It all began a long time ago but our story leaps the intervening periods and begins in fact in the spring of 1975. It had been a bloody spring. Fascists and police had killed militants belonging to the left. Practically overnight the situation was radicalised. In this moment of political and ideological stasis, the political and ideological struggles in the late 1960s and early 1970s were reaping their predictable rewards.

However, an event occurred (one amongst many) which, passing almost unnoticed, was to quickly reveal its importance as a sign of the times. Some 100 militants from Lotta Continua broke away to set-up autonomous groups, collectives and similar bodies of the same order. Their implication was none too clear to the youthful masses who had wearily dragged themselves along to agitate in the seedy little groups of the extra parliamentary left. But by the end of the year they had a more precise connotation. In fact the creation of the first groups of Workers Autonomy (Autonomia Operaia) dates from around 1972, the same year in which Rosso was founded in Milan and the Via Volsci collectives in Rome.

In June 1975, the first Italian regional elections took place. The PCI (Italian Communist Party) scored a striking victory with a 7% increase in their vote. It was not yet the party of the majority in Italy as the DC (Christian Democrats) still maintained a few points lead, but it had conquered a relative majority in all the big cities, even in Naples the centre of clientilism and corruption.

On the evening of June 6th 1975 in the Bottega Oscura (CP headquarters in Rome) the left were exultant – even the most extreme of the extremists. Crushed in a crowd, which was laughing and crying for, deep down (yet so deep down) they were thinking they had not agitated in vain, that all those deaths had served some purpose and that Italy was “red”. It was the triumph of the “historic compromise”, of Berlinguer’s (CP General Secretary) social democracy initiated scarcely three year previously at the end of a period of intense struggle for the proletariat.

The summer slipped by between more or less alternative music festivals. In these crowded festivals the enthusiasm of youth looking for new experiences had not yet been extinguished.

Drugs, including heroin, which had made its appearance the previous year on the Italian market for mass consumer goods, were spreading, forming part – in spite of the hostility of political formations – of the quest for new experiences. Autumn 1975 was marked by another episode, carelessly brushed aside at the time but which was a classic forewarning, signalling a situation which was becoming ever more insupportable to young proletarians.

The occasion was provided by a large anti-Franco demonstration. In Madrid 5 militants belonging to FRAP (armed Maoist group) and ETA (armed Basque party) had been executed. The newspapers, which today would call them terrorists, then described them as patriots. Two demonstrations had been called, one by the parties proper and the other by the smaller parties (Lotta Continua Avanguardia Operaia, Partito del Unita Proletaria). This second demonstration had terminated in the Piazza del Popolo in the centre of Rome. That evening while meetings and torch light processions were taking place, a few hundred people shouting, “burn down the embassy” suddenly shot off down the Via del Corso, the most elegant street in Rome, and began looting shops. On the following day it was estimated 37 shops had been looted. The suppression of this action had not come from the police, rather it came from stewards belonging to the various groups ready, once more to loyally demonstrate their bureaucratic purpose and do the dirty work normally left to the police.

At all events the silent haemorrhaging of the small parties continued and many militants went on to form autonomous collectives in thought and in action, separate from all logic of a party political character.

In December 1975 there took place the first and perhaps only national gathering of all these autonomous groups. It was organised by the Via Volsci collective, which was to the forefront of collectives with a quite strong presence in the work place. Unfortunately we have not been able to find any documents originating from within the assembly itself and as a result we are not in a position to provide even partial account.

In retrospect, we can see however that it was these groups, which came to constitute the array of ideas and action that defined “Workers Autonomy” (Autonomia Operaia). It was unified at a theoretical level by an ideology which, even if in practise was not homogenous, did have in common a clear cut refusal of reformism as practised by the PCI and the groups alike. This refusal was to be expressed in a certain cult, though not exclusively, of street violence and rebellism:

1. Autonomous factory and neighbourhood collectives spread the length and breadth of Italy.

2. Autonomous assemblies in the big factories in northern Italy.

3. Autonomia Operaia (Workers Autonomy) collectives (hospitals, ENEL Electricity Board)). Some had come from particular groups (like the CUB related to Autonomia Operaia) who stressing the necessities of their own work situation had, thanks to that, often scored a notable success as a result of the radicalism of their methods of struggle.

4. The “Rosso” group. This was a movement (as it now defined itself) newspaper. Many were cadres and ex-militants from Potere Operaio (Workers’ Power). It is necessary to go into this separately because these militants were the only link in 1977 with the movement of 1968/’69 and the beginning of the 1970s.

5. Those who had left Lotta Continua in Rome and southern Italy for various reasons.

6. The ‘creators’ – to use capitalist terminology – libertarians, ex-Potere Operaio (Workers’ power), anarchists. The most well known were those from Bologna who along with Radio Alice and the review A/traverso were immediately to become the main point of reference for the movement in the first half of 1977.

In fact it was within the ambit of the latter, there took place in December 1975 another event which had little immediate consequence but whose fertile influence in Italy was enormous. This was the emergence of the first public sortie of the “Metropolitan Indians” or (more precisely) “Geronimo” the ex-Cassio collective. The genesis of this group shall serve to elucidate partially the formation of so many groups coming from the urban periphery.

The background of the people belonging to this group was very different coming from Lotta Continua, Autonomia Operaia, the PCI, Via Volsci, etc. Moreover, the group included many isolated proletarians, nowhere people from the back of beyond.

Events, neighbourhood games, the occupation of parks, partially gutted houses as well as attacks on bulldozers belonging to building contractors, were organised. Strongly opposed to local sections of the PCI “Geronimo” became very active in neighbourhoods.

The idea of defining themselves Metropolitan Indians came about almost by chance. One evening during which the group had organised a sortie to cover neighbourhood walls with graffiti like “death to the sense of guilt”, “masturbate peacefully” etc it became necessary to find a name for the group. At one point someone shouted, “Let’s leave the reservation” (meaning by this the ghettoes of the big cities, i.e. metropolitan ghettoes). The rest came of itself. Geronimo was the American warrior who dared leave the reservation without asking permission.

On Xmas Eve 1975 Geronimo organised a series of provocations against the local church. It was a question of pushing an action to a paroxysm: this was even to be its essence, a parody of lived experience. Whilst some poured pots of red paint on the steps of the church others wrote on the surrounding walls: “bourgeois bastards, this is the blood that Christ sheds everyday in the streets and in the factories” – it was a semi-bourgeois, semi-proletarian neighbourhood.

