Subversive bookfair in Brussels

The most powerful weapon that all anti-authoritarian persons share and that we have to take to heart, are our ideas. Those that can cement and provoke profound changes in the world we live in. Everywhere around us uprisings and insurrections follow that seem to indicate that we live in a moment favourable for freedom, a historical moment that allowed people to leave their usual mental isolation and to raise the head to be illuminated by the small sparkle of new ideas.

In a context like this, it is normal that we all ask ourselves what to do and how to have an influence on the reality that surrounds us. It seems that there are as much answers as individuals or groups. Nevertheless, much to my regret, I see that postures prevail and, according to me, these can only lead us towards a total failure.

A big part of what is called the anarchist world displays an almost prophetic attitude towards the population, which will be hardly greeted with sympathy. If, to our fellow creatures, we can only present ideas mummified, fossilized or anchored in reflections from the past century – trying to preach the “anarchist” doctrine in the desert of alienation – we will meet, in the best case, only indifference or, in the worst case, a visceral rejection.

Thus, how I see it, the strategy of the moment has to adept to the reality and we have to use our ideas in an intelligent way. Long years of processes of decredibilitation have made the word anarchist a taboo and has made it a concept to distrust. It’s for that reason that we come up against reactions of rejection towards our publications and our propaganda. Yet, have we tried to talk about solidarity, direct action, mutual aid or freedom without shutting ourselves away behind any label? In my experience, I can say that there are much more people than we can imagine who share the ideal of emancipation, although they refuse the label behind which a lot of us place ourselves and that we use to define ourselves.

My own reflection leads me to the conclusion that we have to know to live following the times that we correspond with and have to be capable to overcome the anachronisms and the self-referential dynamics. That will allow ourselves to share our ideas and our values with the rest of the world; as well in the streets as in assemblies. If we come down from our pedestal and we humbly spread our ideas without locking them up in any ideological chapel, then we will probably come to ideas that gather and unify people, and oppose them to a common enemy: the State and the Capital.

After all we all have enough of this precarious work that exploits us and alienates us; that steals our right to live. We all have it difficult with the fact that the comfort of our sofa bathes in the innocent blood of our brothers from other places. It is true that a significant part of the population prefers to close their eyes and let pay their silence in exchange for commodities offered by the society of well-being; however these times are bygone. We see how, all over Europe, the economical affluence drops ceaselessly and how the Welfare state rapidly disappears. When the television, tourism and the industry of the spectacle can no longer hide a decomposing world, when the workers see that they are no longer profitable for the system and that their periods of inactivity follow one after the other, … Thus a large part of the population will be obliged to choose between authoritarianism and freedom.

If during the years before the inflexion point, we don’t show ourselves capable of humbly sharing with the rest of the world our vision and our ideas how to construct the only world in which we can really be free (that means being alive), we will see, faster than we can imagine, parliamentarian neo-dictatorships more adapted than ever before, that at the same time tear away our emancipatory horizon. It is even more a fruitful moment because the political capitalist class lives trough a moment of almost complete delegitimation, that makes it more weak than ever.

If we fail, we will carry the responsibility. That will reflect our incapacity to be really capable of putting everything into play, to cut ourselves loose from all the old antique and void forms and to take the bet of the true revolution. If we triumph, the gratification will justify every previous sacrifice.

Cronos

It is beyond doubt that we’ve come to a point where there is much of ourselves to be discarded, to overcome and to re-understand. We could then try lifting ourselves beyond the swamp where the progress of capital and the deviation of pacification have driven us to. We could re-claim what is actually something obvious: we, as anarchists, have a revolutionary, and therefore insurrectional, perspective, which means projects that are going concretely towards that direction on a local as well as on an international level. During the last years, here and there, the urge was expressed for ‘the new, which keeps us waiting for it’ and ‘hypotheses which still have to be invented’, projectualities which can finally overcome the established borders. Maybe even something which could develop outside of the specific struggles we are undertaking (and probably will continue to undertake) in our own context. We are searching for something refreshing around the debate and agitation of our ideas in a general sense, those ideas which are in the end the base from which we depart: anarchy and social revolution.

What does this signify to us today? How do we talk about it? How can anarchy re-become a living, discussable, revolutionary possibility contrasting the current misery? If the classical model of insurrection and revolution is no longer up to date, then what is our perspective for a fundamental social upheaval today? What could a revolutionary practice correspond to today? What could be our qualitative contribution, being an anarchist minority, inside of the social conflictuality? In the every day situations as well as in times of unrest which will inevitably continue to burst out, with or without us. I think that the discussions and hypotheses, the agitation and projectualities concerning these matters should go beyond the specific context and be developed on an international level. The bookfair in Brussels 2011 could be a boost in that direction, but for this to happen, I think we first need to clear out some necessities…

About self-restraint and revolt

During the last decades, some kind of self-restraint was developed in the anti-authoritarian milieus, a certain attitude which gives us the impression one is not really taking his own ideas and revolutionary potential seriously. Nowadays, someone that trusts his own ideas and takes his responsibility in developing, for example concrete proposals to act, is often regarded with mistrust. The one that develops his own projectuality and dares to say that we could be able to provoke insurrections, is looked at in a sceptical way. This kind of events are deemed far away from us, they are deemed something dependant on ‘objective circumstances’. The sceptics are using these and other arguments to spread the idea of insurrection as being an abstract future event, and at the same time they forget that the preparation and experimentation of smaller and bigger insurrectionary attempts among anarchists has always been a method to propagate their revolutionary intentions. At least amongst the anarchists who were not able appease their desire for freedom with the ‘milieus libres’, or with waiting for a quantitative growth of some organisation. At least not amongst those who thoroughly believe that revolt is contagious, as well as solidarity. Those who, being oppressed amongst oppressed, wanted to spread their ideas in the struggle and didn’t want to wait for the moment that certain abstract ‘oppressed’ would start to fight.

Insurrectionary agitation is by far no invention of a few Italian comrades, who maybe put it a bit too much into a frame– not to say ideologized (however, it depends on whichever side you are looking at it, since it is not the formulation of a theory, but the decision of individuals who apply it in an ideological or schematical way, or not). The ‘anarchist insurrectionalism’ as it was theorized and put into practice in the Italy of the 80’s and 90’s sprung for the desire to keep the insurrectional practice alive in the times of social pacification. During times when an offensive anarchist discussion and movement was, to say it bluntly, absent in most other countries. This was its quality, which has been an inspiration to many comrades, especially during the last 10-15 years. But this is where we can find its limits today: the fact that these methods have been relatively and exclusively developed by some comrades in a specific context. A context with exact demands and difficulties, but which is too much unknown to me to allow me to speak about possible ‘mistakes’. A context which has nevertheless changed today. It would perhaps be more suitable to critically evaluate the experiences of ‘insurrectionalism’, instead of casting it all aside…

About language

To enable a more lively international discussion amongst anarchists, to me, it seems necessary to first of all find a language which corresponds to this need. A language which doesn’t intend to thin out the differences for the sake of a false unity, neither to sharpen them to the point of making all shared debate impossible. A language which avoids getting lost in metaphorical detours or rhetorical tussles, but which tries to express the essence in a clear way. It is only through this way that practicable hypotheses can develop. Also, only through this way we can give rise to projects which are alive not despite but thanks to the differences (differences which in the end exist between all individuals), by giving space to them inside of these projects, as conflicts. As some kind of engine for criticism and self-criticism. In the end what is important is that these conflicts are expressed in a clear way. Because it is a fact that too many of them are referring to personal stories, exploding in the rhetorical fight…

Then let’s talk about the language of our agitation. In times where the meaning of words is more than ever being deformed by power, we should maybe think well about the space left to interpretation in our pamphlets and posters, or about concepts difficult to understand or about vague concepts left open-ended. Too often we forget that for those who have not been occupied so much with subversive ideas, their references to words is mainly though the references given by power. If we want to chase away the deformations of power and find a proper language, I think this should be a simple and clear one. A language that calls a cat a cat, a language which can be shared amongst oppressed.

