EDITORIAL
In a reality that is opening up possibilities of revolutionary intervention or rather that is strengthening the thrust towards the desire for profound transformation, we need to give ourselves more adequate instruments that can be better understood by eventual users. A paper is always something limited, necessarily circulating within a predetermined circuit. We know this perfectly well. But we will not let ourselves be influenced by those who come out with a sentence of absolute condemnation.
So long as it is adequate to these claims and does not turn out to contradict itself or to be too unilateral. That is precisely what we thought we could see in the last series of Anarchismo. A contradiction caused by the fact that we wanted to kill two birds with one stone. One of the two ended up not biting the bait. The documentation and news articles ended up becoming (given the not exactly monthly regularity of Anarchismo) often too late, while analytical examination suffered from seeing itself constrained within the angust dimensions of a few pages.
So one ended up becoming unilateral. In fact, the informative model (or counter-informative) ended up deciding in the field of analysis as well, conditioning the latter to the affairs of the moment and preventing the task of analysis that always remains that of “seeing in order to foresee”. You can’t foresee much - so you cannot make your “surprise” actions of the future adequate if your analysis remains tied to affairs of the moment.
It is necessary to have the logical space of taking a distance in order to see better. In view of resolving, or rather of lightening, this task, we have given life to ProvocAzione which will come out monthly. More frequent therefore, and more news items. Also analyses. More circumscribed and condensed. Documents and accounts of struggle. Chronicle and considerations. Individuation of events and personages. The enemy and its counterpart. The class war and small actions.
A readable paper. At least, so we illude ourselves (and hope). But always readable by having recourse to one’s brain, not to scleroticised residuals of what the mechanisms of consensus have left us with. Our paper will be simple, not simplistic. No specialised language, but not for that will it be “reduced”. No concessions to fashion either, substantial or formal. No cohabitation with those who are killing our capacity to understand, starting from the use of language (written or spoken). Against manipulators and swindlers of all kinds. We have always been against those who illude themselves that they can solve any problem with just one more icon.
So much for the form.
For the content, the war continues against mystifiers of all kinds, a number of whom are more dangerous than danger in the same way in which every “hanger on” is more realist than the king. The enemy and surroundings. Prospectives and methods of domination and the management of the misery of consensus. Warders and prisoners in the new perspective where reciprocal acceptation of their roles as differences is being weakened, and the few revolutionaries still on the barricades see more and more spotlights on themselves. The projects of power. The places of power.
And then rebellion. Wherever it comes about, in whatever way it manifests itself. the revolt to breathe, not to die here and now, asphysixiated by repression or by simple piousness. Torturers or Red Cross nurses, both are our enemies.
Now rebellion is beginning to delineate itself for what it is: a permanent state of mind of whoever does not accept charity or cowardice. The pride of rebellion is no longer that of the slave who rebelled because he was constrained to choose between physical death or revolt. Now, at a time when the project of power is based on the prospect of consensus and not pure and simple repression, rebellion is a question of pride and dignity, and it will become so more and more.
Now is the time for a serene but firm distinction between revolt and dissent. The insecure and tepid will continue to say no while power prepares to use this no as a further element of government. For how long we have to continue to confuse the respectable pacifist with the decided antagonist of a death system which has disguised itself with progressive possibilism?
Is it possible to make this distinction? Or have the roles become so gangrenous as to be inseparable? Have we all become spineless animals? Looking around one sees nothing but beggars. Even comrades that we would never have imagined would have bowed to hypothetical negotiations with power are now talking about the end of the revolution, possible government concessions, a practice of platonic dissent thatdoes not suit the rigidity and firmness we considered them to possess. Disillusion? Perhaps. But also clarity in ideas.
The paper wants to unmask this reality, also going into the depths of the shabbiness of excuses and camouflage. The pathetic individual that hides behind formal dissent makes us vomit, but it is necessary from time to time to point to him if we do not want to be overwhelmed by a tide of chatter in all and for all, complying to the will of those who are setting up the dominion of tomorrow.
We must harden our hearts if we want to reply effectively as revolutionaries to the perspectives of the “new” rebellion. The time for tenderness has disappeared for good. Now goodness and tolerance towards whoever hesitates or openly collaborates, means betrayal. Yesterday we were considered excessive, but we were only logical. Today we need to be really cruel if we do not also want to become confused with the manifest heap of the utilisable.
We are decidedly for the attack on the class enemy and against the structures of power. We consider that today the roads of simple dissent and platonic respectable pacifism are leading into the palace of horrors. Anyone can fool themselves as they wish or manifest their clear conscience to refuse attack, either due to fear or opportunism. May this appear clearly.
May the charlatan intriguers and crows of ill omen put an end to their laments. If they have converted to collaboration, may they say so openly and stop trying to throw smoke in our eyes, talking of a presumed impossibility to do anything else.
We want to do differently. And along with us millions of men and women who want to struggle in the name of their own dignity.
Main articles
Editorial
Nuclear, never again
State Servants
Proposal for a National Demo
Police Shoot at Montalto
CONCEDE TO REPRESS (AMB)
Communique-Pentiti Mai
The Battle of Montalto di Castro
Infamity Explained to the People
THE RAILWORKERS’STRUGGLE (PLP)
Pasqua the Terrible
Arrests - France - Geminiani
The Mayor Loses Ground OV
Reply to Orestino Domenichelli’s Declaration
Chirac’s Face
Propulsive Utopia
Spain, China, Italy
Let’s Burn the School
“Action Directe”
The School Between Jumps and Projects
Functions of the Educational system
Military Nuclear - Two Unexploded Bombs
Vengeance -Alfa Romeo Showroom, Explosive Device
Hunting the Hunters
D.C. Robbed - Clashes at New Year
Homeless Defends Himself with Lions - A Doubt About Carlo Rubbia
Deja Vu (Not too much)
Attack on Carlo Rubbia
Attack on Methane Gas Duct
Foreigners and the CGIL
Chronicle
Olbia - Sardinia - data centre in Olbia. Town hall burned and documents and calculators destroyed. Mayor’s room and others destroyed. On the walls “Olbia is sad, we need work and dignity” “Perhaps the cat is sad”.
State servants: many ‘repentents’ and dissociated left prison - how defend them? - police escorts - and proletarian justice?
Arrests: comrades in France - including anarchist Roberto Gemigniani
Chirac: demos in France - students truncheoned - against Devaquet law
Burn the school: students try to set fire to school - a good citizen rings the police
Action Direct: 15 Dec. A.D. strike ex-minister Peyrefitte - against student demos - and “abolition of Devaquet law” bomb in car
Vengeance: 72 year old kills ex-PM who sentences him to 20 years in ‘55. Escapes in hired van then takes poison when police capture him.
Milan showroom: “Workers on the dole” claim attack on Alfa Romeo showroom in Milan
Hunt the hunters: Barbagia: 60 attacks in a month - hooded men take their arms and game and wallets. Over 100 arms taken
C.D. robbed: half a billion in cash stolen from safe in D.C. headquarters in Rome
New Year clashes: G.B. London, Liverpool, Leeds, special riot police - generalised illbeing - demos take up the right to joy, to play - new roads of liberatory violence. They must not be blocked.
Evicted man defends himself: Padova - englishman threatened with eviction puts three lions in garden.
Deja vu: “La Scala - demo like old times - slogans, eggs, spitting
Attack on methane duct : Christmas night - Palazzo Canavese, Ivrea - 2 detonators and 100 metres of fuse - duct main line explodes
Antimilitarist attacks: over 100 NATO tanks sabotaged over last few days at Sanem base in Luxemburg
Half ton explosive destroys barracks in Belfast. 6 employed in barracks woounded. IRA
Chile, December: national information central attacked - one killed, others wounded.
THE STATE IS TERRORIST BY NATURE
[PROVOCaZIONE n. 26, p. 15]
The acquittal of the accused neofascists for the Bologna station massacre is the confirmation, if there ever was any need for it, that the State is the real terrorist.
The apparently inexplicable massacres that have taken place, beginning from piazza Fontana*, and which have deeply marked the development of social struggles in our country, bear all the unmistakable signs of power system.
Past and present history has demonstrated without a shadow of doubt that the State apparatus is behind the fascist puppets and all the sections of the secret services, ready to give orders, to provide means and coverups.
We are not particularly interested in finding out the names of those materially responsible for the massa-cres; nor do we intend to waste our time with the ritual antifascism that buds from every massacre. That only helps power, which in this way manages to deviate revolutionary antagonism from against itself, by deviating it on to the fascists, in this case, used to draw it into a trap.
It is important instead to be conscious of the fact that the massacres, like terrorism on a large scale, i.e. war, or large scale sackings and so on, serve to give States a stable solution to their crises, to their police order disturbed by the social struggles in course.
Moreover, thanks to indiscriminate terror, States manage not only to hide their true nature, attributing it to their most intransigent enemies, that is to say those who want to destroy them, but also present themselves to public opinion in the role of the victim: "Terrorism, by striking institutions and their men, want to force us to come into the same field, that of violence, to then demonstrate to us our presumed authoritarian and antidemocratic nature. But, as you can see, we are not capitulating in the face of this blackmail, we are combating terrorism keeping ourselves within the ambit of democratic legality". In this way States manage to render credible even their democratic mask.
There remains the fact that terrorism is a phenomenon that is natural to the State as such, therefore not attributable as it is claimed only to declaredly authoritarian, dictatorial States. The only difference consists in the fact that in dictatorial States terrorism is normal administration, it is the rule; while in the "democratic" States it is an episodic phenomenon.
All the same, looking into it, this difference turns out to be fictitious, being based on a reductive interpretation of the phenomenon, in the sense that it does not take into account the other aspect of terrorism: the less noticeable one as such in the ambit of sensitive experience and if we like which is conceptually more difficult to define, but not for this less ferocious and inhuman in its effects.
Because this other aspect of State terrorism, which we shall now speak of, manages to make itself "invi-sible", not have itself identified, so one is led to think that in the formally democratic States they do not constitute the rule. Because in its manifestation it does it not present the traits that immediately make one think of terrorism as it is commonly known.
In other words, because in people's imagination terrorism is only that which causes death and loss of blood.
It happens thus that this identification of terrorism in death and blood, i.e. in its outcomes that are available to the "naked eye", leads one not to qualify as terrorist the outcomes through which the other aspect of terror carried out by States, i.e. oppression and exploitation in general, daily phenomena, certainly not episodic.
Oppression and exploitation therefore: this is the true face of terrorism. And it is infinitely more cruel and devastating than any massacre, because it is unceasing, it acts constantly in time and space, sadistically scientific, causing individuals unspeakable physical and psychological suffering, because it obliges them to live in the terror of a precarious, injust, existence, dominated by the non values of the State and capital subtracted from individual and collective control. Terrorism therefore essentially consists in the exercising of dominion.
That is why those who make a distinction between a dictatorial State and a democratic one seem incongruous. These distinctions are extremely dangerous when made by anarchists, because they induce one to seeing violence a useful and legitimate means only if used against openly authoritarian regimes.
But we have seen that in democratic regimes people are also governed by terror. Consequently, it is really difficult for us to understand, for what obscure reason one should use two scales: yes to violence against the dictators, no to violence against the terrorism of the democrats.
The terrorism remains such no matter what form-State expresses it. And violence is not a choice that we have made, it is the terrorist State that obliges us to respond with revolutionary violence, an eminently defensive violence, even if that does not mean that we must stay with our hands folded waiting for aggression.
We can and we must attack too, in our own time and in our own way, in the perspective of the violent destruction of the State.