Geronimo survived for a further five months during which it organised in addition to going to Autonomia (autonomy) demos’, its own “acid” Committees, self-criticism groups and parties.

As a matter of fact everyone enjoyed themselves a lot and felt free finally to step off the beaten track. Spontaneity and parody merged with a criticism of everyday life. To introduce a theoretical note, certain members of the group attempted to put together a small magazine with a situationist content. But the result was a total break with the editors of this magazine who found themselves excluded.

But the explicit demands of Geronimo very rapidly found a fertile ground on which to expand. It was February 1976 and the occasion was provided by a demonstration in aid of comrades who had been arrested. On it were Lotta Continua, Autonomia Operaia, Pdup, Au Communista etc and Autonomia Romagna, which at this time was a group few in number comprising essentially the Volsci collective. Geronimo comprising some 50 people assembled behind the Volsci, carrying a multi-coloured banner. The Volsci, workerists to the core, were ill at ease with the mix. However, to begin with, it was only a verbal conflict. Then later when the Volsci broke away from the procession formed from individual groups, to seek a confrontation outside the Regina Coeli prison, Geronimo followed them resolutely. The confrontation with the police did not take place. On the contrary, in the little procession the slanging match had reached a critical point. From being verbal, the confrontation became physical. Certain of getting the upper hand, the former attacked with sticks but Geronimo promptly charged the attackers really letting them have it. In the wrangle the inevitable happened, a large number of comrades who had trouped behind the Volsci banner switched over to Geronimo who numbered behind its banner something like 300 people when the procession ended. It was another revelatory sign of how strong the individual need to be liberated from oppressive rnilitantism was. It was a great success for Geronimo. It had asserted itself as an autonomous group, which it was, without compromise and without demanding anything of anyone.

With all the comrades in Rome knowing about Geronimo it ceased to be only a neighbourhood phenomena from that day. An article in La Republica newspaper came to the conclusion it was the most radical group and in fact ended by saying “one cannot exclude links with NAP”. This was completely ridiculous as it was precisely the target of Geronimo’s attacks.

Anyhow, a link was forged with people in Rome who looked towards Radio Alice in Bologna. After the group was dissolved (which was not decreed by some jumped up nobody, simply that it had nothing more to say) the movement continued unabated.

Links, which had been forged during the demonstration in February, gave birth in May of the same year to a kind of plenary assembly calling for the creation in Rome of a radio station for the movement in contact with Radio Alice. Although there was no shortage of ideas, money was scarce and for this reason a sizable group got into contact with an already existing Radio Bleue. For a definite period of 3 to 4 months Radio Bleue (whose interests lay in fact entirely in the opposite direction) was transformed into a radio station belonging to the movement, alternating with the groupuscule radio Citta Futura or, if you like Fottutta meaning an anarcho.

It was June 1976. Lotta Continua at the Rimini Congress had agreed to dissolve. It was plain to see no one there had anything more to say and that henceforth voting for the PCI was a good idea plus counselling people to comply with the great party of the working class.

In the legislative elections in June, the PCI confirmed its advance remaining however behind the DC. lnspite of that, with 34%/35% of the vote it found itself decisively placed when it came to forming a government. Anticipating the entrance of the PCI into the Government the unions gathered together in a plenary assembly at the sports palace in Rome and decided to initiate a social contract. This decision for those who still had any doubts on that score, confirmed the institutionalised character of our unions. This development merits a further explanation but let’s return to the movement and look at what was happening to it in Rome.

During the summer Radio Bleue had invented a new way of conceiving radio and politics making use of parodies on news broadcasts, information on the autonomous movement, anti-statist sketches and a music that was in opposition to the constraints imposed by multinational recording companies. But the core of the disagreement with the owners’ concerned themost directly politicised broadcasts in which the autonomous collectives spoke freely. By September the wrangle had become impossible. There were attempts later at broadcasts on Radio Citta Futura but the radio’s directors Renzo Rossellini and Sandro Silvestri (now a director of a multinational firm) did not permit any coverage of the movement.

Autonomy continued to advance. The poxy political manoeuvres of the unions began to bear fruit. Unemployment was rising remorselessly. The young were really being kicked from pillow to post.

In Milan auto-reductions were organised at cinemas. Every Sunday a large number of people under the watchful eye of group stewards would make their way to a posh cinema, paying a reduced price for tickets. Until the opening night of La Scala this was more or less successful. With the aim of attacking the bourgeoisie done up in their best on their way to La Scala, the circles of proletarian youth from Milan and autonomous neighbourhood groups, were to stage guerrilla events in the centre of Milan. The result was one great cock-up. Crushed by the total disorganisation, thanks to the behaviour of some organised autonomy sections, many young comrades were hurt in the confrontation. The papers exaggerated the affair and autonomous groups had their moment of notoriety.

Auto-reductions were also organised in Rome on two consecutive Sundays. This bore no relation to what was taking place in Milan because in Rome the groupuscu1es did not possess stewards. Thus everything concerning the groups was in comp1ete disarray. The result was spontaneous confrontations.

On the first occasion on December 1st a thousand or so people had gathered in the drizzle in the Piazza Cavour. The aim was to get into the Adriano Cinema. A contingent of police was all that was needed and on being charged the crowd scattered.

The following Sunday things were different. During the week without any stickers or leaflets the rumour spread especially in the schools. Come Sunday 5000 comrades had gathered in the Piazza Trilussa in Trastevere. The “America” cinema was attacked from the outset. Some sort to purchase an auto-reduced ticket but immediately realizing it was not about that; the crowd entered the cinema with no intention of watching the film. The police charged and arrested – an ironical stroke – the people attempting to buy auto-reduced tickets. The mass of the people left the cinema and formed a procession, which marched towards Testaccio, a popular neighbourhood in the city centre.

At the “Victoria” cinema people burst inside without delay this time. Not everyone succeeded in getting in and the police charged and dispersed the crowd outside. Inside there remained some 200 people under siege. When night fell an agreement was reached after several attempts to charge the cinema. Without a blow being struck the surviving remainder withdrew from Testaccio.

They were the first symptoms of a malaise which was to become widespread amongst the youth whether students, workers or marginals. The New Year passed and 1977 arrived. No one, not even remotely guessed what was to happen. In the first weeks of January tension was high but nothing occurred.

On January 23rd the Humanities Dept was occupied to protest against the reforms proposed by the Christian Democrat, Malfatti. The papers barely reported the news. It seemed a theatrical occupation organised solely by militants. After staying away three days many began to take a look for themselves. The first debates commenced and attempts were made to bring people together but all these initiatives still appeared unrelated and gave no one any satisfaction.

