Subversive bookfair in Brussels

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Possibility of clear skies ahead

Destroying rejuvenates.

Walter Benjamin

 

The only capital that the proletariat […] has accumulated in its history, is the latent push of its own rage, a global negator of “the state of things”, its latent concrete possibility to overthrow with violence the state of things and sink it once and for all in the past, with its culture, all its rationalizing rhetoric, and the spectacular organization of appearances.

Giorgio Cesarano, Gianni Collu

 

I step away from those who wait for the possibility to escape scarcity brought on by chance, by the dream, by a riot. They resemble too closely those who in other times trusted in God in order to save their missed existence.

Georges Bataille

 

Thirty years of counterrevolution have ended.

That storming of the heavens that animated the most radical hopes of the Seventies comes back to scare, with its unfulfilled charge, the dreams of the technocrats, of the conformists, of the proud citizens. This society, which survives its own collapse only as a giant infrastructure, as police technologies, as a theatre of shadows, thought that a sea, a sea of cameras and uniforms would suffice to keep away the poor from their power and their similars. It thought that unequal development, the blackmail of international debt, the tecnomiltary mafias, and the regional massacres could be a program sustainable for much longer. For a while the practices of killing as much exuberant humanity as possible, selling weapons and controlling the movements of opposition, were considered fruitful, especially since national liberation was part of the game. However that type of war between States and counter-States seems to have run its course.

 

The total mobilization imposed by the global domination has given way, as its rebound, to a much more dangerous game: that of correspondence.

The riots of London that further spread to other English cities were the best answer to the insurrection in North Africa. An act of correspondence that resumes what happened in the French banlieus in 2005 and in Greece in 2008. An act that is reminiscent of the uprising in Tirana of last spring, that goes back to tumultuous Cairo, that stretches out to Santiago del Chile. A kid shot by the cops, isn’t, unfortunately, anything new. What is new though is the rage it meets. The same with the shebab in Palestinian territories. It is not the old internationalist solidarity; it is not the project of bringing the anti-imperialist conflict into western cities, in the belly of the beast. It’s something different; it is a way of answering to the same war, to the same chocking and dark life, to the same absence of meaning.

 

It was blatantly pathetic to see the mass media and the professional analysts inject commendable democratic intentions to the “Arab spring” and to stamp as an explosion of an absurd and incomprehensible ailment the revolts in Tottenham, Enfield, Brixton, Hackney, Peckham.

What would this youth, both local and immigrant, from these popular neighbourhoods want? Don’t they already live in democracy? Yeas they do. But real democracy, exploiting their strength and marking with iron their bodies, has not yet taken their will to avenge, it has not completely dulled their burning souls.

To go up in flames were not only cop stations and banks, but also the huge Sony warehouse in Enfield. 22 thousand square metres of concrete. It surely promised to be able to keep the youth busy for a lot longer, isolated by headphones. Instead together with the police, the blows were aimed also towards mass entertainment. Consumer alienation and cops: two tentacles that crush every life, every youth. “…The big buildings and the wide streets, the concrete and steel have lost their appearance of lasting sturdiness. A torch, a bomb, a strong enough gust of wind, and they too would crumble”, wrote years ago an ex- Weatherman, remembering the US revolts during the Sixties.

 

Thousands upon thousands of cameras, 16 thousand cops, the threat to military intervention were not enough. Not even within the domestic borders. After days of riots in the poor neighbourhoods, the revolt broke open the luxurious doors of Brent, Ealing, Camden, Notting Hill, Oxford Circus. The district of Wembley (which canceled the match England-Holland), the district of the shopping malls, of fashion, of the new-hip-radical-chic lifestyle. The dangerous class comes knocking on the doors of the tecno-bureaucratic minority of the included, and it frees its brainwashed youth, anorexic from goods and ghosts.

These are not the indignados, a new wing of impotent citizenists, these are pissed off people, full of rage. Like that one guy that said “there is a rabble in every class”, since it is not only one part of the planet that is colonized or just the left-overs of society, but our entire life, put to work twenty-four hours a day.

These partisans against the reduction and humiliation of life are joined in their guts- in their own insurrectional guts- to rebels everywhere. The economic crisis, the failing educational system, the overworked single parents- are all just mumble-jumbles of lefty sociologists who are only chasing after an out of date reformism.

Those explanations were already given, over and over. Only chatter, nothing more.

The insurrection, the one possible within and against history, is again amongst us.