By definition revolutionaries are against any reformist logic, against any negotiation with the bosses, against any compromise with the institutions. They do not disdain the arm of critique but also want to go beyond that, struggling against all those who work in order to guarantee oppression and exploitation, under whatever form and whatever flag.
The acquittal of the accused neofascists for the Bologna station massacre is the confirmation, if there ever was any need for it, that the State is the real terrorist.
The apparently inexplicable massacres that have taken place, beginning from piazza Fontana*, and which have deeply marked the development of social struggles in our country, bear all the unmistakable signs of power system.
Past and present history has demonstrated without a shadow of doubt that the State apparatus is behind the fascist puppets and all the sections of the secret services, ready to give orders, to provide means and coverups.
We are not particularly interested in finding out the names of those materially responsible for the massa-cres; nor do we intend to waste our time with the ritual antifascism that buds from every massacre. That only helps power, which in this way manages to deviate revolutionary antagonism from against itself, by deviating it on to the fascists, in this case, used to draw it into a trap.
It is important instead to be conscious of the fact that the massacres, like terrorism on a large scale, i.e. war, or large scale sackings and so on, serve to give States a stable solution to their crises, to their police order disturbed by the social struggles in course.
Moreover, thanks to indiscriminate terror, States manage not only to hide their true nature, attributing it to their most intransigent enemies, that is to say those who want to destroy them, but also present themselves to public opinion in the role of the victim: "Terrorism, by striking institutions and their men, want to force us to come into the same field, that of violence, to then demonstrate to us our presumed authoritarian and antidemocratic nature. But, as you can see, we are not capitulating in the face of this blackmail, we are combating terrorism keeping ourselves within the ambit of democratic legality". In this way States manage to render credible even their democratic mask.
There remains the fact that terrorism is a phenomenon that is natural to the State as such, therefore not attributable as it is claimed only to declaredly authoritarian, dictatorial States. The only difference consists in the fact that in dictatorial States terrorism is normal administration, it is the rule; while in the "democratic" States it is an episodic phenomenon.
All the same, looking into it, this difference turns out to be fictitious, being based on a reductive interpretation of the phenomenon, in the sense that it does not take into account the other aspect of terrorism: the less noticeable one as such in the ambit of sensitive experience and if we like which is conceptually more difficult to define, but not for this less ferocious and inhuman in its effects.
Because this other aspect of State terrorism, which we shall now speak of, manages to make itself "invi-sible", not have itself identified, so one is led to think that in the formally democratic States they do not constitute the rule. Because in its manifestation it does it not present the traits that immediately make one think of terrorism as it is commonly known.
In other words, because in people's imagination terrorism is only that which causes death and loss of blood.
It happens thus that this identification of terrorism in death and blood, i.e. in its outcomes that are available to the "naked eye", leads one not to qualify as terrorist the outcomes through which the other aspect of terror carried out by States, i.e. oppression and exploitation in general, daily phenomena, certainly not episodic.
Oppression and exploitation therefore: this is the true face of terrorism. And it is infinitely more cruel and devastating than any massacre, because it is unceasing, it acts constantly in time and space, sadistically scientific, causing individuals unspeakable physical and psychological suffering, because it obliges them to live in the terror of a precarious, injust, existence, dominated by the non values of the State and capital subtracted from individual and collective control. Terrorism therefore essentially consists in the exercising of dominion.
That is why those who make a distinction between a dictatorial State and a democratic one seem incongruous. These distinctions are extremely dangerous when made by anarchists, because they induce one to seeing violence a useful and legitimate means only if used against openly authoritarian regimes.
But we have seen that in democratic regimes people are also governed by terror. Consequently, it is really difficult for us to understand, for what obscure reason one should use two scales: yes to violence against the dictators, no to violence against the terrorism of the democrats.
The terrorism remains such no matter what form-State expresses it. And violence is not a choice that we have made, it is the terrorist State that obliges us to respond with revolutionary violence, an eminently defensive violence, even if that does not mean that we must stay with our hands folded waiting for aggression.
We can and we must attack too, in our own time and in our own way, in the perspective of the violent destruction of the State.
By definition revolutionaries are against any reformist logic, against any negotiation with the bosses, against any compromise with the institutions. They do not disdain the arm of critique but also want to go beyond that, struggling against all those who work in order to guarantee oppression and exploitation, under whatever form and whatever flag.
Antonio Gizzo
ANTINUCLEAR DYNAMITE
Facts show the antinuclear saboteurs to be in the right. At the same time they show up the pointlessness of calling for referendums or petitions.
Within the framework of an uninterrupted ecological and antinuclear struggle carried out against the ENEL, on September l 10th 1990, two giant pylons linking the sorting plant of Albertville near Lyons to the same kind of plant in Rondissone were severed. The action was carried out in the region called Baldissero Canavese, 40 kilometres from Turin.
This is also the line most used by the ENEL for transporting energy through the Small San Bernard pass, electric power produced by the French nuclear station at CreysMalville, better known as the Superphenix. At the time of the action the station had been closed for two months for maintenance work.
On this occasion the media went to town, giving much space to the news of what had happened, supported by technical details that were quite impressive.
We know just about everything about the way this antinuclear sabotage was carried out, then, from the time, about 6.20am, to the fact that three charges of explosive were used a few seconds from each other, that they completely uprooted giant pylons 223 and 224 about 300 hundred metres from each other, pulling down about a kilometre of electric cables.
The first to fall to the ground was the one near the plain. After having rendered it invalid, ie sawn the two downhill legs, the other two upstream were carefully mined with 200 grammes of gelatine explosive of the kind used in quarries. In this way the poor thing did not remain in that uncomfortable position for long, in most unstable equilibrium. The explosion, a liberation for both pylons, reduced them both to the same condition thirty seconds later. The latter, fallen into the valley below, fell on to a secondary 15,000 volt line, putting it out of use. The latter was used for supplying electricity to the surrounding villages.
The damage caused to the ENEL by this antinuclear sabotage was considerable: over a million pounds. For those interested in statistics, this is the fourth sabotage that has been carried out against that parti-cular electric line which was built in spite of the many protests by people of the area and which began functio-ning in 1987.
The first attack took place on September 18 1988 at Vallo Caluso; the second, on September 10 1989 at Settimo Torinese; the third on March 3 1990 at Are di Caluso. The first two attempts failed as the pylon, although sawn copiously and ingenious precautions were taken, had resisted. In the attack at Settimo explosives were used for the first time. In that carried out in the Are di Caluso area, a flat area, the first maxi-pylon, 45 metres high, weighing 6 tons, similar to the one at Baldissero, was successfully slain. One should remember that in '88 and '89 the electroducts that start out from the nuclear station at Caorso were also attacked. The same technique was used.
For those who like to know the best tested and most likely to succeed technique used to slay the pylons: two of the four supports are sawn at the base and the other two are mined. The explosion cuts them in half and the weight of the cables completes the work making it smash to the ground.
For once modern technology seems to have worked against itself. It has produced a kind of electric saw fed by an electrogenic group that can be silenced. The most commonly used explosive, according to the experts, is common gelatine with a nitroglycerine base contained in cartridges, better known as sticks of dynamite, with a slow combustion detonator and fuse. According to one expert, to cut through an ENEL 45 metre support a 250-300 gramme charge is sufficient.. Probably to be sure, still according to the same expert, the antinuclear saboteurs who made the two giant pylons go crashing to the ground, seem to have used double that amount. A crude technique in his opinion. But quite an effective one, given the results that who put them into practice, obtained.
The importance that this antinuclear sabotage has is due to the fact that this plant is a key link for transporting energy from abroad to Italy. About 40 per cent of the electric power acquired by the ENEL yearly in Europe. Its transporting capacity is three thousand megawatts a year.
This has undoubtedly been a heavy antinuclear sabotage, in that it struck one of the nerve cells of the interconnection network, putting the whole national electricity supply in crisis for a number of hours . The transport system of electric energy used by the ENEL comes from the construction of a network, which makes it possible to bypass the breakdown and link up to other suppliers who in this case might be Switzerland, Yugoslavia, Austria.
Once again, after this event, a number of newspapers with little imagination, linked the sabotage to the review Anarchismo.
We remember that this constant reference to the review concerns the fact that in 1988 it was "guilty" of having published a recipe of anarchist culinary skill concerning sabotage. In practice it was instructions for felling pylons, signed by an anarchist group operating the sector.
We should not forget, finally, that on the wave of the recent rise in petrol prices due to the armed conflict in the Persian Gulf, the use of nuclear energy in Italy has been discussed by various parties. In November the government itself, through its prime minister Andreotti, made it known that it intended to reconsider the plan laid out on energy policies, leading to believe that it was no longer tabu to say yes to nuclear energy. On the same track, the present industry minister Adolfo Battaglia communicated that 150 billion lire had been taken from the budget to be destined to the ENEA exclusively for research, which is already, being spent on safe (sic) nuclear power. There are also industrial agreements with the Ansaldo for the restructuring of 16 soviet power stations with gas turbines, this in the framework of an electricity supply from the USSR .
Finally, the counsel of ministers foresees an amendment of the law on saving that is being discussed in the senate for another 1300 or 1400 billion, especially with a tax on anhydride carbon. At the same time an energy and ecology tax. Often concerning the ENEL who then puts it on the consumers.
But perhaps all this is a good thing as it tears away the veil of hypocrasy that had been created by the referendum.
Nuclear power has never been stopped in the research laboratories. By financing the ENEA in this way, nothing is done but make public this research that has been carried out unofficially in the meantime. Just as not much time will pass before the construction of a new nuclear power station with second generation reactors, naturally passed off as "ultra-safe".
It is obvious, after what has been said, that the struggle carried out by the antinuclear saboteurs against the ENEL is the only valid methodological choice against those against the institutionalist one of the pacifists. Contrary to what the newspapers and those working for the conservation of this system of domination, what we have been talking about is turning out to be, without any doubt, the only practical method for putting the death production out of operation.
The use of sabotage as direct revolutionary action is the dividing line that separates coherent antinuclear ecologists from the whole parainstitutional mire that aims through petitions or public referendums to render inoffensive any real opposition against the projects of dominion put into act on the territory of State and capital.
Within the framework of an uninterrupted ecological and antinuclear struggle carried out against the ENEL, on September l 10th 1990, two giant pylons linking the sorting plant of Albertville near Lyons to the same kind of plant in Rondissone were severed. The action was carried out in the region called Baldissero Canavese, 40 kilometres from Turin.
This is also the line most used by the ENEL for transporting energy through the Small San Bernard pass, electric power produced by the French nuclear station at CreysMalville, better known as the Superphenix. At the time of the action the station had been closed for two months for maintenance work.
On this occasion the media went to town, giving much space to the news of what had happened, supported by technical details that were quite impressive.
We know just about everything about the way this antinuclear sabotage was carried out, then, from the time, about 6.20am, to the fact that three charges of explosive were used a few seconds from each other, that they completely uprooted giant pylons 223 and 224 about 300 hundred metres from each other, pulling down about a kilometre of electric cables.
The first to fall to the ground was the one near the plain. After having rendered it invalid, ie sawn the two downhill legs, the other two upstream were carefully mined with 200 grammes of gelatine explosive of the kind used in quarries. In this way the poor thing did not remain in that uncomfortable position for long, in most unstable equilibrium. The explosion, a liberation for both pylons, reduced them both to the same condition thirty seconds later. The latter, fallen into the valley below, fell on to a secondary 15,000 volt line, putting it out of use. The latter was used for supplying electricity to the surrounding villages.