It was merely the beginning. In a matter of days a blazing fury burst out in many individual and collective acts containing in a single moment both prologue and epilogue, consummating the desires of those taking part.

The first act unfolded on February 1st: a fascist attack took place in the Law Dept. Comrades who were occupying the Humanities Dept went to the aid of those in the Law Dept. The fascists fired wounding two comrades, one seriously in the head. On the same day a revolt began which straightaway went beyond the immediate situation, given that the fascists were only one aspect of state repression. After the Humanities Dept, students occupied the Physics Dept, the Teachers Training Dept and the Engineering Dept. On the same evening Italian TV began colour transmissions.

The following morning the battle began and firearms made their appearance in the street.

We will never know who fired first and it scarcely matters to us.

A demonstration was called against the fascists and there were assemblies in all the schools. During the demonstration some fascists were punched then shots were heard – hand gun and machine gun fire. An officer belonging to the public security arm of the police fell to the ground, shot in the head and two comrades from the Autonomy collective, Paulo Tomasini and Daddo Fortuna were seriously injured in the legs by a machine gun wielded by public security agents. They were arrested and charged with attempted murder having been found in possession of a gun. The story grew and the news spread all around Rome. Come midday and the university was packed with people. Sharp exchanges and insults flew directed at militants from different groups and their loyal followers who supported the notion of a student occupation by students.

People thronged to the university from every neighbourhood – school students, the unemployed, youth from estates on the urban periphery, druggies, gays, young workers in the black economy. This was the ‘movement’, which exploded. It had scarcely seen daylight before it began to bawl out loudly and ever yet more loudly causing, even if it was only for a few moments, the pillars of the social contract to shake – i.e. the unions and the party – even if it was far from achieving its real objectives, the institutions of capitalism.

These were the great days during which marginals, autonomists from neighbourhood collectives and work places, footloose mavericks of every variety united in hot pursuit of pettifogging political parties, wresting from them any attempt to reduce the movement to a series of organs, reflecting in miniature, the institutions themselves.

“La Rivoluzione” (a Mao-Dadaist paper from Bologna) wrote:

“On demonstrations we cry out: “it’s another 1968”. “No it isn’t ’68” Rinascita replies. We say it is another ’68 in intention, to underline the desire to turn everything upside down as then and to engage in a process of struggle, which will be broad and powerful, not just a flash in the pan, something off the cuff. At the same time however we are living through a different process. It is much more massive than before, far more radical far more determinedly anti-reformist. Because it is composed of proletarians, of people who are already working, have worked already, or are looking for work. It is not reducible to a student dimension. Today, explosion is the continuation of a history begun in April 1975, which has grown throughout ’76 eventually broadening out into a movement of young proletarians. The February movement was the conquest of a mass social terrain and the central territory of the university by a subject incarnating the refusal of work.

It is the moment of creating free space.”

“La Rivoluzione” wrote (Number 12, March 1977):

“The solution consists in the growth of the movement itself. Marginals coming together at several different points on the urban terrain, occupation of space and houses, meeting places and Departments. Inspection committees, for instance made up of workers and the unemployed to enforce the new conditions of life, wages and work, providing work for the unemployed and regularsing casual employment.

To arrive at a generalised rupture let’s make a leap. The terrain remains the same but the programme becomes:
Liberation of inner city areas, (workers quarters, marginal quarters, university precincts). Here we will impose a “political price” on the enemy who will be forbidden to enter (cops, carabinieri, fascists and PCI).

Generalised expropriation of Church property and property belonging to it. Generalised occupation of empty houses. In the liberated areas the numbers at work are to be increased, overtime is to be banned, work undertaken whose terms the movement will determine.

All this is indispensable and a possible mode of organising a counter-power. Without thought, this might be translated into institutional terms or be taken by the state.

Rome University, the cultural fortress, became for 15 days a liberated space (even if this was illusory because there remained within the university precinct, a police station, although a pretty inactive one, which had been set up after ’68) with the intention of realising what autonomous circles had announced some while ago.

During the first few days of February rage and desire exploded in this space in a violent fashion. On the one hand it was ephemeral and illusory but also quite real to all the proletarians present. All false pretexts were swept aside (the Malfatti reform, anti-fascism etc.)

Thus, a total hammering out began, the subversion of daily life pushed to the point of paroxysm with the desire to be liberated from all constraints. And those who affirmed themselves to be the social subject were all those proletarians who right from the days immediately following the struggles of ’68/69 had become known to sociologists, politicos, psychologists and professionals of the party of revolution, bent on preaching to the masses, a pure object of academic discussion. In schools and universities they had extolled proletarianisation and passing through the school of the working class.

All these dregs, the miserable residues of Stalinism and the epigones of reformism, found themselves isolated, derided and ridiculed in every conceivable way. The movement of the “none guaranteed” as it had defined itself put an ever-greater distance between itself and militantism, which it aspired to leave behind forever.

“Fantasy shall destroy power and laughter will bury it” appeared on the walls of the university.

Whilst the PCI began, through its press, a terror campaign against the movement, to show to its friends in the Government its determination to go the whole hog in its role as policeman of the proletariat, the occupation of university departments continued apace.

In early February the PCI and the groups tried to set up some tin-pot assemblies to bring everyone back within the fold of institutionalised “ordered” and “peaceful” protest against the Malfatti reform. In fact, no one knew any longer what it referred to. So much so, that “Paese Sera” (PCI paper) referring to the “youth occupying the university” wrote on February 8th “they don’t even know what they are struggling for any longer”.

On February 5th, the Prefect of Police banned the demonstration fixed for the following Saturday. The occupation of the university up till then limited to the Humanities Dept became total.

In the “liberated” precinct, debates, games, amusements, the fantasia of proletarian festivity continued without let up. The atmosphere that reigned was of a liberated neighbourhood (a wall was separating it from the rest of the world) emulating the Paris Commune. At a more elitist level, the Chicago Commune and Paul Mattick were dusted off by “Marxiana”, the only theoretical journal that enjoyed some credit then.

But the movement’s creativity was expressed in a myriad other ways. What occupied the most privileged place during this period, beyond the struggle against the institutions, was the ludic dimension. Henceforth, this was the impulse behind the decisive victory over the union cops who tried to put a stop to the horror of the February 17th occupation.