At this point as well I would like refer to Italy, where an anarchist agitation was present during the last decades which inspired many comrades in other countries, including their ‘way of writing’. Simply to pose the question; how far has the repression which has been tangible over the last years influenced the choice of words? For example the tendency to use metaphors instead of clearly pronouncing the things? And I am really not adverse to poetry, on the contrary, but isn’t the poetry of the poor often to be found exactly in its simplicity? What about the simple beauty of an Uncontrollable of the iron colon, the unrestrained directness of a Libertad, the non-biased intelligibility of a Malatesta?

Nothing to offer?

We have no program which allows passive membership; we have no patented solution that one could follow; there is no form, no practice, no way of living that we could praise as containing freedom as such. We don’t want to put forward the weapon as an ultimate way to salvation, as the trade-unionists do by promoting the strike, as the collectivists do by putting forward the assembly or those who glorify armed struggle. Because we think that it is the why and how that give the quality to the chosen means. By the same logic, we also don’t fight full of hope of reaching some expected, predefined situation. Because in this way we would be scarifying our life here and now, and we would inevitably end up disappointed. Freedom as an ideal is a tension, something to strive towards, but actually not something which you can reach, not something which you can build up and complete. Freedom is a social relation between individuals, in permanent construction; it is not a model, nor a scheme. Desire seeks for its expression according to the context. This is why indeed you could say that we have nothing to offer. Even if it was merely because a relation of offer and taker makes us sick. But the self-restraint mentioned in the beginning has developed some kind of caricature out of this completely correct conclusion: the mistrust for every confirmation of an idea, of a proposal, of a project, by immediately defining it as a political and converting logic.

This mistrust seems incompatible with the desire to bring our own dreams to reality, to confirm the our own ideas or to share them with others, to experiment with them, to develop them more deeply, to create new ideas and throw away others, all of this while walking on your own road and developing your revolutionary perspectives. No, the fact that we have nothing to offer doesn’t mean at all that we don’t have any proposals. Because as anarchists we have good proposals, probably the most promising that I know: to give joy to life and to demolish the walls which limit our imagination and perception of freedom. And yet these are proposals without guarantees, without certainties. They are proposals for which everyone who is inspired by them carries his own responsibility. Because it is only by this road that we can find accomplices, individuals who take the same direction as us, out of their own and free choice.

Let us therefore overcome this self-restraint and confirm with the self-confidence of revolutionaries that we have ideas to get rid of the misery to which the lives of so many people have been reduced. Ideas that are rich of countless experiences, in permanent development, ideas which we are all able to imagine.

Even when it is clear that the discourse in our specific struggles is a revolutionary discourse, I do think we need projects which can bring our ideas into circulation on a social level, in a relatively independent way from these struggles. Projects which give space to the question why and consequently to the question how we want to fight and life. Projects which do not only touch the ideas about an existence without domination, of the individual, of affinity, of self-organisation, of autonomy, solidarity, freedom, but which implement and deepen them again and again in different ways.

About revolutionary projectuality and internationalism

If a revolutionary is somebody who has his own projectuality, with a maybe a vague but a personal imagination of the steps to be taken that could be relevant for spreading subversive ideas and stimulating insurrectionary situations; if a revolutionary is not someone with a program in his pocket, but someone who has the impossible in his mind, who senses the possiblities step by step; if a revolutionary is someone who moves around a lot, who knows the international situations, the different conflicts and discussions, and yet, or maybe because of this knows his own context the best; if a revolutionary is someone who develops a perspective and in this perspective tries to realize subversive and offensive projects; if a revolutionary is someone that is driven by love for emancipatory ideas, by the dignity which is always blazing up during revolts and by the intuition of the destructive, creative strength which subverts (the only strength which can unchain a social revolution)- then it seems to me that today revolutionaries are hard to find.

It can be said that today there is no lack of unrest in many countries, but there is a lack of revolutionary practices. I don’t think that revolutionary practices signify following the ‘social movements’, neither the associating with the unrest which is anyways developing, but I do think it signifies being prepared for these unrests and having the capacity to act as revolutionaries, by which I mean to contribute in a practical way and in regards to the content, contributions that push them further.

This void is the unavoidable consequence of the self-restraint, and consequently of the lack of perspectives which has spread during the last decades. And, to say it once again, a perspective is not the same as a program; it is not a plan, but a certain imagination of the possibilities. This is why it is necessary to develop insurgent hypotheses which correspond to the current situation and which can feed this imagination. In those countries where the anarchist movement had only a little or even no continuity during the last decades, it seems there is a more fertile ground than in countries as Italy or Spain. In Italy or Spain the discussion was maybe uninterrupted, but it seems that today these discussions got stranded based on old conflicts or tended towards a thematic specialisation which seems to dominate anarchism. Therefore, it is important to mix the different contexts, experiences, considerations and perspectives. If we want to revive internationalism, we also have to revive the exchange, the travel and the encounter between comrades who try to develop a revolutionary projectuality. Such an internationalism wouldn’t need a formal expression, perhaps not even an accumulation of punctual moments of encounter during international gatherings (the need for this will make itself felt constantly), but especially a multiplication of projects and encounters across the borders, as well as a permanent mutual relations, in our practices and in our writings. It would mean the true elimination of the borders in our heads…

Proposal

My proposal would be to strive towards different anarchist journals, which would be only spread inside a country or language area. Journals which are written independently from each other, but which give importance to exchange, mutual relations and debate. The articles would be directed to the international anarchist movement as well as to the people on the street. It would not have the ambition of theoretical complexity, but would contain a simplicity and clearness in the articles. The weight would be put on the finding of a language for our ideas; on the attempts to describe and deepen them from all possible sides. Through analysis or hypotheses, with reason or with passion, through the every day events or through the big dreams, through the revolts of today or yesterday, through our words or through words that withered away a long time ago, or lastly through every instance in this rotten world where we perceive a spark of the life we wish. The ambition then would be to stimulate the thought of that completely other, of what freedom could be- to again spread a revolutionary perspective across all borders.