 

Already in the Seventies some breeder of hit men in suit and uniform proposed that the new war should be played on three fields. The first, repression without mercy of any act of insubordination, which, in a social order as unrelenting as fragile, can bring straight to insurrection. Secondly, the strategic removal of any distinction between civil and military business in order to accustom the population to military presence on the street. Thirdly, the creation of peaceful movements that reject violence, in order to isolate and strike down anyone who steps out of democracy-world. We are, more or less, there. Eating on the streets, sitting on benches, meeting up in parks and courtyards is being prohibited in more and more cities. Not only to leave space to the triumph of consumer goods and speculation, to the detriment of human clutter, but because the order of speculation and isolation is scared of the subversive nature of sharing company. Who ever shares anything is enemy of the State.

The lack of distinction between civil and military is a known fact, in production, in research, in control, in the planning of houses, buildings, neighbourhoods. All colonial experimentations (urban, executive, anthropological, strategically) have our cities as their new laboratories.

Trying to create or infiltrate oppositional movements against regimes at one point allied and now obsolete, has always been a proven technique. If the Syrian rebels can be easily massacred, the ones of Libya can be helped by a few NATO airstrikes: to raise the stakes in the geopolitical poker of partitioning land. Some Temporary National Committee, randomly put together for the media, is easy to find. Even on the home front, it is much more desirable to have a clear and democratic indignation today, rather than a messy and ungovernable insurrection tomorrow. But when the indignation even arrives until Israel, after Fifty years of history, it might not still mean that it is completely another matter.

 

More and more the military war is giving space to a civil war, which involves at least three favourable conditions for revolutionaries (it should be made clear, favourable, not deterministically guaranteed). The contestation of violence held by State monopoly. The give-and-take steps of sovrainty between the State and the individual. The slackening of control, in the form of shuffling up of friends and foes, of affinities and incompatibilities for the sake of immanence.

The implicit invitation is to disregard any insurrectionary ideology- with its fetishes, its rhetoric, its never changing analyses- to tackle theoretically and practically, ethically and materially the insurrection as a historical possibility.

We have maybe finally exited that long desert that was making of revolt only a testimony of human resistance, a method to not discard into a corner, a weapon to bear through the cold moors of the castaways, of the reintegrated, of the dissociated, of the resigned. All the riotous knowledge gained cannot now let the assaults that are individually calling us overtake our priorities.

 

If I think back to the early Nineties, when some comrades proposed an Antiauthoritarian Insurrectionalist International, which would have as an area of intervention the Mediterranean, for the enormous insurrectional possibilities it offered, I remain astounded in front of how much reality has proven the intuition of that hypothesis, at the time thrown aside because of misunderstandings, bad moods, tantrums and repressive maneuvers.

If I think of how years and years of discussions regarding affinity groups and informal organization has barely left us with a way of relating to each other among comrades, not paying any attention to the other level: that of base structures composed of both comrades and other exploited…

If I think about how informal organization was not only the exact opposite of acronyms and federations, but also of bitterness and self-congratulation.

And how Bakunin talked about “anarchic movement of populations” (in French it’s deliberately anarchique and not anarchiste), maybe today it’s possible to see at the horizon an actual insurrectional movement and not only an insurrectionary milieu. Even more, it is not certain at all that in a situation of civil war symbols or chit-chat would get us anywhere.

 

Civil war appears there where the façade of society, of the agreement, of the exchange, of the mutual assurance collapses and from there emerges, within and beyond the individuals, the powers, the inclinations and the conditions of life, ideas and their worlds, their appropriate means, the different clinamen. When putting between brackets the normal rules of conduct, the silent economic coercion, the political rituals, the game is once again on. When life is no longer folded in on itself, it shows its wrinkles, its sharp edges, its knots, its crevices. The first act, a temptation long held back, is to destroy. To destroy what one knows, what is exposed to one’s touch. Space stops being something unlimited and at the same time compressed – like “society”- to give itself the place to ground itself, territory. Outside of the virtual world of technological prosthesis, the raging individual needs to find his bearings. The humiliation included in uninhabitable alleys, in malls, in police stations, in the subway cars, in the welfare offices, in call centres is lapidated, demolished, set ablaze. The living being takes back the control over their objectified world, of the State of Things.