Commencing from this date, the movement abandoned the illusory terrain of street confrontation to explode in the re-appropriation of entertainment. Each assembly was supported by theatrical events staged by groups of people ridiculing the daily pontificating of “politicians”, inventing slogans, which changed by the minute. In the space of a day was born the CDNA. (Centre For the Broadcasting of Arbitrary News) the Nazichecka, the Craxi group (“Long live Comrade Bettini Craxi scourge of the fascists who gets around in a taxi” – Craxi was of course Prime Minister – TN).

The more homogenous groups who forsometime past had already fought against the PCI’s social democratic project and who in the main had gathered around Radio Bleue brought out “La Rivoluzione” together with Radio Alice. In the meantime, Radio Alice had been creating a movement of far greater consequence than in Rome (all things considered). “La Rivoluzione”, was a national paper and by way of introduction published the following manifesto:

“WORK MAKES YOU FREE AND BEAUTIFUL”

In the current economic situation millions and millions of young people risk, during a long period not being able to enjoy a fundamental right/duty which is, however, guaranteed by the constitution, to all citizens whose only goods are their chains: namely wage labour.

It is thus that the incentive to get up before daylight, one of the most lively and salutary traditions of our way of life, is being lost to whole generations. Next to go, the regularity and good humour, which characterises the existence of the honest labourer, gives way to confusion, anxiety and deviation. As psychologists, criminologists and sexologists’ stress, isn’t work an excellent remedy against drugs, pederasty and bestiality?

For workers who already have a job, on the contrary, new and unexpected perspectives open up for them and for the development of their work capacity: henceforth, notably thanks to overtime, the creativity and exuberance of adult workers will be able to grow and achieve limits which no one would have dared envisage before now.

But it is not right to be carried away with enthusiasm before such results: While the healthy plant of employed workers grows and prospers, the dry shrub of a lazy and marginal youth becomes more sterile every day.

This is why trade unions and democratic forces, together with the association for parents of runaway children, propose the following jobs for young unemployed:

1. Efface graffiti on walls, schools, factories, universities and toilets.

2. Increase religious and monastic vocations, as well as police vocations.

3. Reforest the bald mountains of the islands and the Apennines.

4. Restore all volumes hanging around libraries page by page, following the instructions of Giorgio Amendola (TN: CP big wig).

5. Cement-up all dens of subversion and chaos.

6. Constitute edifying groups for young marginals.

7. Distribute to students who are behind in their studies a demi-hectare of virgin land in Irpinia, Aspromonte or in the Modonia.

8. Rediscover in a definitive way the last vestiges and remains of World War One.

9. Establish re-education centres for the treatment of worker absenteeism.

10. Self-sacrifice is not enough.

11. Self-immolation is the only way.

This manifesto, like many others, although written before hand, came out only after February 17th, the day Lama (General Secretary of CGIL the CP led union federation) was chased out. Unfortunately I don’t have any tracts and photocopied leaflets from this period.

On February 17th exactly the movement faced its first space/time crises when repression began to shift the movement onto a terrain somewhat different to street confrontations toward a banding together and self-absorption. But during February that was not felt to be an immediate danger.

The movement evolved practically entirely in the direction of self-awareness and in the inevitable nature of its existence and essence. Thus it affirmed the refusal of wage labour and as a result, all forms of workers’ organisation, which ended up in trade unions. This notion was taken to its extreme, to the point where wage labour was considered anti-revolutionary in that it did not partake of the immediate refusal of its own condition. However, not only did it delineate a formal rupture with the traditional communist movement but one that questioned the substance itself of the individual choice of each proletarian. The end result was an exaltation of casual work, non-guaranteed labour and the sub-proletariat as the immediately revolutionary subject in opposition to waged workers whose job was guaranteed by the unions. All this was expressed through festivity and parody. It was really due to these internal practises that the movement drastically rejected all attempts at spectacularisation and stardom (that no leader emerged was not down to chance). It went as far as the assembly decreeing after a public trial of journalists from the PCI, “Corriere della Sera” and “La Repubblica” that no journalists were to be allowed to enter the university. The position taken against the spectacularisation of the media, the PCI and its policing role and the bourgeois press which “sought to understand” was unambiguous.

On February 9th 30,000 people demonstrated in Rome. It was a peaceful demonstration, which passed practically unnoticed, journalists appearing to be more interested in what was transpiring in the occupied university.

At the same time the unions launched a strike in schools and universities against the “Malfatti Reform” (which was undeniably reactionary but it was not a question of going into the details but a matter rather of a pretext for anyone concerned). The PCI and the unions carrying out by proxy the behest of the high and mighty circulated through their papers an invitation to a dialogue with the “sane” (not exactly accurately identified) part of the movement. The grande finale to this music hall turn would be, according to the aims of the organizers, the meeting with Lama in the occupied university. It was announced beforehand as though it was an invitation from “the workers” to a dialogue. It was trumpeted forth as “Lama goes to talk with the university occupants”, power being only too glad to leave it to the PCI (who, for its part, continued to want to demonstrate its zeal was unimpeachable) the thankless task of lancing the boil.

February 17th was quite warm for the time of year. The sun seemed about to come out anytime but from time to time a fine drizzle would delay its appearance. The quadrangle of the Minerva, the centre of the university campus slowly began to fill. Militants belonging to the PCI and the union put up a makeshift platform and a loud speaker system adjacent to the Law Dept, formerly a fascist stronghold and now used by the PCI and certain other groups for their earbashing ceremonies. At the other side of the quadrangle comrades regrouped around the Humanities Dept, the movement’s centre.

In the front were to be seen the “heads” which the bourgeois press had attempted to, more than once, recuperate in the form of spectacle. Dressed in multi-coloured clothes, their faces covered in grease paint they wore an expression somewhat between anger and laughter. With them are the non-organised comrades, the uncontrollables (literally “unchained dogs” TN). The more organised comrades from the remaining autonomous collectives stayed to one side – at least to begin with. Before the Humanities Dept were grouped hardly more than 3000 to 4000 comrades. In comparison to the 7000 to 8000 militants the PCI had brought in as an occupying force, the comrades belonging to the movement were in a minority.

To begin with they just stared each other out. Then, on the platform, Lama opened his mouth to speak and immediately he was barracked. A chorus of “imbecile, imbecile” continued uninterruptedly in the background, punctuated by cries of “Lamas are in Tibet” and “the PCI and the unions are provocateurs. Shaking with fear they are at the service of the state”.