But let us remember that in times where internationalism was alive, there were diverse anarchist magazines circulating and feeding the debate in many countries. If today we take a look at the emptiness regarding magazines and the written word in general, if we have a look at the vagueness often present in our discussions, there is a conclusion which imposes itself. The conclusion that we probably first have to breach the inhibition for expressing our proper ideas in clear words. In this paragraph I have proposed to strive towards these kinds of magazines, meaning to start their development, but as well to give them the time they need for fertility. Because it seems to me that if they would only be the fruit of the few ‘writers of the movement’, they would be stripped of their potential…

∞

Each one of us has special physiognomies and capacities which distinguish him from his comrades in struggle. We are therefore not surprised to see that the revolutionaries are much divided on the question of the direction of the effort.

But we do not give the right to anyone to say: “Only our propaganda is the true one; aside from ours there is no salvation.” That’s an old left-over from authoritarianism, originated out of a true or false reason, which libertarians may not support.

Emile Henry

We can only feel an exiting exaltation of joy when looking around us and noticing that many are revolting against the current state of affairs. Those ones who, tired of continuing to swallow the usual daily oppression, try to revolt against oppression, can only stir up something inside of us towards we feel our desires closely connected. Now that the expected fires of revolt are spreading, we shouldn’t find ourselves unprepared. We should be able to analyse them in all of their aspects, capturing the courage and pride of the insurgents, as well as their limits and pushing on what links us together, as well as on what separates us from each other. Starting from our own desires, we can develop a how, when and where to be present, while keeping our aspirations close to ourselves. Creating the opportunity for developing revolutionary perspectives, discussing about them, giving ourselves the necessary time and space for it, brings us towards growth and enrichment. Knowing how to interpret the events, as well as how to go beyond them, posing the problem of how to not let the events getting exhausted in a short period of time, or how we can avoid going from an insurrection towards a civil war, can open up the gates for the imagination of our intervention in the existing struggles which are expanding. Enabling the continuation of these moments of intense but ephemeral rupture, as well in time as in space will be necessary. Avoiding, as often happens, a struggle to be framed up in her own specificity; making clear how a partial struggle can be an opportunity serving as a battering-ram towards the subversion of the existent and how we can only tend towards our goal by avoiding to stay stuck in the demands.
So to us it seems appropriate having a look on how certain anarchists have been taking up a position towards all of this, not to strand in a critique, but to create the possibility for reflection and a transgression of the limits.

The continual and ever more massive debarkation of men and women fleeing the misery or brutal repression in their countries is going to “slip in” a western balance which is already unstable. The revolutions of which they have been the creators could bring us to think that these people would bring in one way or another their “oeuvre of renewal” towards Europe, and we could give them a role of “revolutionary subject”, a role which they themselves probably don’t experience nor desire. The frustrated fears of making the revolution which has ever been desired, creates complex reasoning and incomprehensible theories at the cost of people who, already exhausted from a difficult life are probably looking for peace which they don’t find over here.

Certainly, not only looking for peace and that is why we have to keep in mind that this could open up ever more urgent perspectives of social conflict, but it is not said that this will take place the way we wish it to.
A search for a communication channel with this people has been set up, in all possible ways. In all possible ways there has been an attempt to present oneself as the privileged communication partners by, in the largest part of the cases, acting in the way of a sterile social work charity. There was the belief that the method of self-organisation was spread, but it all came down towards becoming the “managers” of these peoples needs and the creation illusions for oneself about the construction of relations which would bring them towards anti-authoritarianism. One is looking for a radicalism which escapes the swamp of immobilisation created by the relative welfare in which we are, despite ourselves, immersed.
The children of the Magreb revolutions were rising up for reasons they felt as theirs, to overthrow dictatorships which had been oppressing them for decades. They have destroyed prisons and courthouses, police stations and barracks. Over here, they will have difficulties fighting to overthrow the democratic orders, since they are unknown to them, they will more easily fight, as it has already happened several times, for a minimum of recognition and rights. Which is fully understandable.

At the margins of the democratic West, where a fata morgana of relative wealth is piling up millions of people in the outskirts, riots burst out at an increasingly regular pace. The youngsters of the outskirts of the big cities decide to express their anger, the diffuse chaos spreads, the big commercial chains get plundered, there is rioting with the police, destruction, arson, elastic movement in small groups which put fire to everything they meet on their way. But what do they want? They are certainly not struggling for a revolution which would subvert the existing social relations based on hierarchy and exclusion (their daily life feeds itself on hierarchy and roles as well). Their anger is an expression of unknown possibilities, of the frustration to feel that all possible inclusion is inaccessible. Their anger springs out of seeing the welfare glitter from so close, while systematically being kept away from it.
Those born under the wrong starry sky, those not accepted to transgress what is accepted, those being nothing but an anonymous number which doesn’t count, decide to express their anger and become uncontrollable.
We’ve seen them ‘playing’, and it fascinated us because it was not a joke. We wanted to join their arson feast and to go beyond it, but we know that we would be strangers, intruders. To uniform ourselves to one that is far from us, with his own cultural and religious ties, is absurd, as it would be equally absurd to ascribe our own perspectives to them.

The struggles we have come across that answer to a social State having troubles staying straight without contestation, have a partial character and tend towards preservation. You can notice many movements which want to preserve their work, others who want to preserve their right on education, many the right on a future, who want to ensure their pension, want to preserve a space which doesn’t kill too fast or a territory which is not destroyed too fast. Many social categories and groups with a territorial character are beginning to make an ever insisting noise. Exhausted labourers occupy the factories and go on the streets, a bit more timid in comparison to the students which give to themselves the gift of an uproar which seems difficult to be pushed back into the ranks of normality, ‘whipped up’ inhabitants which passionately resist to garbage and dumping grounds, others against the construction of highways and railways.
The democratic order doesn’t function the way it should, it doesn’t succeed in guaranteeing that minimum of welfare one was used to. The fear of loosing something pushes all, even the most loyal citizens, into taking the streets, being indignant and climbing on roofs.