 

The feeling of empty interchangeability that marks the capitalized survival pushed many insurgents to the most paradoxical of passions: the drive towards their own (and of others) sacrifice. Maybe exactly there in this paradox, in the clash between liberation and barbarity, between the mutual sharing of differences and the identification with a new authority. All the economic and anthropologic explanations of nationalism, of fundamentalism, of power leave this void- the leap between the pettiness of the interest and the unknown (and death). Civil war- which is not only the judicial, economic, political, ideological and moral collapse- widens that emptiness, barely covered by what we call culture. Revenge, resentment, disappointment, animosity…Do we not like what comes out of it? What did we think, that it would be all roses? No, it’s the dregs, the only fertile soil for freedom.

 

Someone said that revolution is not a problem of organization, but a has an organizational problem. Well said.

Having hypotheses. Circumscribed, but firm. Sharpening what is unique, exciting and mutual is to be opposed and taken away from domination and its world.

Our frontier line is full and empty at the same time, it’s there where we attack and live, to attack even further and live even further. Domination is not a growth external to the “social”, to our relationships, to ourselves; it is the infrastructure of alienation, the material universe of isolation, the misery included in objects, in dead work, in urban spaces, in the powerlessness engraved in language, in the frustration that hangs over every image of what could be possible, the order of the identical. There is not riot that makes us, all at once, anything beyond what we are. Revolt is only the beginning.

 

For an end to all organizational ensembles. The computerized restructuring of production and urban transformation (the murder of historical cities) has pulverized any space for long-term self organization of the exploited. However, in the past those organizational frames were always revealed, at the same time, as the tools of political-syndicalist recuperation and the foundations of new power. Today there is no external force to domination able to control all aspects of an anger immediately antisocial. It is not a historical fact to be taken lightly, as it is well known by the councilors of Power. The organization through affinity is the most apt mode for civil war, that which emerges spontaneously from the alleys of the neighbourhoods. A horizontal connection of revolts has also become quite spontaneous, as we have seen in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and England. That this horizontal connection should become also the shared perspective of a different world, and not only a fulfillment of an immediate practical need, is a different story.

A insurrectionary movement must now look at its inner weaknesses, rather than always focusing on the external plot. Today’s dominations are fragile because they are structurally interdependent (think about information, energy, banks), but at the same time viscous, parasitic, granular. Organizing means more than ever: durability. Self organizing to steal back the space from the sovereignty of the State, to combine with the intelligence of our senses and with our words- to our ethical composition- the suspended time of the revolt, to render useless the mercantile exchange.

 

From uprising to uprising, from destruction to destruction, human activity, tragically renowned to the tecnosphere we live in, will find again its time and place.

Starting from small and significant contacts, we need to know the land: from the alleyways to the doorways, from the banks to the weapons supplies, from the snitches in our neighbourhoods to the supplies of pasta. Civil war means first and foremost end of neutrality, conscious of the old heraclitean proverb: “even the sleeping hold up the order of the world”.

 

But civil war sets the stage also for the worst kind of identity fixations, making fundamentalism not so much of a “technically equipped archaism”, but a very contemporary matter. Not only for the seductive formula oppressor=infidel, but for the material community (food supplies, gas bottles, assistance) that it takes care to provide. Our dependence to society’s technologic organization is crushing. To destroy the gears is necessary, but not enough. And this is not a prophetic prediction of tomorrow, but regards the revolt of today. The wild blockades that paralyzed Buenos Aires for weeks in 2001, have revealed how fragile and parasitic urban life is: after just a short time there was no more food. The order to interrupt that method of struggle did not come from some political representative, but from the mouths of the urban monster. To get back in touch with our hands and with the earth is a fundamental revolutionary necessity. (A matter that here I will only mention, but that will be important to get back to).

 

Thirty years of counter revolution have finished.

Sabotage can go back to being something beyond an act of testimony, an esthetic act or the promotion of one’s group, but be a effective damage to a machine, to a device, to the movement of troops, the practical demonstration of the destructibility of a system and the passage through which rebellious intelligence and seditious sharing can stealthy move through, an opening of the counter-world that liberates space in the cities as in the souls.

 

A hood can become something else than an identifying sign of a political component, but a precipitation into anonymity, into what is special, what is property of no one, and that anyone can appropriate.

The riotous youth reveals its own autonomy arming itself with its own means (of attack, of self-defense, of care) refusing work as administrated sloth.

When something happens, being there, knowing also that the best way of being there is sometimes being somewhere else, opening other cracks, appropriating supplies, sabotaging other death machines.

In the heat of the situation, everyone will discover their own.

The rest is a bad omen.

 

Giovanni Marrone

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