The damage caused to the ENEL by this antinuclear sabotage was considerable: over a million pounds. For those interested in statistics, this is the fourth sabotage that has been carried out against that parti-cular electric line which was built in spite of the many protests by people of the area and which began functio-ning in 1987.
The first attack took place on September 18 1988 at Vallo Caluso; the second, on September 10 1989 at Settimo Torinese; the third on March 3 1990 at Are di Caluso. The first two attempts failed as the pylon, although sawn copiously and ingenious precautions were taken, had resisted. In the attack at Settimo explosives were used for the first time. In that carried out in the Are di Caluso area, a flat area, the first maxi-pylon, 45 metres high, weighing 6 tons, similar to the one at Baldissero, was successfully slain. One should remember that in '88 and '89 the electroducts that start out from the nuclear station at Caorso were also attacked. The same technique was used.
For those who like to know the best tested and most likely to succeed technique used to slay the pylons: two of the four supports are sawn at the base and the other two are mined. The explosion cuts them in half and the weight of the cables completes the work making it smash to the ground.
For once modern technology seems to have worked against itself. It has produced a kind of electric saw fed by an electrogenic group that can be silenced. The most commonly used explosive, according to the experts, is common gelatine with a nitroglycerine base contained in cartridges, better known as sticks of dynamite, with a slow combustion detonator and fuse. According to one expert, to cut through an ENEL 45 metre support a 250-300 gramme charge is sufficient.. Probably to be sure, still according to the same expert, the antinuclear saboteurs who made the two giant pylons go crashing to the ground, seem to have used double that amount. A crude technique in his opinion. But quite an effective one, given the results that who put them into practice, obtained.
The importance that this antinuclear sabotage has is due to the fact that this plant is a key link for transporting energy from abroad to Italy. About 40 per cent of the electric power acquired by the ENEL yearly in Europe. Its transporting capacity is three thousand megawatts a year.
This has undoubtedly been a heavy antinuclear sabotage, in that it struck one of the nerve cells of the interconnection network, putting the whole national electricity supply in crisis for a number of hours . The transport system of electric energy used by the ENEL comes from the construction of a network, which makes it possible to bypass the breakdown and link up to other suppliers who in this case might be Switzerland, Yugoslavia, Austria.
Once again, after this event, a number of newspapers with little imagination, linked the sabotage to the review Anarchismo.
We remember that this constant reference to the review concerns the fact that in 1988 it was "guilty" of having published a recipe of anarchist culinary skill concerning sabotage. In practice it was instructions for felling pylons, signed by an anarchist group operating the sector.
We should not forget, finally, that on the wave of the recent rise in petrol prices due to the armed conflict in the Persian Gulf, the use of nuclear energy in Italy has been discussed by various parties. In November the government itself, through its prime minister Andreotti, made it known that it intended to reconsider the plan laid out on energy policies, leading to believe that it was no longer tabu to say yes to nuclear energy. On the same track, the present industry minister Adolfo Battaglia communicated that 150 billion lire had been taken from the budget to be destined to the ENEA exclusively for research, which is already, being spent on safe (sic) nuclear power. There are also industrial agreements with the Ansaldo for the restructuring of 16 soviet power stations with gas turbines, this in the framework of an electricity supply from the USSR .
Finally, the counsel of ministers foresees an amendment of the law on saving that is being discussed in the senate for another 1300 or 1400 billion, especially with a tax on anhydride carbon. At the same time an energy and ecology tax. Often concerning the ENEL who then puts it on the consumers.
But perhaps all this is a good thing as it tears away the veil of hypocrasy that had been created by the referendum.
Nuclear power has never been stopped in the research laboratories. By financing the ENEA in this way, nothing is done but make public this research that has been carried out unofficially in the meantime. Just as not much time will pass before the construction of a new nuclear power station with second generation reactors, naturally passed off as "ultra-safe".
It is obvious, after what has been said, that the struggle carried out by the antinuclear saboteurs against the ENEL is the only valid methodological choice against those against the institutionalist one of the pacifists. Contrary to what the newspapers and those working for the conservation of this system of domination, what we have been talking about is turning out to be, without any doubt, the only practical method for putting the death production out of operation.
The use of sabotage as direct revolutionary action is the dividing line that separates coherent antinuclear ecologists from the whole parainstitutional mire that aims through petitions or public referendums to render inoffensive any real opposition against the projects of dominion put into act on the territory of State and capital.
ANARCHIST BOMB AGAINST VATICAN RADIO
Christmas 1990 was characterised by various attacks against the catholic church in Italy. From Vatican Radio to nativity scenes, to the churches, the objectives for anyone who desires to express their militant anti-clericalism is certainly not lacking.
December 25 in Piazza Pia, Rome, not far from the Vatican where people gather like sheep to pay ho-mage to the nativity scenes that the church constructs every year, anarchist comrades placed a bomb in the building that hosts the Vatican radio station, Radio Vaticana.
The explosion caused some structural damage to the building and windows were shattered. At the same time it damaged the offices of the USSO (United States Services Organisation) the American armed forces circle, and the St Cecilia Academy auditorium. The action was claimed in a communique sent both to the Ansa press agency and to the anar-chist paper ProvocAzione. It reads as follows: We too have celebrated 'Holy Christmas' in the way we like most: by attacking Radio Vaticana, that pusher of ideological drugs, with dynamite.
A(encircled)
However, this was not the only action of dissent and struggle against the religious mystification that Christmas represents.
In Udine, persons unknown set fire to the nativity scene in piazza St Giacomo, after having cut the fence sur-rounding it. In this way the "great work" was destroyed. It had been built five years earlier by an architect doing military service in the town, and was donated to the population by the army. An example of goodwill by an institution whose main task is that of perpetrating legalized massacres and repression.
Still the same night, in Padova, fire started by who knows who reduced life-sized papier mache statues that were part of a nativity scene, to cinders.
And finally, another act of sabotage to Christmas festivities was carried out in Cortina. This time the usual "unknown" used the telephone as a means of attack. They announced the presence of an inexi-stent bomb in a church where 800 PEOPLE WERE WAITING TO HEAR THE PRIEST’S SERMON. The service was interrupted and the church evacuated.
THE MODERN CHURCH AND TV
Religious propaganda in the computer technology society is being put out through the methodical use of advanced mass communication technology. There is now a need to relaunch an anticlerical struggle that is capable of short-circuiting this massive work of indoctrination.
Religious propaganda is making giant leaps forward in modern capitalist society by using increasingly advanced technology.
In recent years the ecclesiastical hierarchy as well as individual parishes, priests and other expressions of the christian religion in its many forms, have thrown themselves on to the radio waves. In Italy alone there are over 500 religious radio stations, and 50 TV studios. If one also considers that the catholic weekly Famiglia Cristiana has the highest publication rate of all magazines in Italy, and that all the churches from those in tiny villages to many of the city ones, bombard the surrounding population with amplified records of bell ringing and mass, one can see the effort the church is making to gain a place within the present day dimension of manipulation and control using information technology.
Information is only the most recent field in which the catholic (but not only) church is continuing to de-velop its ramifications in society. But we should not forget that it has al-ways played a fundamental role in the economy (Vatican Bank, etc), politics, social control (there are more churches than carabinieri barracks in Italy), and in the so-called social services (centres for drug addicts, Aids victims, social centres, etc). All this gives an idea of the influence of religion and the Church within the mo-dern capitalist process, and this should push us to review the problem of religion within our radical struggle for the demolition of the state of present things.
The very practical, material nature of the churches' ramifications in social reality should make us think about our approach as anarchist revolutionaries concerning the problem of the struggle against clericalism and religion.
Atheism and anti-clericalism must not simply concentrate on a ritual opposition to the formal aspects of religion. Opposition to religious rites like christening, communion or marriage ceremonies, or to religious teaching in schools, leads to forms of antagonism that are just as formal and dependent on faith ( albeit an anti-religious one) such as de-baptising, civil marriage ceremonies, demands for `free' religious studies, non-payment of taxes destined to the church, etc.
A radical and materialist opposition to religion cannot but be anarchist insurrectionalist, moving in the direction of attacking and throwing into disorder the bases where the church has grown roots, i.e. in its concrete expressions in the social field, and sabotage certainly becomes one of the most effective instruments in this struggle without boundaries or intermediaries. A struggle within the most total war against capital and the State.
p.r.
December 25 in Piazza Pia, Rome, not far from the Vatican where people gather like sheep to pay ho-mage to the nativity scenes that the church constructs every year, anarchist comrades placed a bomb in the building that hosts the Vatican radio station, Radio Vaticana.
The explosion caused some structural damage to the building and windows were shattered. At the same time it damaged the offices of the USSO (United States Services Organisation) the American armed forces circle, and the St Cecilia Academy auditorium. The action was claimed in a communique sent both to the Ansa press agency and to the anar-chist paper ProvocAzione. It reads as follows: We too have celebrated 'Holy Christmas' in the way we like most: by attacking Radio Vaticana, that pusher of ideological drugs, with dynamite.
A(encircled)
However, this was not the only action of dissent and struggle against the religious mystification that Christmas represents.
In Udine, persons unknown set fire to the nativity scene in piazza St Giacomo, after having cut the fence sur-rounding it. In this way the "great work" was destroyed. It had been built five years earlier by an architect doing military service in the town, and was donated to the population by the army. An example of goodwill by an institution whose main task is that of perpetrating legalized massacres and repression.
Still the same night, in Padova, fire started by who knows who reduced life-sized papier mache statues that were part of a nativity scene, to cinders.
And finally, another act of sabotage to Christmas festivities was carried out in Cortina. This time the usual "unknown" used the telephone as a means of attack. They announced the presence of an inexi-stent bomb in a church where 800 PEOPLE WERE WAITING TO HEAR THE PRIEST’S SERMON. The service was interrupted and the church evacuated.
THE MODERN CHURCH AND TV
Religious propaganda in the computer technology society is being put out through the methodical use of advanced mass communication technology. There is now a need to relaunch an anticlerical struggle that is capable of short-circuiting this massive work of indoctrination.
Religious propaganda is making giant leaps forward in modern capitalist society by using increasingly advanced technology.
In recent years the ecclesiastical hierarchy as well as individual parishes, priests and other expressions of the christian religion in its many forms, have thrown themselves on to the radio waves. In Italy alone there are over 500 religious radio stations, and 50 TV studios. If one also considers that the catholic weekly Famiglia Cristiana has the highest publication rate of all magazines in Italy, and that all the churches from those in tiny villages to many of the city ones, bombard the surrounding population with amplified records of bell ringing and mass, one can see the effort the church is making to gain a place within the present day dimension of manipulation and control using information technology.
Information is only the most recent field in which the catholic (but not only) church is continuing to de-velop its ramifications in society. But we should not forget that it has al-ways played a fundamental role in the economy (Vatican Bank, etc), politics, social control (there are more churches than carabinieri barracks in Italy), and in the so-called social services (centres for drug addicts, Aids victims, social centres, etc). All this gives an idea of the influence of religion and the Church within the mo-dern capitalist process, and this should push us to review the problem of religion within our radical struggle for the demolition of the state of present things.
The very practical, material nature of the churches' ramifications in social reality should make us think about our approach as anarchist revolutionaries concerning the problem of the struggle against clericalism and religion.