In these times of constant change, everything has to be adapted, everything has to be rejuvenated. The current state of society has leaded us to such a widespread and powerful level of estrangement that it has infected the individuals into the deepest layers of the proper spirit. Our aspirations towards another life have become incomprehensible and absurd, which doesn’t let us an easy opportunity for communication. Some think that the anarchists have not been able to catch up with the times.
Others on the contrary think that the antiauthoritarian critique has gone too far, that we were walking on the road of our own theory and praxis, while we should walk on a road on which the masses can walk behind us. Easy, dynamic, accessible, and this in order to gain recognition and credibility, this is how the anarchists have let themselves been taken by the logic of the quantities. There have been too many who consider an intervention in the social movements as a campaign locked up in a specificity which more easily brings us to a massive understanding and a tangible victory. Too many have camouflaged themselves in an attempt towards modesty, abandoning the anarchist content for something more circumscribed and directed, depending on the circumstances. By being a bit more tolerant, at the cost of a too much burning detail, there have been those who thought they could lead or integrate the partial and revendicative struggles. More and more you can notice being said that we can now do with many what we were not able to do with only a few. Believing it is possible to quiet down the separations and deeper aspirations, they have convinced themselves that the form suffices for expressing the radicalism of a struggle and that it is the number which strengthens the struggle, in the illusion of consensus. Things have to happen, too many things have to happen- as is said today- we cannot loose ourselves in a pointless discussion which only creates separations. Now it’s the time for being together.
Affinity, which was in the past regarded to be fundamental in organizing the acting, is now being looked at as a curious tinsel, as something which resembles an extravagant decoration, beautiful to look at, but of few value. Now that the waters are finally beginning to stir and announce a possible storm, everything which could be seen as a obstacle for the agreement with the revolutionary subject of service is put aside or stored at the attic. You will certainly not find a space where the assembly strives towards a common language and a sharing of intentions. There where the majority has all of the reasons and the individual doesn’t have any. Where the consensus irreparably clashes into the desire.
Individualism has become synonymous to loneliness, to autism for which the incapacity to make one understood or only to just led hear of himself is to be blamed. Our critique has become a sign of closeness, expression of an extreme intransigence against those we so called should have tolerated, or learned to conquer.
To us, regarding oneself as unique is not irreconcilable with struggling together, driven by freedom. We don’t want to wait until the masses have “been made conscious”, and even less do we want to wait for permission and for the postulated moments to criticize and act. When we associate ourselves to someone else, it can not be because of opportunism, loneliness or a feeling of desperation, but out of a true corresponding of method and goal. Else we prefer continuing our road, which might be longer and lonelier, but which is truly the road of our revolution.
We don’t want to separate content from practice, because we think the method should be an expression of the world we desire, a world free of authority, without delegation, without concession, without compromise, but a world of individuals who can and want to determine themselves. We are convinced that we don’t need to direct or to guide anyone, we are the messengers of our own voices, promoters of our tensions which are difficult to reconcile with agreements, not concerned about the number and the consensus, who like to think that we meet those who stand close to us because of their will to subvert the existent. Not by obsessively looking out for these people, but by a mutual movement we will meet each other and become able to touch our dreams. We want to be able to hit the system of domination, concerned about the discovery of its nerve centre, using every vulnerability and disruption of her normal management. Indeed, we can profit from the sparks, we can warm ourselves to the fire of joy, but we want more and this will only happen if we use our powers to make it happen.

Two individuals outside of it.

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

A difficult subject, yes. A subject that can rapidly turn towards a polemic, sterile or otherwise. But that is not the goal. Neither is this an existential questioning, a “Who are we”, or a “Who am I”. I want to discuss about the anarchist movement the way I know it, that means the movement of today, although I can imagine that these mechanisms apply to other times or perhaps outside the anarchist movement. There are a lot of things to say, but I would like particularly to talk about the dynamics that uphold the relationships inside this movement, between each other, across language and geographical barriers. However I would not like these words to be taken for something they are not, in fact in whatever I talk about I include myself, and the mechanisms that I describe here, I have produced and reproduced myself. The will to write these lines comes from numerous discussions with anarchists from here and elsewhere, in different contexts, who also feel the need to bring up these questions amongst ourselves, to discuss them openly and without much formality. Of course I don’t pretend to represent these comrades, because I start in the first place from myself.

This text is frustrating, it troubles me. I hope nonetheless that by discussing these taboos, they don’t become a taboo itself, or a tool for self-castigation. I also hope, that on the occasion of these encounters around the subversive book, this contribution will be the moment to think about these questions, that are according to me, indispensable for the development of our ideas and for the encounter with other uncontrollables.

First of all, we don’t have to deceive ourselves, the anarchist movement is truly a movement, maybe a bit crippled, but whatever. We can, most of us, put in the centre the question of the individuality and of the uniqueness of each individual, that will never prevent the entity bigger than the individual, the movement, from substituting itself for the individual will and for the desires that belong to everyone inside the movement. Actually, every social group has its margins, it’s the condition sine qua non of its development, of its own self limitations. Since to be able to define ourselves, we also have to say what we are not and what we resemble. From there, the expression of originality in individuals and affinity groups is often normalised to fit into a mould, a sort of common binding. Until this normalisation no longer works, as in every social group, it is followed by contempt or ostracism.

That’s how automations fall into place and are no longer questioned. “It’s like that”, “it’s not the right moment”, “it has always been like that”. These mechanisms give the power to a handful of guardians the passing on of this sacred formula, holders of the ultimate truth and are generally not so enthusiastic to put any of this into question, despite the evaluation that hindsight allows us, which attest to decades of undisputed failures. I clearly said power and I add forced centralisation. The organization through affinity, which I agree with, has the fault of sometimes being badly distributed, to give too much power to certain individuals that have more social relations, and sometimes more seniority. We have to go through them, him or her, in order to organise, to meet other anarchists, basically for everything.

We know that power at the same time gives anxiety and is seductive, it attracts and disgusts at once. I don’t talk about institutional power but about relations of power between individuals. When one starts to acquire a bit of power, one wants always more. The formula is simple and basic, it occurs among anarchist, even though we are sceptic of these topics, simply through playing with qualities such as admiration and “charisma”. We start to admire the activity of anarchists in this or that country for quantitative or exotic reasons, and so we are locking ourselves up in the pursuit of models: “doing as in Greece” etc. We start to admire the prose and the charisma of this or that comrade (those who are reading this text can certainly think of a comrade that has more social value inside the movement than the others). This is where power relations are born, creating classes inside the movement, through rhetoric, through charm, or through politics. Actually, the movement becomes a place favourite to persons who know exactly what they want but who hide behind rhetorical artifices, some questions and some discussions lead to imagine the possibility of an opening that in reality is not there, because in reality “it’s like that, and that’s all”.

Actually, these mechanisms create leaders, who end up locally centralising the activities of the movement. Those who turn away from this centralization have to in one way or another justify their absence and give plausible arguments for one’s disagreement or non-presence at this or that cornerstone event of the movement, this goes for ideas as well as places (an assembly, a space, a specific struggle). The voluntary non-participation of these holy collective moments has to be justified, and not the opposite, at the risk of coming off as “arrogant”. Thus, without the need of a recognized authority, the multiplicity of the ideas of the individuals is limited to the dimensions of mostly the “charismatic” comrade(s). These mechanisms are inseparable from banishment; against those who are not there where one has to be, in this struggle, in that place, in this assembly, who are thus of course “wankers”, “who don’t give a shit”, “petit-bourgeoises” etc. this seems to develop a sort of point system, not so far from parole conditions. Mechanisms that can be found in recent struggles a bit everywhere, from Val Susa to the struggle of Tunisian clandestines in Paris or the struggle against foreign detention centres throughout Europe, or even “international solidarity” when it becomes blackmail.

I’ve seen many comrades give up, or simply drop out because of these mechanisms. This certainly demonstrates a lack of persistence and of will to create the circumstances one wants in their life, and sometimes I hold it against them. But I cannot completely hold it against them the fact that they give up because often the strength and the persistence are on the side of those who hold the power, since in any way that is what one needs to have and keep it.