The PCI heavies lost their cool and threw themselves into the fray. A furious onslaught was unleashed against those who on this occasion were the state’s policemen. With stones and fire extinguishers at the ready the movement had, minutes later, turfed-out the provocateurs, destroying the platform and all the symbols of mystification. With a single voice the shout was raised “this is our space and you will not succeed in taking it from us so easily”.

The herd of militants legged it as fast as they could. The girls were in tears. Many amongst them had begun to reflect, some were to change and join the movement. Whilst the crowd massed in the forecourt of the Science building chanting their defiance, comrades took up positions at the locked gates. Meanwhile the PCI’s hit squad went in search of isolated comrades who coming from the schools and adjacent quarters continued to flock towards the university. Many were roughed up.

It had been a great victory and everyone was happy and content. But the victory was as sweet as it was short lived. Whilst the PCI was ordering its troops to withdraw, the police once more surrounded the university. They came super-equipped with their new fireproofed armoured cars and bullet-proof vests. And this time they came in earnest.

It was lunchtime and in the university there were only some 2000 to 2500 comrades. People who risked entering to lend a hand to those now under siege inside, were roughly searched by the police. An assembly was called and after a brief discussion an impossible resistance was rapidly organised. All the gates were barricaded except one to allow for escape.

The attempt to erect a barricade the entire length of the main entrance was a bit of a shambles in seeking to block a space of some 30 metres with cars, flower pots, benches etc. The sun went in – it had shone during the hour of victory over the invader. Everyone, both inside and outside the university, knew they would be evicted sooner or later but the resistance that was mounted was not purely formal. It was a concrete way of saying “goodbye”. It was the conviction of being part of a growing movement, a movement that was made up of subjects, not objects. It was a conviction which, although real within terms of the movement was revealed to be illusory in relation to the rest of society. It was to lead to an overestimation of the events, which followed.

Towards evening the police went into action. The armoured car charged the flimsy barricades across the main entrance. Just behind came Martian aliens advancing clumsily in their space suits and on first seeing them one wondered if they had laser guns!

The spectacle ended with the university in flames. It was a military occupation taking away from the movement its arena. This was not just a formality and the consequences of this break up were felt rapidly. For the time being people transferred to the Economics Dept outside the university campus.

The university was closed.

Following February 17th the assemblies which were held throughout the entire city in schools, neighbourhoods and some work places were to heighten every time the level of confrontation. The alternative henceforth was clear: either with us or against us. For the PCI and the state, the question had been settled right from the start. However, it was after February 17th that a rift developed in the plan to suppress the movement. The PCI, who had been given the task, had failed: even worse, after the confrontation some trade union cadres timidly began to sympathise with the movement. In some districts and work places this phenomenon was particularly important.

The hour had at last arrived when the state had to take on the task of repression completely. Seeing that “political” recuperation wasn’t possible, the only alternative was to destroy the movement by dragging it onto the terrain of the spectacularisation of violence. This meant its concrete aspects were not given an emphasis any longer, only, to the exclusion of all else, its formal aspects. Obviously the “plot” which Judge Catalonsalti had mentioned, referred to the one organised by the state to destroy and isolate the movement.

The media spieled out its own version creating the following personages:

1. The hippy like Indian “heads”: ripe for recuperation.
2. The intellectual always ripe for recuperation.
3. The autonomist brandishing a P.38 pistol: non-recuperable, bad, to be eliminated.

One must point out that the movement was more deeply rooted than the institutions had been led to believe and it would provide a lot more to chew on before it would permit itself to be dressed in stage costume.

In the days that followed people continued to meet in other places like the Economics Dept and student residences. The amount of graffiti appearing on walls increased, as did the ironical sending up of institutions. On February 23rd a large, peaceful demo playfully wound its way around Rome. The Indians daubed S. Carvieri in green paint.
The number of universities that henceforth were occupied were many. Apart from Rome and Bologna there were Florence and Perugia and then Naples, Bari, Sassari, Cagliari and Palermo.

The movement’s fulcrum was in central Italy, backed up by southern Italy. It was in these places that the weight of unemployment was most keenly felt and where the concept of class was far less determined by the capitalist nexus. The refusal of work was interpreted along the lines of there was no work and it seemed impossible for there to be any. There was the endemic refusal by the state to import from the north a productive capitalist structure, dismissing the social benefits to be had from drawing people into wage labour. Two tendencies were present in this refusal of work. On the one hand there was a progressive desire to overcome a poverty stricken human condition. And, on the other there was a specific feeling, typical of a pre-industrial society which boiled down to demanding a system of state support (the case of the Neopolitan proletariat).

A signal was awaited from Milan and the industrial triangle i.e. from those sectors of the proletariat most directly involved in the productive process. But the movement in Milan brought to its knees by years of groupusculism produced nothing more than militantism and sectarianism. Even the young proletarian circles had been engulfed by these sectarian games. It was not by chance that some of the people who had produced “Insurrezione”, calling also for a spreading of the movement across the entire territory moved immediately to Rome. In Milan, throughout the whole of 1977 there came nothing other than a discourse of death – an increasingly extreme confrontation of representation cut-off from the productive reality of the north.

At the end of February, on the 26th and 27th to be precise, the first national assembly was held in Rome in the Economics Dept. The attack on the reformist and militaristic tendency flared into the open once more. It was a violent attack – giving rise to misunderstanding and confusion.

The following is from “La Rivoluzione” (No.11): “The Rome Assembly”:

“Minoritarism is defeated, prepare for revolution immediately. Rome, February 26/27th 15,OOO revolutionaries, expressions of situations where the movement is already on the offensive, from the movement of the unemployed in Naples to the displaced persons of Bari, to the Metropolitan Indians, to the Mao-Dadaists in Bologna, to the workers’ coordinations in Milan …..

It is crystal clear to those whose vision isn’t clouded that in the assembly groups don’t confront and oppose one another. Rather, in their respective positions, a socially based mass movement is evident, capable of bringing about, with the overthrow of capitalist power, a successful programme of total transformation.

It is crystal clear reformism and the party of small business are out of the running. Their presence already constitutes a provocation and the Berlinguists’ (Berlinguer was then leader of the PCI – (TN) denounced and scattered have been driven out because it is necessary to put a wounded animal out of its misery.

It is crystal clear that Adup and Autonomia Operaia are revolting lice, a mite unsure whether to take up residence on the back of social democracy or the movement.

It is crystal clear that destroying lice is an elementary hygienic precaution.

It is crystal clear lice and fascists have come to Rome to cause trouble but everywhere they came up against the kind of response a mass movement of the proletariat manifests.