Atheism and anti-clericalism must not simply concentrate on a ritual opposition to the formal aspects of religion. Opposition to religious rites like christening, communion or marriage ceremonies, or to religious teaching in schools, leads to forms of antagonism that are just as formal and dependent on faith ( albeit an anti-religious one) such as de-baptising, civil marriage ceremonies, demands for `free' religious studies, non-payment of taxes destined to the church, etc.
A radical and materialist opposition to religion cannot but be anarchist insurrectionalist, moving in the direction of attacking and throwing into disorder the bases where the church has grown roots, i.e. in its concrete expressions in the social field, and sabotage certainly becomes one of the most effective instruments in this struggle without boundaries or intermediaries. A struggle within the most total war against capital and the State.
p.r.
THIRD WORLD
PROVO N. 12 PP 1-5
THE ECONOMIC and social situation in the countries of the Third World has in no way changed from the beginning of the eighties, in fact it has regressed frighteningly, accentuating the inequality between rich and poor countries more and more. Underdeveloped countries exist where the income, consumerism and investment have gone back to the level of the seventies, and others, such as the poorest African countries, have even sunk back to the level of the sixties.
The situation is tragic from every point of view for the peoples living in these territories. This was brought up in a UN report (November 1987) that was drawn up concerning the world food situation, and in the latest annual report of the World Bank in Washington, where they speak of the "debts" contracted by these countries and their economic development.
From an examination of what is contained in these two reports - even though for obvious reasons they are very "contained" so as not to alarm world public opinion - one can get some idea of the dramatic level of the social and economic conditions that Third World populations are living in.
At the same time the progressive and humanitarian democrats of the opulent Western World are boasting on various fronts of the aid being given to these populations to fight famine. They promote vast campaigns of public opinion and solidarity which are in fact more useful to the States, parties, unions, Church and capital itself as they create social consensus by exploiting the disasters that have been brought about by the structure of dominion itself.
The extermination of entire populations continues in the Third World. This is not only due to the extension of the problem of hunger and the spreading of infectious diseases new and old - some, such as AIDS, deadly gifts from capitalism - but to the very aid sent by the Western countries, in reality a scientific way to assassinate them more quickly.
In fact any "help" given is no more than a way to increase these countries' dependency on the more powerful ones. The richer countries resupply the Third World with goods of primary necessity that are not sufficient for a correct alimentation given the different climatic conditions that these populations live in and that the food supplied contains a high fat content. The same goes for agriculture: what is promoted is based on indiscriminate deforestation which is leading to the irreversible process of desertising the planet, increasing the already torrid temperature and limiting the natural production of oxygen. An ecological disaster of immense proportions is already taking place in some areas of the African sub-continent.
It should be added that the plan for "progress" and development in these countries is nothing more than a model for the systematic destruction of every previous internal rural economy. This is aimed at installing an industrial process based exclusively on the production of death, carried out by multinationals such as Union Carbide, responsible for the death and maiming of thousands of people, and one of the greatest ecological disasters produced by capitalist industrialisation.
Moreover, while they are amassing huge profits due to the very low cost of labour and the indiscriminate looting of the raw materials which these countries contain, the opulent and advanced western capitalists are getting even richer, and are accelerating the process of impoverishment of these countries. These crimes are being carried out by capital daily, with the complicity of the various States, to the injury of these peoples all over the world.
This picture perfectly fits the logic of dominion that is at the basis of the modern cynical democratic conviction concerning progressive, humanitarian and "civilising" man.
To come back to the figures, the UN reports that in the African subcontinent 25 per cent of the population is undernourished: this means one hundred million people. Infant mortality from 0 to 5 years is 4 million children every year. In southern Asia, excluding China, 15 per cent of the population turns out to be undernourished, 160-170 million inhabitants out of a population of 800 million altogether.
This UN report, drawn up to tame world public opinion, cynically considers undernourished those people who manage to assimilate the minimum number of calories required in order not to die of starvation and to be able to move slightly. The statistical tables used in this report bring to mind those used in the nazi concentration camps. In fact, such a report covers up the true conditions that exist in the poorest countries, as the number of people who die of hunger is far higher. If one started off by considering a greater number of calories to be necessary, enough to allow the development of any activity that requires even a very modest dispensation of energy, the figures would soar vertiginously. Above all, all the areas of the world are not examined: for example, Latin America is not even mentioned as well as some areas of Africa and Asia.
The World Bank report begins with a reference to the debt contracted by the Third World, increased by 6.25 per cent, which corresponds to the hyperbolic figure of 1.190 billion dollars, which could become 1.245 before the end of this year. All this is in spite of the fact that in 1987, for the fourth consecutive year, the countries that are poorest and most in debt have sent increasingly high sums of money to the creditor countries in payment of interest: more than they have received in new loans.
Here again the kind of "help" given by the most industrialised countries to their poorer "brothers" emerges.
All the same, what worries the World Bank is not so much the abnormal in-crease in Third World debt, so much as its level of internal development which, as well as not having shown any improvement, has regressed in some cases. If this is the situation in which the poor nations are living in a period where the world economy is going full sail ahead - they ask - what will happen in a period of recession'? It is particularly on this point that the problem lies.
The World Bank director for international economy, Jean Baneth, points out that it would take only a simple moment of stasis in the process of economic development of various countries to bring about a fall into a state of poverty for wide sectors of the population. He adds “it is also potentially disruptive at the social and political level. It threatens the survival of many new and fragile democracies and, more widely, of regimes which favour cooperation rather than conflict”
In simple terms what this means is that it would take only a period of crisis in the world economy to provoke a chain reaction within the countries involved, that could open up tensions and vast areas of social and political conflict. The extension of this would mean great difficulty for the institutions in controlling the situation: the result could be the overturning of the present capitalist order.
Their main preoccupation is therefore that of exorcising the spectre of "social disorder", of a radicalisation of the class conflict within the countries that, once involved in such a situation, could make their world and their economic order based on the fragile equilibrium established by State terror, crumble down around them.
It is also in this sense that the proposal of the entry of the USSR into Western capital's international organisations should be seen. In fact an improvement of relations between the two superpowers, not only in political but also economic, financial and commercial terms, would undoubtedly create conditions of major instability for the whole world economy, as well as that within the individual States. The support that the US government is giving to their entry into the International Monetary Fund is based exclusively on reciprocal economic and political interest, not the ideological questions that are talked about so much to deceive the unprepared.
Capitalism and Statism are two realities that are not instituted at planetary level. They differ only in their exterior forms and in the way they are applied in the various countries, but their substance is identical. In the West as in the East, for the proletarians of the whole world, these concepts will always mean exploitation and oppression. The imperialist wars of conquest between the two superpowers have been over for some time. They have already colonised the whole planet. Their present interest is to come to an agreement and cooperate at all levels to guarantee themselves a painless and ordered management of their dominion within their respective areas of influence having recourse to their smaller collaborators who, in exchange for services rendered, receive welcome compensation in political terms.
But just as there is a precise social hierarchy within States, there is also another between the State "extras", which one knows, are always in the pay of the powerful, and are treated as such by their bosses. Basically the wellbeing that is shown off by the economically and technologically more advanced countries has come about and continues to come about through the oppression and exploitation of the proletariat internally, and through the impoverishment of the populations in the underdeveloped countries in the Course of development.
Further confirmation comes from the same World Bank report when it states that under the weight of the debt and the interest paid in the 80s, the middle range pro capita income in Latin America was reduced by a seventh and at least by a quarter in the poorest African countries. This is causing serious economic and social differences within them and an increase in tension between those countries that find themselves in the same situation.
In their report the experts are therefore trying to find palliatives to resolve some of these problems, without obviously facing them at the roots. The situation of the economic crisis in Mexico is illuminating for example. Inflation there has reached the level of 140 per cent. Well, among the proposals of the World Bank there is the recent one to cover a part of the Mexican debt with special US treasury bonds, and there is also that formulated in 1985 by the secretary of the American treasury Baker, who fore-sees new loans but excludes any moratorium on loans given in the past. It was the World Bank itself who recognised the inconsistency of both these proposals, in that, if these solutions had been applied they would only have had the effect of slowing up the degenerative process, reducing the foreseeable negative effects which would consequently bring heavy repercussions on the world economy.
Beyond the figures and statistics, from our point of view, the revolutionary one, it will take quite different and radical measures to solve these problems that seem enormous and insurmountable.
Even between the lines of the reports of all these "experts" we are able to read what their main worry is, i.e. to find a plan which will put a brake on all the thrusts of revolt that naturally animate the exploited in every part of the world. It is always the latter who pay the cost of the world social and economic "crisis" that exists in their own countries. That is why the "solutions" that revolutionaries all over the world must search for can only be those aimed at accelerating a process of social subversion for the destruction of capitalism and all States on a planetary scale. But this leads us to another discourse!
Pierleone Porcu
THE ECONOMIC and social situation in the countries of the Third World has in no way changed from the beginning of the eighties, in fact it has regressed frighteningly, accentuating the inequality between rich and poor countries more and more. Underdeveloped countries exist where the income, consumerism and investment have gone back to the level of the seventies, and others, such as the poorest African countries, have even sunk back to the level of the sixties.
The situation is tragic from every point of view for the peoples living in these territories. This was brought up in a UN report (November 1987) that was drawn up concerning the world food situation, and in the latest annual report of the World Bank in Washington, where they speak of the "debts" contracted by these countries and their economic development.
From an examination of what is contained in these two reports - even though for obvious reasons they are very "contained" so as not to alarm world public opinion - one can get some idea of the dramatic level of the social and economic conditions that Third World populations are living in.
At the same time the progressive and humanitarian democrats of the opulent Western World are boasting on various fronts of the aid being given to these populations to fight famine. They promote vast campaigns of public opinion and solidarity which are in fact more useful to the States, parties, unions, Church and capital itself as they create social consensus by exploiting the disasters that have been brought about by the structure of dominion itself.
The extermination of entire populations continues in the Third World. This is not only due to the extension of the problem of hunger and the spreading of infectious diseases new and old - some, such as AIDS, deadly gifts from capitalism - but to the very aid sent by the Western countries, in reality a scientific way to assassinate them more quickly.
In fact any "help" given is no more than a way to increase these countries' dependency on the more powerful ones. The richer countries resupply the Third World with goods of primary necessity that are not sufficient for a correct alimentation given the different climatic conditions that these populations live in and that the food supplied contains a high fat content. The same goes for agriculture: what is promoted is based on indiscriminate deforestation which is leading to the irreversible process of desertising the planet, increasing the already torrid temperature and limiting the natural production of oxygen. An ecological disaster of immense proportions is already taking place in some areas of the African sub-continent.
It should be added that the plan for "progress" and development in these countries is nothing more than a model for the systematic destruction of every previous internal rural economy. This is aimed at installing an industrial process based exclusively on the production of death, carried out by multinationals such as Union Carbide, responsible for the death and maiming of thousands of people, and one of the greatest ecological disasters produced by capitalist industrialisation.
Moreover, while they are amassing huge profits due to the very low cost of labour and the indiscriminate looting of the raw materials which these countries contain, the opulent and advanced western capitalists are getting even richer, and are accelerating the process of impoverishment of these countries. These crimes are being carried out by capital daily, with the complicity of the various States, to the injury of these peoples all over the world.
This picture perfectly fits the logic of dominion that is at the basis of the modern cynical democratic conviction concerning progressive, humanitarian and "civilising" man.
To come back to the figures, the UN reports that in the African subcontinent 25 per cent of the population is undernourished: this means one hundred million people. Infant mortality from 0 to 5 years is 4 million children every year. In southern Asia, excluding China, 15 per cent of the population turns out to be undernourished, 160-170 million inhabitants out of a population of 800 million altogether.