To tell the truth, I think that I’m not getting much further by discussing about something that we all clearly see inside the movement: the roles, those damn roles. At some point we have all found ourselves confined in roles within our groups. The handyman, the writer, the social butterfly, the technician, the theorist, the idiot, the intelligent one, the one that does layouts, the one that puts up the posters, the graffer, the kamikaze, the paranoid, the shy one, the distracted, the radical, the moderator, the artist, all with a level more or less echoing professionalism. What is really important, is to get out of it.

Nonetheless, I don’t want to deny or level out the differences of everyone, every individual is animated by different tendencies, passions and tastes, but one thing is sure, we don’t have to leave the monopoly of all the respected attributes to one or some individuals inside a group, because it’s the easiest way to create a leader, sometimes even without their consent. And we know, it’s been said over and over a thousand times, there are only masters because there are slaves who obey them.

So we have to distrust within our groups, as well as in the relations between groups, everything that encourages “prestige” or “merit”. The elders are not the most respectable, prison doesn’t make comrades more interesting, the quality of a comrade is not measurable by the number of broken windows… It just isn’t quantifiable in any way. Prestige is hierarchy, and hierarchy is power. We shouldn’t be afraid to expose our fears and doubts, we don’t have to be intimidated by dogmas. It is not because a comrade is better in exposing his certainties rather someone else talks more about his doubts that the former has the truth on his side. First of all because truth doesn’t exist, but also because rhetoric only shows the capacity to persuade and not to convince.

Those who are more used to expose their positions, and here I include myself, have thus a responsibility if they don’t want to take power. Inside the anarchist movement, the mechanisms of intellectual authority have to be fought as much by those who are able to produce it as by those who are able to reproduce it.

An anarchist without the habit of deconstruction

The revolutionary question is a clear line of rupture in the heart of the international anarchist movement, in some places it cuts deeper than in others. On the one hand there is THE revolution, the mirror image of a faraway oasis, which will kill us of thirst in the desert before reaching it in some concrete form. This vision regards revolution as an event to quietly expect, because it anyhow doesn’t depend on our actions, but depends fully on the awakening of the masses. This kind of revolutionaries never regard the circumstances as right for revolution, and view all sort of attacks that are not “massive” as the product of an out of place impatience and an avant-gardism that puts itself in words as well as in deeds in the place of the true revolutionary subjects, which are not revolutionaries…

On the other side there is the basic anti-revolutionism which denounces the revolutionaries by stating that they are only waiting, tempering with the revolt, stopping those which wish to live anarchy here and now. The revolution as a concrete event is in a certain way a miracle on which one hopes, but which will never take place, a faraway paradise.

Unfortunately, due to the era in which we are living, there are apocalyptic, even chiliastic perspectives developed from all sides, and contrary to the faraway past, these perspectives are not only to be found back in the midst of mystics, conspirators or religious fanatics. Today the question of “the end of the world” is haunting the discussions in a more or less serious way. The end of the world in 2012, judgement day, the return of the messiah, the third eye and other mystic religious crap is competing on the eschatological stage with the frightening perspective of a nuclear Holocaust or a complete world- or civil war. But somewhere on this stage, there is the idea walking around that the system will collapse out of itself, under the weight of its abuses. The unavoidable collapse of capitalism by the Marxist revisited at the edge of the 21^st century and its economic, social and ecological “crises”. A hypothetical collapse accompanied by hope for it as well as by fear. Off course, this hypothesis seems little serious to me, seen the fact that capitalism progresses through its history from crisis to crisis, each time strengthened, reform after reform.

This vision on the revolution which is set into action on its own, without us, without me and in a certain way under the impulse of the self-destructive old world, offers nothing but the immediate perspective of sitting and waiting for it. The projection of our desires into an unavoidable future enables us to accept the existent in an easier way. And if Marx’ belief in the unavoidability of communism lead him, him and his disciples, to regard industrialisation and capitalist exploitation as necessary steps towards the introduction of communism; the ideology of the unavoidable collapse ends forcibly justifying the praxis carried out as “a social self-defence”, an answer against the state. Furthermore it validates the escape from the reality that we are facing on a daily basis in a very concretely.

Of course, this vision on the old world which would collapse under its own weight makes the insurrectional necessity redundant, making place for nothing but expectancy, defence. In one way, this will concretise itself in, to use a fashionable term, “social self-defence” (squats, scenes, lifestyles, community, survival…), or through a reactionary preservation of “the planet” to facilitate a return towards a previous condition (but which one?), or again somewhere else one will specialize in the defence of the “indigenous people” or in anti-repression projects, uniquely conditioned by the enemy, and so on. In any case there is no need whatsoever to attack the State or capitalist structures, or the mechanisms of domination which define human relationships, since they propel towards the collapse, as by magic.

In the end, these extremely prickly debates about the partisans of the unavoidable collapse of the system don’t really interest me, whether it they are “communisateurs”¹ or anarchists. This is to say, whatever its conclusion may be, it will not change my point of view. If capitalism truly must collapse on its own, it has no influence on the fact that I will in no way await this event in a patient way, continue to suffer this miserable mediocre life offered by this expectation.

I am an anarchist and a revolutionary, but I do not believe that THE revolution will take place, not today nor tomorrow. Yet, I strive towards the revolution, that is to say I strive towards directing my actions and my thoughts towards a total subversion of this world, and a total rupture with the past. This is how I am revolutionary, not out of opportunism, and I think there is nothing worse than those who say they are revolutionary because they are animated by the belief that they will still live the revolution as a concrete event. No, being revolutionary means one plants the seeds of another world inside his concrete activities and theoretical production, so that the means and the ends coincide.

We cannot deny that our life as well as the condition of the current world is horrible. De facto, seen the current condition of humankind, a radical subversion freeing this world from all authority seems almost unimaginable to me. We can even affirm that today the perspective of a generalized insurrection contains as much hope as fear. In a world in which the rancid ideologies such as racism, the identitarian and communautarists mechanisms, the thirst for power, the greed for money, the consumerism, the economic or social competition or the sexism are devouring each other, we can state that the insurrection, next to the elements in which we can recognize ourselves and can join in, will as well contain a bunch of tragic and unbearable events with it.

This being said, it seems to me even more unsuited and estranged from reality to talk about an anarchist revolution. Because this would implicate the imagination of a revolution of millions of anarchists, in some way the old dream of the CNT, which, if respectable on the level of the dream, one cannot use a pipe dream as a pretext for passivity and expectation. If there is a revolution or an insurrection, the anarchists will not be standing on the sidelines, that’s for sure. Trying to pull the events towards a criticism on authority in itself, to push aside the negative impulses belonging to this world without playing the role of the cops, but as well to give pleasure to oneself in satisfying the desire for revenge which has been accumulating blow after blow, a revenge towards the state and the economy as well as towards the society.

So according to me, being revolutionary signifies being driven by a tension towards something else. A tension that becomes concrete here and now, every day, in the smallest deed of war. It is the projectual interweaving in every deed, even the most insignificant, which is carried by the revolutionary, dedicated to the identification of this world as being an obstacle towards the revolutionary project. In a way it is a responsibility as well, because it seems unavoidable to me that one puts himself at risk in the struggle. To openly declare oneself a revolutionary brings about its share of risks and dangers. We cannot expect that society, after having openly declared our conflict against it, will in turn not take its revenge on us, by means of the state repression or otherwise. Exactly as it is in life, these issues are much more subtle than such simplistic formulas.