Within the movement no coercion is necessary. Whoever has not grasped this, who holds problems can be resolved with the aid of shock troops and through the display of macho force, has remained bogged down in the most wretched minoritarism. Making a great deal of fuss, it is a leftover on the verge of extinction. The behaviour of sectors of Autonomia Operaia (Workers Autonomy) – the organised part with a capital A – comporting themselves on military style parades, acting in a violent, aggressive way with comrades, young people and women observes the logic of coalitions. It indicates a profound inability to grasp the newness contained in the movement. But the worst thing is by now imposing a minoritist and organisational logic, whether of a militarist or workers stamp, they risk forcing on the movement a centrist position alien to it.

Inspite of the militarist pressure exerted by these sectors the Rome assembly came out victorious and unitary. The Metropolitan Indians rejected manipulation by the wretched palefaces of the Pdup (jacket, tie, cashmere sweater), the motion was carried by thousands of cries of approval, and the concluding feeling was one of decision, convinced the movement would not falter.

The restoration of the paranoiac stage of politics with all its aggressive armoury, voluntarism and repression threatens to crush and deny reality, that which exists, the revolt born from the transformation of everyday life and the break with the mechanisms of constraint.

But what is obscene floats to the surface once more and the corpses of the institutions and the paranoiacs of militantism carry away the phrasemongers”.

The motion adopted by the assembly was in reality a bit weak, because at that point, the bulk of the forces present had been wasted by internal battles. The motion claimed all the street confrontations that had taken place up to then (including the ones in the Piazza Independencia) as part and parcel of the movement and proposed “mobilizing for a direct link-up with factories, quarters and schools in order to re-launch the struggle for full employment, a reduction in the working week, a wage increase and to oppose restructuration. It was decided to send a mass delegation (in practise anyone who wanted to go) to the FLM (Federazione Lavoratori Metal Mecanica) meeting, which was to be held in Florence the following week.

Really it boiled down to things many had taken for granted already. They had hoped the assembly would provide a point of departure in determining on a revolutionary strategy however minimal. The necessity of re-affirming it put the accent on the degree of disinformation and the vanity of enclosing each space and political group within a predetermined trajectory.

What did emerge was a general lack of preparation tending to favour isolated concrete acts undertaken often as an end in themselves and as the only practicable revolutionary terrain.

Preparations were laid for the days of revolt. Over and above the discussions the movement simmered, feeling an ever stronger need to re-appropriate public space to encounter the city. But repression restricted it to a generalised anger. Revolt was imminent. Everyone needed to stick together to reoccupy the university campus to be in a position to say more. But events supervened narrowing the space for creation and reflection.

On February 28th two pupils from the “Mamiani” school were wounded one seriously, by a fascist who was not properly identified. In the light of events that followed, in particular the most important, the fascist could also have been a state agent – however to ascertain if this was the case was henceforth impossible.

The “Mamiani” school was one of the schools where the movement was at its strongest. It was a bourgeois school, the most bourgeois in Rome. Inspite of the fact the FGGl (young communists) had, at least by the end of the year, some 100 members and activists out of a total of 2000 pupils, the movement had taken root there, creating a situation of permanent agitation, as in many other school, which no one could stand aside from. Playful forms of self-management and assemblies were organised which made it impossible for the functionaries of the little scholastic parliaments to continue with any kind of activity. Teachers who glorified in ’68 were openly challenged being, in fact, the most ferocious champions of social democratic normalisation.

There spread throughout Rome’s schools a capillary movement, which was total and in same respects infantile but which assuredly desired to challenge and attack “left” culture as recuperated by the spectacle of the party game.

The “Mamiani” school was a focal point within this framework being a school for the children of the enlightened bourgeoisie – a school for tomorrow’s leaders of recuperation (the same state of affairs as today in fact).

The demonstrations in response to the attack were however monopolised by the anti-fascists of the PCI and the groups.

Come the end of February, there was no getting away from the fact, the movement of opposition in the schools was a broadly based phenomena. The schools that were occupied and self-managed numbered more than 20, which is over half the high schools in Rome.

On March 1st the Humanities Dept was re-opened. But on March 4th a further repressive provocation struck the movement. Fabrizio Panzieri, a comrade belonging to the movement accused of killing a fascist during a street battle two years earlier, was condemned to nine years in prison. Thus the judicial practise of “moral responsibility” was commenced which today has been amply exploited by our repressive judicial apparatus.

There had been trouble in the court on that same evening. The demo of school students called for the following morning passed without incident. But by the afternoon many people had gathered in the university. But the police refused to allow the demonstration to leave the university perimeter because it had been banned. In the university whilst some were debating what to do, very violent confrontations broke out in the San Lorenzo quarter adjacent to the university, which then started to spread toward the centre. This time guns were repeatedly used, shots ringing out from every direction – it was no longer a question of an isolated incident. Some police cars were hit and a small car set alight. Two carabinieri suffered gunshot wounds. In the centre of Rome from the Largo Argentina to the Trastivere trouble erupted. Practically everywhere attacks took place – on a bank, a police station in the Piazza Farnese, the Ministry of Justice and in the Via Avenula. Lastly, a gun shop was attacked, the same one that had been looted a week earlier. Barricades made from burning cars were impossible to count.

On the following day the rector ordered the university to be closed remaining garrisoned by the police.

It was March 7th and in Florence the national conference of the FLM (the engineering union), which the movement had been invited to take part, was held. But throughout the two days of the conference the situation of incommunicability between the movement and the workers became accentuated. It reached the point where the movement questioned the idea of a union even – not just its controlling function – a thing which was in fact central to the workers’ delegates who subsequently held an assembly in the Lirico in Milan disclaiming the official position reached by the tri-partite union meeting. It was not a matter of weakness or incapacity but sprang from the fact that the demands put forward by the movement as immediately realisable were regarded by the employed working class as utopian and unrealisable. Translated into practise, the refusal of work became unemployment rendering survival impossible as a consequence. In the class more directly involved in the productive process there was not, in short, that apocalyptic sense of the end of time which pervaded the movement, becoming the dominant spirit in the days immediately after.

A national demonstration was fixed for March 12th in Rome.

But on March 11th a revolt broke out in Bologna. The bourgeois newspapers straightaway stated that this revolt, which lasted for two days, had involved thousands upon thousands of comrades, townsfolk and proletarians. It had been provoked by some 50 autonomists who had not been properly identified but who refused to allow a meeting of the Comunione e Liberazione (a Christian Democrat youth organisation) to go ahead in the university.