This UN report, drawn up to tame world public opinion, cynically considers undernourished those people who manage to assimilate the minimum number of calories required in order not to die of starvation and to be able to move slightly. The statistical tables used in this report bring to mind those used in the nazi concentration camps. In fact, such a report covers up the true conditions that exist in the poorest countries, as the number of people who die of hunger is far higher. If one started off by considering a greater number of calories to be necessary, enough to allow the development of any activity that requires even a very modest dispensation of energy, the figures would soar vertiginously. Above all, all the areas of the world are not examined: for example, Latin America is not even mentioned as well as some areas of Africa and Asia.
The World Bank report begins with a reference to the debt contracted by the Third World, increased by 6.25 per cent, which corresponds to the hyperbolic figure of 1.190 billion dollars, which could become 1.245 before the end of this year. All this is in spite of the fact that in 1987, for the fourth consecutive year, the countries that are poorest and most in debt have sent increasingly high sums of money to the creditor countries in payment of interest: more than they have received in new loans.
Here again the kind of "help" given by the most industrialised countries to their poorer "brothers" emerges.
All the same, what worries the World Bank is not so much the abnormal in-crease in Third World debt, so much as its level of internal development which, as well as not having shown any improvement, has regressed in some cases. If this is the situation in which the poor nations are living in a period where the world economy is going full sail ahead - they ask - what will happen in a period of recession'? It is particularly on this point that the problem lies.
The World Bank director for international economy, Jean Baneth, points out that it would take only a simple moment of stasis in the process of economic development of various countries to bring about a fall into a state of poverty for wide sectors of the population. He adds “it is also potentially disruptive at the social and political level. It threatens the survival of many new and fragile democracies and, more widely, of regimes which favour cooperation rather than conflict”
In simple terms what this means is that it would take only a period of crisis in the world economy to provoke a chain reaction within the countries involved, that could open up tensions and vast areas of social and political conflict. The extension of this would mean great difficulty for the institutions in controlling the situation: the result could be the overturning of the present capitalist order.
Their main preoccupation is therefore that of exorcising the spectre of "social disorder", of a radicalisation of the class conflict within the countries that, once involved in such a situation, could make their world and their economic order based on the fragile equilibrium established by State terror, crumble down around them.
It is also in this sense that the proposal of the entry of the USSR into Western capital's international organisations should be seen. In fact an improvement of relations between the two superpowers, not only in political but also economic, financial and commercial terms, would undoubtedly create conditions of major instability for the whole world economy, as well as that within the individual States. The support that the US government is giving to their entry into the International Monetary Fund is based exclusively on reciprocal economic and political interest, not the ideological questions that are talked about so much to deceive the unprepared.
Capitalism and Statism are two realities that are not instituted at planetary level. They differ only in their exterior forms and in the way they are applied in the various countries, but their substance is identical. In the West as in the East, for the proletarians of the whole world, these concepts will always mean exploitation and oppression. The imperialist wars of conquest between the two superpowers have been over for some time. They have already colonised the whole planet. Their present interest is to come to an agreement and cooperate at all levels to guarantee themselves a painless and ordered management of their dominion within their respective areas of influence having recourse to their smaller collaborators who, in exchange for services rendered, receive welcome compensation in political terms.
But just as there is a precise social hierarchy within States, there is also another between the State "extras", which one knows, are always in the pay of the powerful, and are treated as such by their bosses. Basically the wellbeing that is shown off by the economically and technologically more advanced countries has come about and continues to come about through the oppression and exploitation of the proletariat internally, and through the impoverishment of the populations in the underdeveloped countries in the Course of development.
Further confirmation comes from the same World Bank report when it states that under the weight of the debt and the interest paid in the 80s, the middle range pro capita income in Latin America was reduced by a seventh and at least by a quarter in the poorest African countries. This is causing serious economic and social differences within them and an increase in tension between those countries that find themselves in the same situation.
In their report the experts are therefore trying to find palliatives to resolve some of these problems, without obviously facing them at the roots. The situation of the economic crisis in Mexico is illuminating for example. Inflation there has reached the level of 140 per cent. Well, among the proposals of the World Bank there is the recent one to cover a part of the Mexican debt with special US treasury bonds, and there is also that formulated in 1985 by the secretary of the American treasury Baker, who fore-sees new loans but excludes any moratorium on loans given in the past. It was the World Bank itself who recognised the inconsistency of both these proposals, in that, if these solutions had been applied they would only have had the effect of slowing up the degenerative process, reducing the foreseeable negative effects which would consequently bring heavy repercussions on the world economy.
Beyond the figures and statistics, from our point of view, the revolutionary one, it will take quite different and radical measures to solve these problems that seem enormous and insurmountable.
Even between the lines of the reports of all these "experts" we are able to read what their main worry is, i.e. to find a plan which will put a brake on all the thrusts of revolt that naturally animate the exploited in every part of the world. It is always the latter who pay the cost of the world social and economic "crisis" that exists in their own countries. That is why the "solutions" that revolutionaries all over the world must search for can only be those aimed at accelerating a process of social subversion for the destruction of capitalism and all States on a planetary scale. But this leads us to another discourse!
Pierleone Porcu
WHAT BETTER SOLIDARITY
What better solidarity can a comrade who finds himself in prison receive than that of learning first from the media, then from the papers of the movement, that the struggle against injustice and exploitation is attacking in first person.
For a comrade who finds himself in prison, all actions such as this, or of another kind but which however support an irreducibility against power, are the best attestations of active solidarity, and also against all those who with paternalism and gradualism theorise and put into practice an illusory counterposition that maintains oppression intact.
Who knows why I, on the contrary to the OACN/FAI, never had any doubt that the authors of these actions were comrades? It is in individual autonomy, united to a continuous critical development both of oneself and the group one belongs to, that one finds the means for avoiding taking positions or making congressual proclamations...
It is due to their instinct of conservation that structures of synthesis have recourse to these systems. Free people do not need structures of synthesis that transform organisation into an institution whereby the latter, initially conceived to increase freedom, becomes an instrument that limits it.
The informal organisation does not have, nor does it want, strategies drawn up at a table, but
organises itself in affinity groups which meet and disband according to the needs of the moment, because they recognise their common action on concrete political presuppositions, basing their methods on an insurrectionalist logic...
Gradualism, anarcho-syndicalism, social ecology a la Murray Bookchin are nothing more than invitations to desist, propagandists of mental schemas that accustom the proletarian masses to accept the logic of slow change or quantitive illusions of the kind "if there are only a hundred of us we cannot do anything, if there are 56 million, then that's all right".
...As good christians for Libertarian socialism, those of the OACN/FAI are trying to reconcile interests so far removed from each other that only those whose are brains are polluted with the myth of the working class can affirm such a thing. But these impavid ones do more, taken as they are by the fear of falling into the hands of the repression, these villains want to confuse comrades comparing attacks of a fascistic kind aimed at terrorising and killing people indiscriminantly with the endorsement of the secret services, with sabotage which speaks for itself as revolutionary and antagonistic on the basis of the objective struck. The choice of objective shows that they are comrades. What would be the point otherwise of making counterinformation about nuclear power, militarism, or about revolutionary solidarity, against everything that the media invent, or publishing lists of Italian companies that have relations with South Africa? Isn't it an implicit invitation to comrades to act, also possibly in the line of attack? What other aim could this list have?
There is no separation between theory and practice. Only in the logic of inconclusive chatter poses these problems to dig the grave of those who de not conform, failing to show active solidarity with those comrades who at an informal level and autonomously decided, in their own specific situation, to attack, believing that it is right to strike now right away without waiting....
It is more incisive to organise in one's own situation. Self-organised forms of struggle based on permanent conflictuality, against delegating and above all for the direct action of all the exploited. As anarchists are also exploited in first person they must be the first to do what they advise others to do....
Any action that concretely upsets power or that hinders the project of social control, any action that demonstrates that in Palestine, as in all the other places in the world, anyone who rebels against power is in the right. If we begin to draw distinctions, then it is the usual tune, that of an organisation of synthesis, which for its way of relating, that is of approaching the reality of the struggle in order to synthesize it within the organisation, becomes an obstacle on the path to social revolution.
Pippo Stasi
For a comrade who finds himself in prison, all actions such as this, or of another kind but which however support an irreducibility against power, are the best attestations of active solidarity, and also against all those who with paternalism and gradualism theorise and put into practice an illusory counterposition that maintains oppression intact.
Who knows why I, on the contrary to the OACN/FAI, never had any doubt that the authors of these actions were comrades? It is in individual autonomy, united to a continuous critical development both of oneself and the group one belongs to, that one finds the means for avoiding taking positions or making congressual proclamations...
It is due to their instinct of conservation that structures of synthesis have recourse to these systems. Free people do not need structures of synthesis that transform organisation into an institution whereby the latter, initially conceived to increase freedom, becomes an instrument that limits it.
The informal organisation does not have, nor does it want, strategies drawn up at a table, but
organises itself in affinity groups which meet and disband according to the needs of the moment, because they recognise their common action on concrete political presuppositions, basing their methods on an insurrectionalist logic...
Gradualism, anarcho-syndicalism, social ecology a la Murray Bookchin are nothing more than invitations to desist, propagandists of mental schemas that accustom the proletarian masses to accept the logic of slow change or quantitive illusions of the kind "if there are only a hundred of us we cannot do anything, if there are 56 million, then that's all right".
...As good christians for Libertarian socialism, those of the OACN/FAI are trying to reconcile interests so far removed from each other that only those whose are brains are polluted with the myth of the working class can affirm such a thing. But these impavid ones do more, taken as they are by the fear of falling into the hands of the repression, these villains want to confuse comrades comparing attacks of a fascistic kind aimed at terrorising and killing people indiscriminantly with the endorsement of the secret services, with sabotage which speaks for itself as revolutionary and antagonistic on the basis of the objective struck. The choice of objective shows that they are comrades. What would be the point otherwise of making counterinformation about nuclear power, militarism, or about revolutionary solidarity, against everything that the media invent, or publishing lists of Italian companies that have relations with South Africa? Isn't it an implicit invitation to comrades to act, also possibly in the line of attack? What other aim could this list have?
There is no separation between theory and practice. Only in the logic of inconclusive chatter poses these problems to dig the grave of those who de not conform, failing to show active solidarity with those comrades who at an informal level and autonomously decided, in their own specific situation, to attack, believing that it is right to strike now right away without waiting....
It is more incisive to organise in one's own situation. Self-organised forms of struggle based on permanent conflictuality, against delegating and above all for the direct action of all the exploited. As anarchists are also exploited in first person they must be the first to do what they advise others to do....
Any action that concretely upsets power or that hinders the project of social control, any action that demonstrates that in Palestine, as in all the other places in the world, anyone who rebels against power is in the right. If we begin to draw distinctions, then it is the usual tune, that of an organisation of synthesis, which for its way of relating, that is of approaching the reality of the struggle in order to synthesize it within the organisation, becomes an obstacle on the path to social revolution.
Pippo Stasi
GLAD TO SEE YOU
Alfredo Bonanno and Pippo Stasi have been released following two years in prison. A return to the struggle. A weighing up and a taking of distance from all the hypocrisy and all the talk.
Glad to see you..
Against all those who in one way or another dribbled their uncontainable bile upon our arrest, against the hopes of others who finally breathed a sigh of relief when they knew we were in prison for who knows how long, and against the truffles concealed behind a hypocritical, gossipy and ambiguous solidarity - suddenly, like a jack-in-the-box in a nightmare, we are out.