So this world, far from the point of destroying itself, must be destroyed, this is the oeuvre of the revolutionary, it cannot be avoided. As someone else already said, if the question is not about “making the revolution”, it will be about “how to avoid it?”.

Another revolutionary without revolution

I’ve been thinking for quite some time now, to write about certain topics, and after reading some texts, it seems to me that the issue I want to write about is a sentiment shared by other companions.

I would like to speak about a need that I have always felt, a need that not only has never been soothed, but on the contrary has been occupying more and more space in my reflections during the last times: I’m talking about Utopia. This idea haunts me with a new and strong persistence, which might be because its quest has slowly but inexorably become less obsessive in the hearts of what we can generically define as the anarchist movement. At least this is my impression.

Maybe disillusioned from the years which are now perceived as an accumulation of failures, or maybe fatigued by the repeated blows (more in a moral than in a physical sense) which remain constant possibility when you are in struggle, all of this to then be told that anyways we will never realize our wildest dreams; it seems to me there is a certain tendency to settle for less: better to win a small struggle to boost your morale than to put up with another failure while aiming at the ultimate victory. Better to solace a part of this miserable existence rather than to risk never improving anything during our attempt to permanently overturn it. The constant push to improve our adaptation to the situations we are confronted with, is superseding the tension which would not allow us to ever adapt; the frenzy and anxiety to do something, be active and feel alive, is risking to become a substitute for the analysis and critique necessary to develop our own projectuality. We then end up doing like the others and talking like the others, because we think that the use of another language would make us incomprehensible, risking remaining isolated. We all participate in the same struggles and we also do the things in the exact same way, using the same means which on the long run are sterilizing and immobilizing us, to then discover that we are all too often just chasing what the anarchist movement used to be; we have aborted our creative capacities, we have choked the imagination necessary to pursue the straggles we had embarked on…

What about those struggles then? As means to reach something wider and bigger these struggles risk to become an end at itself, and this is the road on which we loose sight of Utopia. The occasions on which I talk with comrades about bigger dreams become more and more rare. I am not referring to those daydreams that we put aside once we’re done fantasizing, but about a sublime aspiration to shoot for, something to strive towards to try to realize. To me, Utopia is not an island in never never land, but something which pushes the blood towards the heart and brain, an idea which never allows truce; it is the tension which pushes me to act and at the same time the consciousness which enables me to overcome fear. The Utopia is one of the reasons for which I am anarchist, because it is the only thing which offers me the possibility to struggle, not only for a new world, but for something that has never been realized before. This is my Utopia: the attempt to realize something that has never been achieved before, the strife towards a world that is not this one, but neither the one of some thousand years ago. Something we can only try through an insurrectionary rupture, a moment which is nothing more than the opening of a possibility, which lets me look into a deep abyss and feel vertigo, leaving open the possibility that in its depths could be something completely fascinating as something absolutely terrible. In short, a leap into the unknown without knowing beforehand what the society I desire has to look like, but starting from what I don’t desire.

Thinking the unthinkable, as the preliminary condition to attempt the impossible.

“He who starts thinking about the end when he’s just at the beginning, he who needs the feeling of security to reach the end even before starting, he will never reach it.”

A. Libertad

Without precedents. This is the characteristic of the times we are living through full of wonder, anxiety, dismay, hope. Not to say that in the past history has not known wars, insurrections or plunging economies. However, with the sense of the later and with the proper amount of security distance, it has always been easy to pick out the different sides in play, their reasons and the influence of the protagonists on the unfolding of a chain of events. The last two centuries have provided us with the knowledge from which to draw, have engraved our certainties and our doubts, have laid out the guide that we use in our daily acts. But the third millenium opened immediately on a very unpredictable note.

On the morning of September 11, upon waking up, who would have thought that a few hours later the world would never be the same again? Ten years have passed since then which have repeatedly destroyed all our consolidated benchmarks one after the other. Until we come to today with one European country teetering between reaction and revolution (Greece), another one famous for its stolidness put to the sword (England), others on the verge of economic collapse (Italy, Spain, Portugal and Ireland), distant regimes that seemed eternal crumbling in a few weeks (Tunisia, Egypt, Lybia), others forced to survive a vicious repression against its own people (Syria); the worldwide super-power itself, the United States, master of this planet, finds itself dealing with a failing economy.

Not to even mention those wars that should have been brief, but that are still ongoing (Iraq and Afghanistan), of the conflicts that seemed to have died down, but that have revived (Israel and Palestine), mass migrations that wreak havoc (on one side and the other) on the way of life of millions of people, of the (un)natural disasters that determine not only important environmental shifts, but also political and social changes. Up until the present daily life, the one that we drag behind us day after day, dealing with lack of alienating work that is necessary for getting money that is not enough, in any case, to buy things that are not worth anything… everything contributes to spreading the consciousness that this present does not have a future.

The world as we know it, the only one of which we have had direct experience, is crumbling before our eyes. It is not important here to establish whether its downfall is the result of a poor administration of power or of social movements, whether its an old self-fulfilling prophecy or a surprising novelty. It even has little relevance to know whether it is real and material or just the latest virtual trick. It is certain that it is perceived, felt. And this, for those who want to turn this world upside down is nothing but good news. It is not necessary anymore to try to open the cracks in the wall of the consensus that structures social order: that wall is already falling to pieces. Nothing is the same as before. However the situation that has emerged, and that theoretically should only evoke enthusiasm on our side, is practically mostly bringing bewilderment. Born and raised in the last century, how can we be contemporary and topical? The language, the formulas of interpretation that we are used to, seem to be more and more useless and become obsolete. We are running the risk of becoming historical artifacts that will end up collecting dust in museums.

This is why a broadened confrontation is now more than ever necessary and urgent. Unimmaginable possibilities are opening up right in front of us. To be able to seize them we don’t need to learn the lesson of the day by heart, but nor do we need to just throw ourselves into pure chance, let alone make use of some vague ideological fashion. Meeting, discussing, exchanging your own ideas in view of… (yeah, in view of what?), becomes all the more vital.

A new world?

We start thinking of some famous words of Buenaventura Durruti. We are not afraid of the ruins, because a new world is already being born in our hearts. So let’s start from there. In the old continent the collapse of this world tends to provoke reactions with nihilist or citizenist tones, this is because there is no new world in the heart of the human beings that are inhabiting it. In North Africa the rebels fought with courage and determinations, also because they still have a hope that animates them. We know that the myth of democracy is a lie and we repeat (ourselves) that in their mouths it is only an excuse to cause a ruckus.