However, there was no getting away from the fact that an extremely determined struggle had been waged by the Bolognese proletariat. The Comunione e Liberazione holed up in the university by the comrades asked the rector, Rizzoli, for help. It was he who brought in the police and carabinieri. The movement immediately organised a protest demonstration. According to those taking part in this little demo a small detachment of carabinieri began firing blindly at the comrades who instantly fled. But someone amongst them did not. He was Pier Francesco Lorusso, killed by a bullet in the back. Lorenzo Tramontini was the carabiniero responsible.

It was the spark that set Bologna alight. Radio Alice immediately informed the comrades about what had happened. A demonstration wasn’t even called. The anger of the Bolognese proletariat, though poorly supported and hemmed in, exploded into furious revolt.

The university quarter of Bologna, right at the heart of the historical centre became for two days a liberated zone from where attacks were launched against all the symbols of bourgeois peace and quiet and local social democratic power – shops, banks, gun shops, the station – nothing was exempt from the anger of the proletariat.

It was a genuine, authentic revolt even if it never remotely took on the features of a revolutionary situation because it was the expression of a minority of the proletariat, no matter their number and determination. In any case, it really shook the institutions, particularly the PCI because Bologna was the jewel in the crown of its social democratic project. So much so that in order to safeguard it, armoured vehicles were sent in at 6 am on the morning of March 13th to remove the barricades. Throughout that entire day battles kept breaking out only to spend themselves before the military detachments, which were to be a permanent fixture in Bologna until the September Congress. Radio Alice which had sought constantly to supply counter-information and to rally people was closed down by a police raid and the editors arrested or obliged to go on the run like all the most active elements in the movement in Bologna.

On the morning of March 12th many people had arrived in Rome from all over Italy.

On the morning of March 12th many people – too many people! – had arrived in Rome from all over Italy. The national demonstration of school students set for March 11th had been transformed into a national demonstration against state repression and murder – like that of Lo Russo’s. By early afternoon an enormous crowd of comrades had gathered in the Piazza Esedra. The predominant feeling in the hearts of the 100,000 people gathered there had an apocalyptical touch to it – the ultimate expression of rage and anger. This was reinforced by the city’s appearance like as if it was under siege: shops were closed, no pedestrians about only detachments of police and carabinieri in riot gear.

The clearest political judgement passed on this day was given on the same evening by all those comrades who weren’t merely seeking in the movement a spectacular flare up, but an action oriented continually toward the creation of a genuinely revolutionary situation which they consciously felt to be a long way off.

Such a large concentration in Rome emptied all the other Italian cities of the vanguard of struggle (where the conditions existed that could foment rebellion) and created the situation of a pitched battle against the armed force of the institutions, which even though tired out after journeying through the night was well equipped and trained. In fact the entire effort was concentrated on Rome, which militarily was unfavourable because it had been occupied in a particularly highly trained manner. Thus the chance was lost to extend the struggle to the entire peninsula where demonstrations on a much smaller scale took place instead.

If one had to make a show of force Rome was probably the right place to do it in, in so far as it is the institutional centre of a well-organised powerful movement. However, it remains true that tackling the institutions through all out confrontation on a military terrain was a tactic doomed to defeat. It was not a matter of storming a Winter Palace, henceforth stripped bare, but of organizing a capillary action to circumvent all attempts at normalisation. And, further, to bring into the movement all those proletarian strata, which were still having doubts about the social democratic programme.

To storm the Montecitorio or the Palazzo Chiga was a mad idea not only because from a military point of view it was impossible to pull off but also, because even if it were to come about, we would be right back to square one. The need, in other words, was to work out really revolutionary ideas. The absence of any communication with the working class was a problem that was deeply felt by the movement and, after the March days, in an even more acute form.

“La Rivoluzione” dated March 19th, 1977 wrote: “The Movement and Power”

“Faced with the bosses attack on living and working conditions and on organisation there is no other way.

Bourgeois power is aiming at one thing – to get workers on their knees, cut wages, stamp on the indexing of wages and increase exploitation savagely.
If it succeeds in destroying the student movement and the unemployed movement, it will succeed in destroying insurrection. After that it will be the turn of factory workers. It is therefore necessary to engage in struggle immediately and to collate all the information coming from the barricades that tens of thousands of young students and the unemployed alongside advanced workers have erected in Bologna, Milan and Rome.

To prevent the movement from being massacred there is no other way except to carry the fight into proletarian quarters.

To block the path of Cossiga’s fascism, the armed violence of special units and counter revolutionary terror, there is no other way but to carry the fight into proletarian quarters.

Let us work out a programme on which to construct power: the force is not lacking to impose an increase in the workforce, plant by plant, quarter by quarter; the force is there to reduce overtime and speed-ups. The force is there to occupy the 100s’ of 1000s’ of empty houses while 100s’ of 1000s’ of proletarians don’t have a place to live. The force is there. Comrade workers, there is no other way. Comrade workers for hell’s sake let’s unite in struggle”.

With the benefit of hindsight we could say the force would have been there if the comrade workers had come along. And on March 12th in Rome instead of force the movement expressed its emotion, spontaneously deciding to openly confront. It was not therefore a pre-ordained decision but it did reflect badly on the capacity of groups of comrades who had analysed the situation more clearly. Over the preceding days they had created a broadly based revolutionary consciousness going beyond a rebellism of street confrontation which would only incline the movement towards a mad destructive militarism as had already been observed in the national assembly held in February.

So 100,000 people had assembled in the Piazza Esedra in Rome. Trembling with rage they were packed against the railings of the metro yard facing the police drawn up several lines deep in the Via Nazionale. Rome the beautiful was deserted, the sky was overcast, the shops closed and in the streets there was not a soul to be seen. It seemed the street had been cleared so the battle could take place without doing too much damage.

Towards 5 o’clock the demonstration moved off. Even the Indians with their painted faces, displayed under their cheerful make-up, signs of anger. Even they, like over half the other demonstrators, carried under their coats molotovs, bricks, stones and some had guns.

The demonstration moved forward slowly, unpunctuated by slogans no one in the Via Cavour would hear. It began to rain. The stewards, to coordinate action attempted to pass around an instruction to block the historic centre, in order to repeat on a larger scale what had already happened in Bologna (where the effectiveness of the police was greatly reduced because they were from Rome).