The reason for this was the reduction of all sentences approved recently by the government to level the differences in judicial treatment resulting from the application of the new procedural penal code. But we like to think that basically the true reason for it was our personal and incredible good luck.
This is not the best place to salute all those who abstained, kept out of they way, or wove embroilment and calumny against us from the shadows. Against all of them, and there were certainly legions of them, went our contempt right from the moment we went into prison. Now, from our newly acquired freedom, we cannot but address them a subtle and hazy thought, like the blade of a knife.
Some might say, nothing else was to be expected from the mephitic sectors of an unfortunately not small part of the anarchist movement. We knew this, and had no intention of picking up the gossip, or, worse still, begging the solidarity of those who could not give it if for no other reason than that it would have been against their socialdemocratic and possibilistic positions. But there are limits. There are words and words, silences and silences.
Some attitudes turned out to be even worse than seemed possible, precisely because of the limpidity and simplicity of the situation. What can anyone say about a robbery carried out for personal reasons, as we declared right from the start? Absolutely nothing. Yet the rubbish dump that infects the anarchist movement found a way to talk about it in every possible way, not only violently, to our faces while we were not in a position to defend ourselves as we would have liked to and as w would have known how to had we been free to move around, but also behind our backs, with the technique of slander and infestation of corridors to which some old hags of the Italian (and not only Italian) movement have resorted for decades.
Basically, to see so much squalor from inside prison, if at first it amazed us, later led us to reflect on the real condition our movement finds itself in. It gave us a better idea of the availability in the field. It enabled us to see the subtle distinction between true and false solidarity, pacifist and religious opportunism, to distinguish those who see themselves committed in words to declarations that are far from the way they really behave - from the revolutionary solidarity that expresses itself in continuous, spread out, capillary action within the often insurmountable limitations of their own possibilities.
And it has been a great lesson for both of us, as we think it has been for many other comrades spread around more or less everywhere, comrades not yet affected by the stinking air that hangs around us, but who instead are more free to reason with their own heads and feel themselves ideally engaged in a project of a revolutionary transformation of the reality that surrounds us.
Much has changed from the moment when, two years ago, we were arrested in Bergamo during an attempted robbery in a jeweller's shop. Much has changed in reality as a whole. World upheavals have taken place, lived by us through the filter of the prison bars, and perhaps the world that we have found outside is different. But of one thing we are sure. One thing that has not changed - if anything it has been strengthened - is our revolutionary consciousness, our way of seeing the distribution of the forces available for the struggle and, principally, our even more acute desire to go to the search of the enemy, the class enemy, obviously, but also, - and why not! – of our own personal enemies!
Glad to see you, and till we meet again.
Alfredo Bonanno Pippo Stasi
Glad to see you..
Against all those who in one way or another dribbled their uncontainable bile upon our arrest, against the hopes of others who finally breathed a sigh of relief when they knew we were in prison for who knows how long, and against the truffles concealed behind a hypocritical, gossipy and ambiguous solidarity - suddenly, like a jack-in-the-box in a nightmare, we are out.
The reason for this was the reduction of all sentences approved recently by the government to level the differences in judicial treatment resulting from the application of the new procedural penal code. But we like to think that basically the true reason for it was our personal and incredible good luck.
This is not the best place to salute all those who abstained, kept out of they way, or wove embroilment and calumny against us from the shadows. Against all of them, and there were certainly legions of them, went our contempt right from the moment we went into prison. Now, from our newly acquired freedom, we cannot but address them a subtle and hazy thought, like the blade of a knife.
Some might say, nothing else was to be expected from the mephitic sectors of an unfortunately not small part of the anarchist movement. We knew this, and had no intention of picking up the gossip, or, worse still, begging the solidarity of those who could not give it if for no other reason than that it would have been against their socialdemocratic and possibilistic positions. But there are limits. There are words and words, silences and silences.
Some attitudes turned out to be even worse than seemed possible, precisely because of the limpidity and simplicity of the situation. What can anyone say about a robbery carried out for personal reasons, as we declared right from the start? Absolutely nothing. Yet the rubbish dump that infects the anarchist movement found a way to talk about it in every possible way, not only violently, to our faces while we were not in a position to defend ourselves as we would have liked to and as w would have known how to had we been free to move around, but also behind our backs, with the technique of slander and infestation of corridors to which some old hags of the Italian (and not only Italian) movement have resorted for decades.
Basically, to see so much squalor from inside prison, if at first it amazed us, later led us to reflect on the real condition our movement finds itself in. It gave us a better idea of the availability in the field. It enabled us to see the subtle distinction between true and false solidarity, pacifist and religious opportunism, to distinguish those who see themselves committed in words to declarations that are far from the way they really behave - from the revolutionary solidarity that expresses itself in continuous, spread out, capillary action within the often insurmountable limitations of their own possibilities.
And it has been a great lesson for both of us, as we think it has been for many other comrades spread around more or less everywhere, comrades not yet affected by the stinking air that hangs around us, but who instead are more free to reason with their own heads and feel themselves ideally engaged in a project of a revolutionary transformation of the reality that surrounds us.
Much has changed from the moment when, two years ago, we were arrested in Bergamo during an attempted robbery in a jeweller's shop. Much has changed in reality as a whole. World upheavals have taken place, lived by us through the filter of the prison bars, and perhaps the world that we have found outside is different. But of one thing we are sure. One thing that has not changed - if anything it has been strengthened - is our revolutionary consciousness, our way of seeing the distribution of the forces available for the struggle and, principally, our even more acute desire to go to the search of the enemy, the class enemy, obviously, but also, - and why not! – of our own personal enemies!
Glad to see you, and till we meet again.
Alfredo Bonanno Pippo Stasi
THE STATE IS TERRORIST BY NATURE
PROVOCaZIONE 26 P.15
The acquittal of the accused neofascists for the Bologna station massacre is the confirmation, if there ever was any need for it, that the State is the real terrorist.
The apparently inexplicable massacres that have taken place, beginning from piazza Fontana*, and which have deeply marked the development of social struggles in our country, bear all the unmistakable signs of power system.
Past and present history has demonstrated without a shadow of doubt that the State apparatus is behind the fascist puppets and all the sections of the secret services, ready to give orders, to provide means and coverups.
We are not particularly interested in finding out the names of those materially responsible for the massa-cres; nor do we intend to waste our time with the ritual antifascism that buds from every massacre. That only helps power, which in this way manages to deviate revolutionary antagonism from against itself, by deviating it on to the fascists, in this case, used to draw it into a trap.
It is important instead to be conscious of the fact that the massacres, like terrorism on a large scale, i.e. war, or large scale sackings and so on, serve to give States a stable solution to their crises, to their police order disturbed by the social struggles in course.
Moreover, thanks to indiscriminate terror, States manage not only to hide their true nature, attributing it to their most intransigent enemies, that is to say those who want to destroy them, but also present themselves to public opinion in the role of the victim: "Terrorism, by striking institutions and their men, want to force us to come into the same field, that of violence, to then demonstrate to us our presumed authoritarian and antidemocratic nature. But, as you can see, we are not capitulating in the face of this blackmail, we are combating terrorism keeping ourselves within the ambit of democratic legality". In this way States manage to render credible even their democratic mask.
There remains the fact that terrorism is a phenomenon that is natural to the State as such, therefore not attributable as it is claimed only to declaredly authoritarian, dictatorial States. The only difference consists in the fact that in dictatorial States terrorism is normal administration, it is the rule; while in the "democratic" States it is an episodic phenomenon.
All the same, looking into it, this difference turns out to be fictitious, being based on a reductive interpretation of the phenomenon, in the sense that it does not take into account the other aspect of terrorism: the less noticeable one as such in the ambit of sensitive experience and if we like which is conceptually more difficult to define, but not for this less ferocious and inhuman in its effects.
Because this other aspect of State terrorism, which we shall now speak of, manages to make itself "invi-sible", not have itself identified, so one is led to think that in the formally democratic States they do not constitute the rule. Because in its manifestation it does it not present the traits that immediately make one think of terrorism as it is commonly known.
In other words, because in people's imagination terrorism is only that which causes death and loss of blood.
It happens thus that this identification of terrorism in death and blood, i.e. in its outcomes that are available to the "naked eye", leads one not to qualify as terrorist the outcomes through which the other aspect of terror carried out by States, i.e. oppression and exploitation in general, daily phenomena, certainly not episodic.
Oppression and exploitation therefore: this is the true face of terrorism. And it is infinitely more cruel and devastating than any massacre, because it is unceasing, it acts constantly in time and space, sadistically scientific, causing individuals unspeakable physical and psychological suffering, because it obliges them to live in the terror of a precarious, injust, existence, dominated by the non values of the State and capital subtracted from individual and collective control. Terrorism therefore essentially consists in the exercising of dominion.
That is why those who make a distinction between a dictatorial State and a democratic one seem incongruous. These distinctions are extremely dangerous when made by anarchists, because they induce one to seeing violence a useful and legitimate means only if used against openly authoritarian regimes.
But we have seen that in democratic regimes people are also governed by terror. Consequently, it is really difficult for us to understand, for what obscure reason one should use two scales: yes to violence against the dictators, no to violence against the terrorism of the democrats.
The terrorism remains such no matter what form-State expresses it. And violence is not a choice that we have made, it is the terrorist State that obliges us to respond with revolutionary violence, an eminently defensive violence, even if that does not mean that we must stay with our hands folded waiting for aggression.
We can and we must attack too, in our own time and in our own way, in the perspective of the violent destruction of the State.
By definition revolutionaries are against any reformist logic, against any negotiation with the bosses, against any compromise with the institutions. They do not disdain the arm of critique but also want to go beyond that, struggling against all those who work in order to guarantee oppression and exploitation, under whatever form and whatever flag.
Antonio Gizzo
The acquittal of the accused neofascists for the Bologna station massacre is the confirmation, if there ever was any need for it, that the State is the real terrorist.
The apparently inexplicable massacres that have taken place, beginning from piazza Fontana*, and which have deeply marked the development of social struggles in our country, bear all the unmistakable signs of power system.
Past and present history has demonstrated without a shadow of doubt that the State apparatus is behind the fascist puppets and all the sections of the secret services, ready to give orders, to provide means and coverups.
We are not particularly interested in finding out the names of those materially responsible for the massa-cres; nor do we intend to waste our time with the ritual antifascism that buds from every massacre. That only helps power, which in this way manages to deviate revolutionary antagonism from against itself, by deviating it on to the fascists, in this case, used to draw it into a trap.
It is important instead to be conscious of the fact that the massacres, like terrorism on a large scale, i.e. war, or large scale sackings and so on, serve to give States a stable solution to their crises, to their police order disturbed by the social struggles in course.
Moreover, thanks to indiscriminate terror, States manage not only to hide their true nature, attributing it to their most intransigent enemies, that is to say those who want to destroy them, but also present themselves to public opinion in the role of the victim: "Terrorism, by striking institutions and their men, want to force us to come into the same field, that of violence, to then demonstrate to us our presumed authoritarian and antidemocratic nature. But, as you can see, we are not capitulating in the face of this blackmail, we are combating terrorism keeping ourselves within the ambit of democratic legality". In this way States manage to render credible even their democratic mask.
There remains the fact that terrorism is a phenomenon that is natural to the State as such, therefore not attributable as it is claimed only to declaredly authoritarian, dictatorial States. The only difference consists in the fact that in dictatorial States terrorism is normal administration, it is the rule; while in the "democratic" States it is an episodic phenomenon.