Whether it’s a reason or an excuse, it’s pointless to deny the fact that they need that myth, that dream that pushes them to destroy what stands in the way of its realization. All revolutions have needed a dream powerful and intoxicating enough to excite the people and push them to action. And this dream has always been something other than the miserable concessions of the existent. The direct democracy invoked by the Enragés was unfathomable before 1789, as was the Commune before 1871, or the Soviet before 1917, or Collectivity before 1936…

But today, here in the west, what is the dream? The only utopia that stays untouched (even in a certain sense, as bad as it is to say out loud, also thanks to the defeat of the Spanish revolution) is anarchy, a world without power relations. Even so, even among anarchist we notice a certain reluctance to support it, an embarrassment of those who do not want to appear too impractical, too unrealistic. And furthermore to whom do we address ourselves? Carried by the irresistible push of technological development, the last decades have seen the erosion of all meaning, the distorision of all words, the generalization of aphasia. The Babylon of the free market is also the tower of Babel of the inability to communicate.

This has provoked the disapearence, not of the so-called social aspect, but more of its awareness. Today’s social struggles are not carried out by exploited that want to put an end to their exploitation (and unfortunately they still trust politicians ready to betray them) but of integrated citizens that only want a more authentic democracy. Meanwhile the revolts that suddenly explode in our corner of the world are usually empty of content, don’t formulate demands, don’t indicate prospects, are only explosions of rage. This tendency, very visible in Europe has pushed the biggest part of the anarchist movement to divide, and to take two apparently opposing roads, that in reality mirroring each other.

Once all the hope in our hearts has been subdued, the eyes of many comrades who don’t intend to resign themselves, a dry, brutal, inevitable alternative is being outlined. Either to give up any attempt to involve masses that show themselves to be more and more alienated and transform social war into a private war between anarchists and the State (armed struggleism). Or to pursue this involvement to the point that one adapts to the “dynamics” of the masses, taking over its demands and transforming social war into a contest between civil society and the state (citizenism). We can’t help making the observation that the starting point of these two roads is the same: the realization that the reality around us does not allow for a revolutionary intervention like the one practiced or even hoped for in the last century.

Let’s be clear, both of these hypothesis put forward answers to real, concrete needs, which were never called into question. It is just that the attempt to carve into the surrounding reality has been separated from the methods, so that the different ways of struggle are no longer complementary, but have polarized into two equally political alternatives: on the one hand an intentionally acritical participation in “popular struggles”, on the other hand the formation of a specific organization that claims various attacks against power. Now, it’s precicely the penetration of politics and its calculations into a movement that was hostile to them that is one of the main causes of the present-day “depression” of many comrades. And the more politics is revealed to be “winning”, thanks to an unscrupulous use of various self promotional tactics, the more one cannot do without it.

Which road to take?

The anarcho-citizenism has managed to lure some comrades into certain mass situations, allowing them to obtain some visibility and approval… but at what price? As long as you give up being an anarchist, learn to disguise or silence your thoughts, to bear the unbearable. This is a “victory” which is unable to hide the dismal opportunism that made it possible in the first place, which succeeded in an achievement once unthinkable: making many comrades actually disdain the very idea of intervening in social struggle, intervention that is now considered synonymous with compromise. How surprising is this, after we have seen comrades organizing conferences with reformists and presenting lists of signatures to the authorities? Why should this be shocking, after we have seen them giving support to a heavier circulation of goods while scolding the self-professed pacifists for not properly doing their institutional duty? Why complain, after we have seen them working hand in hand with priests and stalinists? Not only that, but this strictly political interpretation of social struggle is passed off as a truth acquired through un indisputable historical experience. “sharing or State”- is the pathetic decree that is imposed these days to avoid facing problems.

Anyway, faced with the spread of rage, with the increasing outbursts of protests, with the opening of new prospects, it is absurd to deprive ourselves of the possibility to intervening in wider contexts only because we are deafened by the noisy marketing of some petty movement leaders. Therefore, instead of shuddering in the face of the inevitable limitations of social struggles, we should attempt to fight within them as well, being certain and making it clear that the social aspect of a struggle is enriched by its qualitative dimension, not its quanititative one. A few comrades who sabotage the building sites for the TAV, for example, are conducting a social struggle on their own terms, since the High Speed Trains are a problem that affects eveyone without distinction. Many comrades that demonstrated for the abolition of life sentences, to give another example, carry out a political struggle on someone else’s terms, since life inprison without the possibility of parole is a problem that concerns very few and that can only find a abolitionist solution on the legislative level.

Therefore, it’s not that we want to stay away from social struggles. We intend to stay away from the politicians that are infesting them, including anarchists.

Anarcho-armed-struggleism, on their hand, although it has been able to directly strike the enemy more often and with better results (like in Greece or in Latin America), tends to reduce social subversion to a purely military practice, a conflict between us and them. Look at the fact that most of these actions are a direct answer to a repressive operation. Instead of continuing and expanding the struggle against domination in all of its forms, this form of solidarity is reduced to the defense of your own little garden: anarchists attack the State that just arrested some comrades, the State reacts by arresting other anarchists, which then react by attacking the state, which then reacts by attacking other anarchists, who then… This creates a vicious circle which becomes even less enticing, especially when embellished by that sad retoric that praises martyrs and sacrifice.

For the majority of people it is not a struggle that aims at subverting an unbearable existence, but a duel between a few individual rebels and the State. The fact that this conflict sometimes ends up on the front page of newspapers does not make it interesting, but in any case it is perceived as a private affair and as such can only attract spectators. Also because, and this is the worst part, armed-struggleism turns the attack on structures and on those responsible for domination into a characteristic of specific organizations rather than of an entire movement. And in no way is this a natural choice. It is an arbitrary choice. As most of the history of the anarchist movement can prove, “propaganda by the deed” can very well be the work of an entire movement. This happens when the action stays anonymous, without anyone claiming its ownership. When an action does not belong to anyone specific, it can belong to everyone. But when you make the effort to claim it, to brand it with your mark, it is because you want to make it clear to the world that that action belongs to someone.

Despite appearences, citizenism and armed-struggleism look like and feed each other. The openness to compromises of the first and the closure of identity of the second, and vice versa. The citizenist who swears on his own radicality while holding hands with a politician is not that different from the armed-struggleist who swears on his own informality while building an organization with acronym and program. The first seeks consensus of the masses, and therefore does not disdain the microphones of journalists. The second disdains the masses, but looks for the flashes from the media. Both in their own way seek visibility.

We consider immensly more attractive a movement that is anonymous and informal- an autonomous anarchist movement, as it was once called before journalists and magistrates distorted it- which does not renounce its difference from the world that surrounds it. But which also does not renounce the possibility of subverting it, which does not accept the extinguishing of the flame in our hearts for the new world that is not afraid of the ruins. Utopia is the only antidote against citizenism and against nihilism. We live like guests, undesirable and undesired, in this old decrepit world. Its agony does not move us, we are inclined more than ever on speeding up its disappearence.

Perspectives

How many times do we need to see our dreams shattered before we stop dreaming? How many times do we need to feel our own trust shattered before we start distrusting everyone? How many times do we need to see our ideas renounced before we just settle for some ever-changing opinions? How many times do we need to have our thoughts banalized before we renounce to any form of communication? There are those who continue to ask themselves these questions, hoping in their own hearts to never find an answer. We do. Stubborn or just plain stupid, untimely or just late, we find it intolerable to sink into melancholy at the exact moment when new and fascinating possibilities are opening up.

