
Attacks against RAI Receivers in Tuscany
The Reasons for Integralism
Behind the Ghost of Carpentras
ALF - New Perspectives
Incendiary Bombs in Holland
The “Priest Slapper” Strikes again
Unemployed in Germany
Prison Revolt in USSR
Attack Against Biennale in Venice
Attacks on Montedison
SIP Aimed at
Clashes in Bologna
Volley of stones in Milan
Bomb against Nato Summit
Attack on Montefluos




LOSS OF LANGUAGE

The building of the wall that will finally separate the included from the excluded is already in course. It is based on various elements. One of the most important is a diversity of language which is being realised through a reduction in the excluded’s possibility to express themselves.

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 where multiform creativity exists.
The old revolutionary problem of propaganda has also changed considerably in recent years, showing up the limitations of a realism that claimed to clealry show the distortions of the world to the exploited, thus putting them in the condition to become conscious 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 and which constituted a model that was unique for its time. Malatesta did not use rhetoric or shock effects but elementary deductive logic, starting off from simple points based on common sense and reaching complex conclusions that were easily understood by the reader.
Galleani worked at quite a different level. He used great rhetorical constructions, attaching a great deal of importance to the musicality of the phrase as well as to the use of out-dated words chosen to create an atmosphere that in his opinion would move spirits to action.
Neither of the above examples can be proposed as examples 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 there are more models of revolutionary literature to be found in France, due to that country’s great tradition unequalled in Italy, Spain or Britain, and for her particular spirit of language and culture. Around the same period 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 is Libertad and Zo d’Axa.
We should not forget that France already had the example of Proudhon, whose style surprised even the Academy, and later 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. In order to calculate this it is sufficient to compare a leaflet such as the En Dehors 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 at Trieste.
But the problem has gone far 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, this loss is turning out to be irrecoverable.
This process of generalised 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 both image and word, so on the one hand these elements are being essentialised, while on the other the quantity 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: not by 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 also lets past fewer and fewer possibilities. Moreover, this 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 one 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 make an example: all language, in that it is an instrument, can be used 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 of transgression is even more difficult. Although it seems more direct, it is actually further from reaching it. Rock is 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 at its 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 one could say that 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 an average 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 also a product of his time and uses the instruments and occasions it produces.
The possibility of reading about the actual conditions of society and production has diminished, because there is far less to be brought to the surface, and because interpretative instruments have undergone a recession. In a society which was polarised into two distinctly opposing classes, the task of counter-information was to bring the reality of exploitation that the power structure has every interest in hiding, out into the open. This included mechanisms for extracting surplus value, repressive plots, authoritarian distortions of the State and so on. Now capital is becoming increasingly comprehensible in a society that is moving further and further towards a democratic form of management and production based on information technology. This is precisely because it is becoming more important for it to be seen, and less important to discover the methods of exploitation, not necessary to move the massive upheaval of opinion.
Today society needs to be interpreted with cultural instruments that are not only capable of interpreting facts that are not known or have been treated superficially, but also an unconscious conflictuality far from the old extremely visible class conflict. One ends up being drawn into simplistic refusal that is incapable of examining the mechanisms of recuperation, consensus and globalisation. More than documentation we now need active participation, including writing, in what must be a comprehensive project. We cannot limit ourselves to denouncing exploitation we must bring our analyses to within a precise project, which will only 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 cut off.
This new interaction between ways of expressing oneself and one’s project constitutes the strength of this way of using linguistic instruments, but also leads to the discovery of the latter’s limitations. If language has been impoverished, absorbing and adapting to the reductionist tendencies that have been studied and applied by power, this is inevitable.