All the same, looking into it, this difference turns out to be fictitious, being based on a reductive interpretation of the phenomenon, in the sense that it does not take into account the other aspect of terrorism: the less noticeable one as such in the ambit of sensitive experience and if we like which is conceptually more difficult to define, but not for this less ferocious and inhuman in its effects.
Because this other aspect of State terrorism, which we shall now speak of, manages to make itself "invi-sible", not have itself identified, so one is led to think that in the formally democratic States they do not constitute the rule. Because in its manifestation it does it not present the traits that immediately make one think of terrorism as it is commonly known.
In other words, because in people's imagination terrorism is only that which causes death and loss of blood.
It happens thus that this identification of terrorism in death and blood, i.e. in its outcomes that are available to the "naked eye", leads one not to qualify as terrorist the outcomes through which the other aspect of terror carried out by States, i.e. oppression and exploitation in general, daily phenomena, certainly not episodic.
Oppression and exploitation therefore: this is the true face of terrorism. And it is infinitely more cruel and devastating than any massacre, because it is unceasing, it acts constantly in time and space, sadistically scientific, causing individuals unspeakable physical and psychological suffering, because it obliges them to live in the terror of a precarious, injust, existence, dominated by the non values of the State and capital subtracted from individual and collective control. Terrorism therefore essentially consists in the exercising of dominion.
That is why those who make a distinction between a dictatorial State and a democratic one seem incongruous. These distinctions are extremely dangerous when made by anarchists, because they induce one to seeing violence a useful and legitimate means only if used against openly authoritarian regimes.
But we have seen that in democratic regimes people are also governed by terror. Consequently, it is really difficult for us to understand, for what obscure reason one should use two scales: yes to violence against the dictators, no to violence against the terrorism of the democrats.
The terrorism remains such no matter what form-State expresses it. And violence is not a choice that we have made, it is the terrorist State that obliges us to respond with revolutionary violence, an eminently defensive violence, even if that does not mean that we must stay with our hands folded waiting for aggression.
We can and we must attack too, in our own time and in our own way, in the perspective of the violent destruction of the State.
By definition revolutionaries are against any reformist logic, against any negotiation with the bosses, against any compromise with the institutions. They do not disdain the arm of critique but also want to go beyond that, struggling against all those who work in order to guarantee oppression and exploitation, under whatever form and whatever flag.
Antonio Gizzo
FROM THE EAST TOWARDS CAPITALISM
Putting aside for the time being the problems raised by the popular insurrection in China limiting our selves to as objective as possible an analysis of the insurrectional processes in course of development in various countries in Eastern Europe and the borders of the Soviet empire, we must make one further distinction right away.
The USSR, i.e. the hegemonic power of a universe that polarises the countries of the Warsaw pact, has for some years now been moving towards a political and economic project of deep-seated reforms, a project rendered necessary by the truly poverty-stricken conditions that the population finds itself reduced to. This has forced a reduction of spending on armaments in order to give the people a little more to eat.
A reason for new found agreement in a universe that has been in a state of conflict until now, (i.e. with the USA and Nato countries) is the fact that the crises within the countries leading this universe, although not immediately comprehensible, and is only understood after careful observation of the loss of world economic command, has now been consigned into the hands of the Japanese. This is at the origin of the agreements on demilitarisation and breathing space conceded by the west to the projects of economic restructuring of the USSR.
Now, in a country that is politically strongly centralised, it is not possible for any real economic reform to take place before the political structures are dismantled. Hence the first steps towards democratisation not only in the USSR but also the various satellite countries, beginning with Poland and ending in Romania. The above distinction however concerns two kinds of problem: one which is specific to the State campaigns of the USSR, and another which is specific to the satellite countries, now openly on the way to finding their political, and therefore economic, identity without paying any attention to the Warsaw agreements any longer, and without fear of intervention by the Russian tanks.
Although we are trying to elaborate an analysis rendered more necessary than ever, it should be said that the two orders of problem are not the same. The USSR has its nationalistic problems on the European borders, which will get worse and worse in the politically and primarily economic federations, and considerable difficulties in the control and survival of the political and repressive apparatus in the USSR, possible explosions of conflicts of national liberation in the various political situations, however this problem could remain subordinated - although fermenting and dangerous - to the outcome of the USSR as a whole, a country that is approaching the productive and social situation of the West.
Moreover, the problem of the satellite countries is quite different to that of the USSR in the sense that the latter must face two situations, an internal one and one of relations with the West, this problem being being similar to that of the satellite countries.
For the time being it seems more important to me to give a modest contribution to this problem of rela-tions with the West, which is presenting itself in a virulent and chaotic way, under the aspect of a fascinating by an opportune propaganda of a kind of race to freedom and democracy.
Not one of these countries, from Poland which was the first to begin its trade union movements, to the gentle Czechoslovakia, to the incredible East Germany, to Bulgaria and the truculent situation of Romania, not one of those countries is moving towards FREEDOM. Just as the USSR is not moving towards freedom. Towards profound structural, economic and political tran-sformation, yes, but that is a diffe-rent question.
Firstly, the abandoning of the political structures of the past is happening everywhere in a far-sighted and prudent way. The liquidation of an ideological cover such as the communist party, should not impress us. The level of political transformation in all these countries, including the USSR, where the communist party remains standing, is more or less identical. In some countries the old leaders have been discarded, in others they have been accused of embezzlement and imprisoned, in others they have been shot, but these are not the real differences. In substance the apparatus is resisting and transforming itself, keeping a hold on to the levers of power which in its transformation is aiming at adapting the political structure to the economic needs that are showing themselves to be ever more indispensable and com-pelling. And this goes for all these countries, from the USSR to Romania.
The FACILITY with which the marxist ideology with all its theore-tical baggage that it seemed was to have finally put an end to the insurrectional revolutionary attempts of a libertarian matrix has crumbled, this FACILITY is the proof, looking backwards, of how inconsistent and simply decorative that doctrine was, and of how much responsibility its supporters bear for having used it to cover up massacres, genocide, exploitation and oppression.
But this is not the most important problem. Basically, one was more or less certain that dialectical materia-lism would come to an end, as every now and again someone would lift up the edges of the cover and show what was hiding under REAL SOCIA-LISM. For our part, always convinced that the common idealist matrix of all historians belong to cannot but lead to oppression and the restoration of dictatorships, we were simply sitting on the banks of the Ganges therefore have had no THEORETICAL SURPRISES in seeing the corpses of the enemy float by.
Now the problem consists of assessing where these countries are heading for, what choices they are going to make. This is a serious problem, not so much for trying to understand preventively how CAPITALISM is at the present time playing the role of seducer for those countries.
And it is clear that they are not moving towards a western-style capitalism of the kind that existed at the beginning of the eighties, i.e. towards an industrial structure weighed down by large fixed plants, with the prospect of unpleasant social conflict with scarce productive flexibility in the work force. Nor are they moving towards an America in full vigour of industrial production, dominating the load-bearing sectors and armed gendarme of the interests of capital in a good part of the world. Finally, they are not moving towards a Eu-rope in debt to the Americans, with old economies and ideas that are even older.
These countries are moving towards a NEW CAPITALISM. Reality is DIFFERENT at the beginning of the nineties. The USA are in economic difficulty precisely in the weight-bearing structures, with electronics in the lead, where they have been replaced by Japan. If they want to catch up they will have to abandon two things: the role of gendarme that they obliged to reduce, and the economic guardianship of Europe, which moreover is now less and less necessary. The European economies are incomparably stronger than they were ten years ago, while social conflict is under control nearly everywhere. Flexibility of production that economic technology has allowed is making possible structures of production that are no longer subject to the risks of backward plants and excessive employment costs. Mobility, after about ten years of adaptation, has now entered a mature phase, allowing for a fluidity of labour costs that is almost optimal. This is the CAPITALISM towards which Eastern Europe is moving.
One should ask oneself, but is this REALLY capitalism? We believe that the great POST-INDUSTRIAL transformations have always greatly modified the situation. Once, as we have always maintained, the difference between COMPETITIVE STATE CAPITALISM (smuggled under the name of REAL SOCIALISM) were quite negligible and only some idiot ignorant of economic problems could maintain that capitalism did not exist in the East because it lacked the MARKET. Anyone with a minimum of economic experience knows perfectly well that the market is like the fata Morgana, it is only visible under certain conditions. Or, remembering the words of Pirandello, there is ONE, NONE, AND A HUNDRED THOUSAND MARKETS. Precedingly, neither of the two types of capitalism worked at the level of the medium term, one had to adapt oneself to the short term, having recourse to ferocities and bloody adjustments. On the one side, in the West, an apparent wealth paid for in blood, hunger and death in the more backward countries, and with police bullets, but also with the camouflage of ideological consensus of the proletarian revolution. No real difference.
Had these conditions of the eco-nomic structure in East and West, and the social and political conditions of the eighties not changed, there would have been no move towards each other. Democracy and freedom wrapped up together in this rubbish are chatter like marxism and the proletarian revolution. Reality is quite different.
The East is not moving towards capitalism, but is moving towards POST-INDUSTRIAL TECHNOLOGY which, at the end of the eighties and more still throughout the Nineties, will try to develop the conditions for a different kind of global domination.
These movements, considered by all as so surprising and fascinating, these popular uprisings, these insurrections that are eliminating ideological encrustations and years old dic-tatorships, are basically all moving in the natural order of the great capita-list transformations that are taking place all over the world, towards a new POST-INDUSTRIAL society.
In such a perspective, our only hope, our strategy and our action, is that of analysis, in that it is precisely in these events of great international importance, that they come forth strengthened.
AM Bonanno
The USSR, i.e. the hegemonic power of a universe that polarises the countries of the Warsaw pact, has for some years now been moving towards a political and economic project of deep-seated reforms, a project rendered necessary by the truly poverty-stricken conditions that the population finds itself reduced to. This has forced a reduction of spending on armaments in order to give the people a little more to eat.
A reason for new found agreement in a universe that has been in a state of conflict until now, (i.e. with the USA and Nato countries) is the fact that the crises within the countries leading this universe, although not immediately comprehensible, and is only understood after careful observation of the loss of world economic command, has now been consigned into the hands of the Japanese. This is at the origin of the agreements on demilitarisation and breathing space conceded by the west to the projects of economic restructuring of the USSR.
Now, in a country that is politically strongly centralised, it is not possible for any real economic reform to take place before the political structures are dismantled. Hence the first steps towards democratisation not only in the USSR but also the various satellite countries, beginning with Poland and ending in Romania. The above distinction however concerns two kinds of problem: one which is specific to the State campaigns of the USSR, and another which is specific to the satellite countries, now openly on the way to finding their political, and therefore economic, identity without paying any attention to the Warsaw agreements any longer, and without fear of intervention by the Russian tanks.
Although we are trying to elaborate an analysis rendered more necessary than ever, it should be said that the two orders of problem are not the same. The USSR has its nationalistic problems on the European borders, which will get worse and worse in the politically and primarily economic federations, and considerable difficulties in the control and survival of the political and repressive apparatus in the USSR, possible explosions of conflicts of national liberation in the various political situations, however this problem could remain subordinated - although fermenting and dangerous - to the outcome of the USSR as a whole, a country that is approaching the productive and social situation of the West.
Moreover, the problem of the satellite countries is quite different to that of the USSR in the sense that the latter must face two situations, an internal one and one of relations with the West, this problem being being similar to that of the satellite countries.