But- we need to aknowledge this- it is not subversive propaganda, it is not the formation of a revolutionary organization that gets rebels to take to the streets. It is the misery, material and emotional, of this existence that we drag on in our daily lives. If that was true in the past, it is even moreso today, when over the hills we cannot even catch a glimpse of the sun of the new days, but rather the deep night of primal chaos. In the face of this darkness militants will continue to stay secluded in their own cloisters for fear of being taken for trivial scoundrels, while intellectuals will continue to question themselves on the crisis of representationalism. However there is nothing to condemn or praise about modern struggles, the ones which send our own habitual compasses out of whack.

Everything needs to be taken on.

For decades we have remained practically immobile in the stagnating waters of social pacification, waiting for the winds that might to carry us towards our respective destinatons. Our hopes and expectations have been disappointed, it is not just a breeze that is rising. On the horizon we can make out a black sky that promises only a storm. And now? What do we want to do? Do we lower the sails and throw down the anchor, determined to stay still because the risk of sinking is too high, or do we reinforce the ship and let loose the moorings?

The fact that the riots that spontaniously break out are limited by time and substance is a false problem. When they are, this is because of the absence of those who could contribute to prolonging them and raising them. Even when they are the discharge of the fever of a sick social body, the fact remains that they include the lowering of the immune defences able to facilitate the insurgence of the fatal infection that we hope for. Even if they are the short recess before a test, the fact remains that it is up to us to sabotage the school bell. And if those who take part in this without any revolutionary aspirations, but more out of rancor due to their social marginalization than out of the refusal of institutional integration, this has also very little importance.

What makes these uprisings desirable is the suspension of normality which they manage to impose, an indispensable premise for any attempt to transform reality. It is not about sharing the taste of those who fight against the police, nor of trying to anthropologize it, chasing it with sacred subversive texts in hand while going to the assault of vile merchandise. It’s about throwing oneself into the chaos that is being created- even if for banal reasons, even in a guided way- and attempting to shake up, stop, slow down and prevent any return to the predefined order. This means snatching precious time to experiment, propagate and consolidate the disorder of desires.

This is why, in light of the new hotbeds that are igniting and with the atmosphere that is breathing in Europe, it becomes more and more important for us not not let ourselves be found unprepared. Not planning our actions so as to protect ourselves against the unknown, nor searching for complicity where it cannot be found so that we end up becoming the unknowing social workers of our own destiny. Without guarantees, without certainty, without fear of what is undecipherable. However, in the eventuality, which is not even so far out, that a fire might break out under our house, it is best to have a more or less clear idea of where to go and what to do, while we keep examining how to do it and why.

“There is no organization that is above my individual freedom… and in any case it is not my revolution when i can’t dance.”

When we think of books which are subversive, books about juvenile rebellion found in any bookshop in a big city are not the ones that come to mind. Neither do we think of those more or less critical books which come out of our close circles or which are born from the thinking-heads in universities. What comes to mind are examples such as the one given by Severino Di Giovanni, captured on the 29^th of January in 1931 while coming out of a typesetter’s workshop which he had visited in relation to the master copy for a book by Reclus. Despite having been the most wanted person in Argentina during the previous four years due to various expropriations, attacks and his agitation activity, he risked his freedom and his life in order to obtain the master copy he needed. The printing works were under surveillance but it was worth taking the risk once again for a new book. A few months earlier he had achieved his goal of setting up his own press for printing books, pamphlets and newspapers, using the money obtained from a recent expropriation, although only a part of it because most of the money was used in solidarity with imprisoned comrades.

We also think of Jean-Marc Rouillan, Oriol Solé and other comrades who robbed banks and expropriated printing machines during the early Seventies in order to obtain all that was needed so as to be able to print books in Toulouse and smuggle them over the border to Barcelona and other regions of the Spanish state.

Or, perhaps one of the most inspiring examples, we think of the young anarchists from the city of Bialystok who during the first few years of the 20^th century, apart from terrorizing the bourgeoisie and the gendarmes, dedicated a great deal of their energy and means to translating, printing and transporting written material. In 1905, they expropriated 330 kilograms of typographic equipment in order to set up Anarjiya, Russia’s first anarchist printing works: a clandestine press for their publications and books. Over time, many Russian anarchists imitated the gesture, most of them risking going to prison, getting exiled, being condemned to forced labour or death.

Printing, transporting and disseminating books was, for many anarchists around the world, just as dangerous as carrying arms or explosives: partly they were arms and, moreover, they were very powerful arms.

These are the examples which come to mind, amongst others… such as the example of the fighters who, escaping from repression, set up a printing press in a cave in the Ural Mountains. All of these are only a few examples of a close relationship between books and subversion. They are inspiring examples not only because the books —most of which were considered dangerous or simply forbidden— were printed and disseminated in a clandestine manner, breaking all the prohibitions and moving away from any type of consumer logic from which today, it seems, there is no escape; but also because everything related to the development of these publishing projects, the way in which the machines and ideas were put into motion, the hopes and the fighting spirit, seem to belong to another world. But not entirely.

Many of us involved in current publishing projects and printing collectives, and some magazines and newspapers, feel that we are motivated by this spirit which in days gone by was abundant, and that these are but a few examples out of many. Trying not to slide into —but also trying to dynamite— processes related to production/consumption, a profit logic, relations based on commerce and work, we try to bring back that subversive spirit because a radical message must be contained within a form of dissemination which lives up to the level of that message.

We understand that there are projects related to the publishing and distribution of anarchist books which have subsistence aims, projects which see and live this activity as a modest way of earning a living. This is something we can partly understand, taking into account the shit jobs and ways of living within the framework of the system which are imposed upon us. But they should also bear in mind that for those of us who search for different ways of living, within which our lives and struggles are totally related to our everyday realities and are far from relationships of production and consumption, the idea of working with something which for us is a fighting tool —yet another weapon in this social war— is not something we are able to get our heads around.

Amongst our objectives there is the dissemination (as widespread and as affordable as possible) of ideas, proposals, visions and interpretations coming from a radical point of view. And we believe that this must be done through a rupture —as radical as possible— with regards to the forms that capitalism offers us for this task. It is due to this that we see as important the rejection of all commercial distribution (which actually pushes up the prices), the logic of selling books at a price 10 times the cost of printing, the big bookshop cult, the use of control and numeration codes —whether it be for commercial purposes or for classification (bar codes, ISBN, etc.)—, the rights of the authors (copyright, left or whatever), etc.; and we see as something necessary the promotion of more direct ways of distribution through distros which handle revolutionary material, the support for anarchist printing works projects, the assumption that our material is there to be given life to and to be reproduced as best wished, the incitement of greater autonomy for our projects with regards to the translation, writing, page makeup, graphic design, distribution and —if possible— printing, and also the total support for other related projects, such as social libraries, libraries for prisoners, etc.

Perhaps to some it may all sound pretentious and to others basic, but for us it is important to also talk about these things when discussing books and their subversive potential.

Bardo, August 2011

You can find the printable version of the textes here (.pdf).
(update 11.10.2011)