I have always fought against a kind of detached objectivism in writing aimed at clarifying revolutionary problems. 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 “man in a given society”. And it is the style that solves the problem, undoubtedly a difficult one, of supplying along with the indispensable content, the so-called facts of the event and their insertion within a project. If this project is alive and up to the conditions of the conflict, the style could be livened up, but if the style is not suitable or is lost in the illusion of objectivity, it will run the risk of losing itself in a ghostly forest of impressions.
Our language must therefore have a form that is capable of supporting our revolutionary content, with a provocatory thrust capable of violating and upsetting the usual ways of communicating. It must be able to represent the reality we hold in our hearts without allowing ourselves to become wrapped up in a logical sudarium and only understood with great difficulty. The project and the language used to illustrate this must meet and recognise itself in the style used to express it. Without wanting to go to the extreme of this well-worn thesis, we well know now that the instrument constitutes a considerable part of the content.
We must look out for these processes, not let a new practical ideology submerge us in throwaway phrases where there is no relationship between the project and the way of saying it.
So, increasingly wide linguistic impoverishment is reflected in the instruments of communication that we as revolutionaries use. 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 as everyone else, is while others are atrophying. And, more important, we are reducing ourselves. This is normal. We need to make more of an effort to obtain better results and acquire a better capacity to resist these reductive projects.
This lowering in stylistic capacity is a consequence of the lowering of content. It is also capable of producing even greater impoverishment, unable 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 first according to their capabilities and never manage to free themselves from it. They filter all the content they come to possess through this schema, believing it is “their way of expressing themselves”, like having a limp or brown eyes. But it is not like that. Sooner or later one must free oneself from this prison, as from any other, if one wants to give life to what one is communicating.
There are those who choose irony to transmit the urgency they feel, for example. Very well, but irony has its own peculiarity, i.e. it is pleasant, light, a dance, an allusive metaphor. It cannot become a system without becoming repetitive or pathetic like the satirical inserts in the daily papers, or comic strips where one must know beforehand how the story ends otherwise one wouldn’t be able to understand it, like barrack room jokes. In the same way, for inverse reasons, the call of reality - the effort 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. In fact it is unrealisable, and one gets lost in the continual material need to insist, losing the conceptuality that is at the basis of true communication.
One maxim in the museum of everyday stupidity is that one does not know how to say something, when in fact the problem is really that one does not know what to say. This is not necessarily so. The communication flux is not unidimensional, but multidimensional: not only do we communicate, we also receive communications. And we have in communicating with others is the same as we have in receiving from others. There is also a problem of style in reception. The same difficulties, the same illusions. For example, still limiting ourselves to written language, when we read newspaper articles we can reconstruct the way the writer receives communication from the outside. The style is always the same, we can identify it in the same kind of article, the same mistakes, the same short-circuits. And that is because these incidents and limits are not only elements of style but are the essential components of the writer’s project, of their very life.
We can see that the poorer and more repetitive the incoming communications are, even when they come directly from the reality of events, the more modest our capacity to grasp the articulations. A revolutionary must necessarily cross both the incoming communications and events. Approximation and uncertainty is emerging in word and unfortunately in deed, a low level of ideas that does not do justice either 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, 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 for building the insurmountable wall between included andexcluded. If we have identified direct, immediate attack as one instrument in the struggle, we must also develop parallel to this an optimal use of the other instruments at our disposition and take, whatever the cost, those we do not possess. The two are inseparable.

NUMBER TWENTYSIX
Feb ‘91

Everybody Armed against War
Riots in Athens
Antinuclear Dynamite
What Antimilitarism?
ENEL Cancerogenous
Antinuclear Sabotage in France
Anarchist Bomb against Radio Vatican
Antifascist actions
The Modern Church and TV
Information sabotage
Molotov against War in Milan
Antimilitarist Sabotage
Claims
False Call to Arms PLP
Freedom
Antimilitarist Leaflet
After Tienanmen
Basque Separatism in Action
Police in Hospital
But What dirty War Are We Talking about?
Declaration of Alfredo Cospito
Trial against Total Objectors
The Impossibility of Not Communicating
Forte Boccea
Sabotage Against Enel in Desio