For the time being it seems more important to me to give a modest contribution to this problem of rela-tions with the West, which is presenting itself in a virulent and chaotic way, under the aspect of a fascinating by an opportune propaganda of a kind of race to freedom and democracy.
Not one of these countries, from Poland which was the first to begin its trade union movements, to the gentle Czechoslovakia, to the incredible East Germany, to Bulgaria and the truculent situation of Romania, not one of those countries is moving towards FREEDOM. Just as the USSR is not moving towards freedom. Towards profound structural, economic and political tran-sformation, yes, but that is a diffe-rent question.
Firstly, the abandoning of the political structures of the past is happening everywhere in a far-sighted and prudent way. The liquidation of an ideological cover such as the communist party, should not impress us. The level of political transformation in all these countries, including the USSR, where the communist party remains standing, is more or less identical. In some countries the old leaders have been discarded, in others they have been accused of embezzlement and imprisoned, in others they have been shot, but these are not the real differences. In substance the apparatus is resisting and transforming itself, keeping a hold on to the levers of power which in its transformation is aiming at adapting the political structure to the economic needs that are showing themselves to be ever more indispensable and com-pelling. And this goes for all these countries, from the USSR to Romania.
The FACILITY with which the marxist ideology with all its theore-tical baggage that it seemed was to have finally put an end to the insurrectional revolutionary attempts of a libertarian matrix has crumbled, this FACILITY is the proof, looking backwards, of how inconsistent and simply decorative that doctrine was, and of how much responsibility its supporters bear for having used it to cover up massacres, genocide, exploitation and oppression.
But this is not the most important problem. Basically, one was more or less certain that dialectical materia-lism would come to an end, as every now and again someone would lift up the edges of the cover and show what was hiding under REAL SOCIA-LISM. For our part, always convinced that the common idealist matrix of all historians belong to cannot but lead to oppression and the restoration of dictatorships, we were simply sitting on the banks of the Ganges therefore have had no THEORETICAL SURPRISES in seeing the corpses of the enemy float by.
Now the problem consists of assessing where these countries are heading for, what choices they are going to make. This is a serious problem, not so much for trying to understand preventively how CAPITALISM is at the present time playing the role of seducer for those countries.
And it is clear that they are not moving towards a western-style capitalism of the kind that existed at the beginning of the eighties, i.e. towards an industrial structure weighed down by large fixed plants, with the prospect of unpleasant social conflict with scarce productive flexibility in the work force. Nor are they moving towards an America in full vigour of industrial production, dominating the load-bearing sectors and armed gendarme of the interests of capital in a good part of the world. Finally, they are not moving towards a Eu-rope in debt to the Americans, with old economies and ideas that are even older.
These countries are moving towards a NEW CAPITALISM. Reality is DIFFERENT at the beginning of the nineties. The USA are in economic difficulty precisely in the weight-bearing structures, with electronics in the lead, where they have been replaced by Japan. If they want to catch up they will have to abandon two things: the role of gendarme that they obliged to reduce, and the economic guardianship of Europe, which moreover is now less and less necessary. The European economies are incomparably stronger than they were ten years ago, while social conflict is under control nearly everywhere. Flexibility of production that economic technology has allowed is making possible structures of production that are no longer subject to the risks of backward plants and excessive employment costs. Mobility, after about ten years of adaptation, has now entered a mature phase, allowing for a fluidity of labour costs that is almost optimal. This is the CAPITALISM towards which Eastern Europe is moving.
One should ask oneself, but is this REALLY capitalism? We believe that the great POST-INDUSTRIAL transformations have always greatly modified the situation. Once, as we have always maintained, the difference between COMPETITIVE STATE CAPITALISM (smuggled under the name of REAL SOCIALISM) were quite negligible and only some idiot ignorant of economic problems could maintain that capitalism did not exist in the East because it lacked the MARKET. Anyone with a minimum of economic experience knows perfectly well that the market is like the fata Morgana, it is only visible under certain conditions. Or, remembering the words of Pirandello, there is ONE, NONE, AND A HUNDRED THOUSAND MARKETS. Precedingly, neither of the two types of capitalism worked at the level of the medium term, one had to adapt oneself to the short term, having recourse to ferocities and bloody adjustments. On the one side, in the West, an apparent wealth paid for in blood, hunger and death in the more backward countries, and with police bullets, but also with the camouflage of ideological consensus of the proletarian revolution. No real difference.
Had these conditions of the eco-nomic structure in East and West, and the social and political conditions of the eighties not changed, there would have been no move towards each other. Democracy and freedom wrapped up together in this rubbish are chatter like marxism and the proletarian revolution. Reality is quite different.
The East is not moving towards capitalism, but is moving towards POST-INDUSTRIAL TECHNOLOGY which, at the end of the eighties and more still throughout the Nineties, will try to develop the conditions for a different kind of global domination.
These movements, considered by all as so surprising and fascinating, these popular uprisings, these insurrections that are eliminating ideological encrustations and years old dic-tatorships, are basically all moving in the natural order of the great capita-list transformations that are taking place all over the world, towards a new POST-INDUSTRIAL society.
In such a perspective, our only hope, our strategy and our action, is that of analysis, in that it is precisely in these events of great international importance, that they come forth strengthened.
AM Bonanno
ISSUE TWENTYSEVEN
For understandable reasons the present issue of ProvocAzione is coming out with only a few pages in the new format that it will also take in future issues. We have printed more copies in order to have the widest possible diffusion. On the basis of our strength. We ask all comrades interested to telephone or write.... In these grave moments we need the maximum possible support. All comrades interested in constituting a fund for defence costs etc are asked to.
PRESS COMMUNIQUE
From the newspapers we learn of the arrest of a number of members of a non-existent group “Anarchismo e ProvocAzione”. We do not want, nor can we, say anything of the actions the investigators consider them responsible for, nor the connections and relations they refer to, to say the least, very confused. We merely want to underline, as comrades making up the editorial of “Anarchismo” and the editorial of “ProvocAzione” that we are estarnge to any clandestine organisation whatsoever, let alone one called “Anarchismo e ProvocAzione”.
Apart from our work as anarchists and revolutionaries that we reconfirm with heads held high, even at this moment when one of the most clamorous frame-ups of recent years is appearing on the horizon (and it is not the first time), we want to point out the inexistence of possible “continuisms” between organisations operating in the past under the name of “AR” and our editorials. The fact - as has been underlined - that our editions published a book containing the communiques of this organisation, cannot be considered belonging to it or participating in it, in that we have published other books expressing opinions that are diametrically opposed (something the papers do not take the trouble to report).
We think that individual choices, revolutionary or other, be claimed for what they are: personal decisions which cannot draw in structures of the anarchist movement simply because it suits an inquiror more ambitious than others.
It is necessary to do everything possible to denounce this frame up at all levels as foolish and hateful as ever. There has never existed, nor could there have existed, “anarchist terrorism”, nor anarchists stupid enough to lightly give life to deeds such as those pointed out by the inquirors signing themselves in the name of a paper regularly distributed all over Italy.
“Anarchismo”
“ProvocAzione”
NUMBER TWENTYEIGHT
June ‘91
Sabotage against Enel Pylons
The Far-off Needs For a Frame-up
Naples in Underpants
Attention Towards the Arditi
Class Clash in Greece
The Death of Andreotti
Still on “Proletarian Justice”
The Hangman and the Segugio
The Drawingroom Revolutionary
Kossiga and Us
Editorial objectives, but not only
Stones against the Pigs
“Different” or “Other”
Controcultura Communique
Rebellion
In Bologna - Fire against Rizzoli Research Centre
Comrade Arrested in Rome
The Italy Alliance
Enough: Leaflet
Guerilla in Corsica
Infamous Campaign Against Anarchists
Beware of the Dog
Against War, Against Peace
Aerospace Centre Visited
NUMBERTWENTYNINE
Dec ‘91
The Return of the ALF
Yet a Little Would be enough
Repression in Versailles
Press Communique
Worms to the Worms
Barocchio
Appeal Tesseri Fantazzini
Revolt of the Spanish Miners
In Pinerolo
Against a Dirty Frameup
“Fire in Experimenation Centre”
Animals Freed in Padova
Bomb in Corsica
Raids in Bologna
Amnesty - False
Cars Burnt
Creches Devastated
“The Fact Doesn’tSubsist”
Corsicans and Sardinians Together
Totò Trik and Trak
Anarchist Defence Committee
To the Magistrate of Massa
Sabotage with Surprise
Titta Foti: A Dirty Story
Two Explosions in the Night
Census ‘90 Has Begun (Paso)
Town Hall Devastated
PRESS COMMUNIQUE
From the newspapers we learn of the arrest of a number of members of a non-existent group “Anarchismo e ProvocAzione”. We do not want, nor can we, say anything of the actions the investigators consider them responsible for, nor the connections and relations they refer to, to say the least, very confused. We merely want to underline, as comrades making up the editorial of “Anarchismo” and the editorial of “ProvocAzione” that we are estarnge to any clandestine organisation whatsoever, let alone one called “Anarchismo e ProvocAzione”.
Apart from our work as anarchists and revolutionaries that we reconfirm with heads held high, even at this moment when one of the most clamorous frame-ups of recent years is appearing on the horizon (and it is not the first time), we want to point out the inexistence of possible “continuisms” between organisations operating in the past under the name of “AR” and our editorials. The fact - as has been underlined - that our editions published a book containing the communiques of this organisation, cannot be considered belonging to it or participating in it, in that we have published other books expressing opinions that are diametrically opposed (something the papers do not take the trouble to report).
We think that individual choices, revolutionary or other, be claimed for what they are: personal decisions which cannot draw in structures of the anarchist movement simply because it suits an inquiror more ambitious than others.
It is necessary to do everything possible to denounce this frame up at all levels as foolish and hateful as ever. There has never existed, nor could there have existed, “anarchist terrorism”, nor anarchists stupid enough to lightly give life to deeds such as those pointed out by the inquirors signing themselves in the name of a paper regularly distributed all over Italy.
“Anarchismo”
“ProvocAzione”
NUMBER TWENTYEIGHT
June ‘91
Sabotage against Enel Pylons
The Far-off Needs For a Frame-up
Naples in Underpants
Attention Towards the Arditi
Class Clash in Greece
The Death of Andreotti
Still on “Proletarian Justice”
The Hangman and the Segugio
The Drawingroom Revolutionary
Kossiga and Us
Editorial objectives, but not only
Stones against the Pigs
“Different” or “Other”
Controcultura Communique
Rebellion
In Bologna - Fire against Rizzoli Research Centre
Comrade Arrested in Rome
The Italy Alliance
Enough: Leaflet
Guerilla in Corsica
Infamous Campaign Against Anarchists
Beware of the Dog
Against War, Against Peace
Aerospace Centre Visited
NUMBERTWENTYNINE
Dec ‘91
The Return of the ALF
Yet a Little Would be enough
Repression in Versailles
Press Communique
Worms to the Worms
Barocchio
Appeal Tesseri Fantazzini
Revolt of the Spanish Miners
In Pinerolo
Against a Dirty Frameup
“Fire in Experimenation Centre”
Animals Freed in Padova
Bomb in Corsica
Raids in Bologna
Amnesty - False
Cars Burnt
Creches Devastated
“The Fact Doesn’tSubsist”
Corsicans and Sardinians Together
Totò Trik and Trak
Anarchist Defence Committee
To the Magistrate of Massa
Sabotage with Surprise
Titta Foti: A Dirty Story
Two Explosions in the Night
Census ‘90 Has Begun (Paso)
Town Hall Devastated
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
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
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