The front of the demonstration crossed the Piazza Venezia and arrived at the Piazza Argentina. The Corso Vittoria had been blocked off by a detachment of very well equipped carabinieri. Then, at that moment, whilst the front of the demonstration tried to pass word back about the barrier to those behind, the attack broke out in a predictable, disconnected manner. One, perhaps two, projectiles were thrown at the police guarding the headquarters of the Christian Democrats in the Piazza del Gesu. In a split second all hell was let loose. The long procession splintered into several fragments. Some sought to save comrades who weren’t organised for a street battle, letting them cross the river to reach a quieter spot .At the same time, others confronting the armed deployment of police and carabinieri created a wall of fire.

To describe the guerrilla events that took place that day, which the press described as “Black Saturday” may appear superfluous. But it is useful for measuring the range of confrontation which in spite of the insanity shall always remain a moment not easily forgotten.

After the attack in Piazza del Gesu, a few dozen comrades tossed molotovs through the Ministry of Justice. The carabinieri, barricaded behind the gates let go with a murderous volley. To cover the comrades’ retreat a bus was set alight. Despite everything, many were quite seriously wounded by the carabinieri. These casual ties and many others throughout the day were cared for at home; going to a hospital would have meant getting arrested. The official total included only 4 or 5 comrades amongst the wounded – whilst amongst the cops it was a dozen. But the reality was quite the opposite.

The attack on the Ministry of Justice was immediately succeeded by an assault on another gun shop at Ponte Sisto. A group of comrades tore down the metal grill and burst into the shop. But the confusion and rage did not give this gesture, a valid one given the circumstances, an organisational strength, which might have led to a better-armed defense of the movement’s destructive acts. The group, which led the attack on the armoury was not homogenous, it had come together at random in front of the gun shop. It was therefore a totally spontaneous action. The arms were dished out like sweets and in fact the majority were abandoned on the riverbank where the police picked them up the next day. The same thing happened a few hours later when the Casciani gun shop was attacked in the Piazza Cairoli.

Attacks continued to take place everywhere in the centre of Rome until well into the night – shops, banks, police stations, offices of multinationals. Proletarian anger didn’t spare anything, acting in a tempestuous, yearning manner hoping for an impossible and unforgettable revolutionary day.

The mass of people, dispersed and fragmented to the point that not even the most organised group succeeded in reforming, plunged into diffuse guerrilla actions creating spontaneously a nucleus which proceeded to attack a shop, a bank, a police station etc, splitting up immediately once the action was over. But the urban guerrilla plan was not realised. The movement had intended to put this plan into operation when it had occupied one or more districts in the historic core managing them as liberated areas. From this bastion attacks were to be launched on the sites of the institutions themselves.

Even if this project was not pure madness, the opportunity to extend it to the entire country was lost because it was a show of weakness not of strength, as appearances might have seemed.

In CASK, the Metropolitan Indian paper was the following:

“I attacked the gun shop at which I had carefully taken aim as we charged. Away with the false, away with the new. A flash, teargas, a bang? Bang they were shooting. Bang, bang you were firing but I couldn’t see you behind all those faces. Shit, but its heavy, a really heavy thing to have to run away. Get rid of it, asshole, get rid of it. Away with the false, away with the new. Splash – straight into the Tiber. Leave it there for another time which will never come – this was not the right moment. I’d been afraid”.

However, it did allow institutionalised repression more room for manoeuvre, to split comrades up and to isolate and repress nuclei of revolt. Above all the so-called proletarian and/or workerist parties who drew a vanguardist, militarist conclusion from this experience, preparing the terrain for the spectacle of terror, glimpsed already in the demonstration in Milan with the attack on the Assolombarda.

On March 14th the funeral of Lorusso took place. Hemmed in by armoured vehicles, 5000 comrades attended it in Bologna.

After the days of revolt the movement, bedevilled by arrests and a repression without precedent, suffered a brief setback. This left the terrain open to small terrorist acts against the black economy, sweat shops and the like. But, above all, it allowed the press to get all het-up over the actions of the major terrorist organisation. On March 12th, a police inspector, Ciotta, who sympathised with Lotta Continua was killed in Turin.

On March l6th, Rome University reopened. In the assemblies, which were held, the groupuscules were to display once more their institutionalized fixation. At the same time many comrades got all raffled-up in dull discussions like those about examination requirements. In the assembly held on March 22nd to prepare for the tripartite general strike (i.e. the 3 trade union confederations) agreed for the next day, a fight broke out between those who no longer wished to put up with the farce of “dialogue” (who were in the majority) and those who intended instead to persist with the groupuscule line.

On March 23rd, the counter-demonstration held by the movement succeeded in attracting a varied cross section but there weren’t as many as previously. There were a lot of truisms but little conviction – it did look as if the previous 10 days of confrontation had tired a lot ofpeople out.

Despite the fact the university had meantime been occupied by the police, confrontation continued to break out. It was “The Red Barons” themselves who were to incur the costs – Lucio Coletti, Albertor, Asor Rosa and others – were mercilessly ridiculed but weren’t physically harmed. However, these incidents were enough for the rector to justify closing the university for the nth time. It was a preventative measure to avert renewed attempts to reassemble. The movement had to remain physically split up. It was basically the same tactic that the PCI had adopted when faced with the school students. Continuing to occupy schools and less heavily targeted by repression, the students found themselves at the centre of the movement. The FCGI (young communists) succeeded in convening false assemblies, announced as belonging to the movement, which were controlled by its militants. The intention was to get suitable motions and resolutions passed in order to split the real opposition.

On April 1st the university was reopened. In the assemblies, which were immediately held in the Humanities Dept, a platform was approved comprising the following demands:
1) The police to vacate the university.
2) Depts to remain open from 8 in the morning until 10 at night, weekends included.
3) Courses of 150 hours duration to be officially recognized.
4) The 27 to be guaranteed.
5) Freedom of choice on examination subjects.
6) Evening university courses for workers.
7) University teachers to clock-on.
8) Teachers to be refused royal ties on photocopies and a fund for expensive books to be set up.

But in April sensational terrorist acts were to multiply (the kidnapping of Costa and De Martino, the assassination of the fascist Bubak in Germany). Given prominence in the media they were to be the focus of attention.

At the same time, repression continued apace; on April 15th the Government passed the Malfatti reform as if nothing had happened. On April 16th school students protested, the only ones still allowed to do so. There were more than 30,000 but they had to reckon on the attempts at recuperation by the FGCI and the groupuscules. The struggle was fought out by way of slogans and in the end it was all too obvious people were seeking a breathing space through the school students movement to co-opt protest into official channels.

However, it was the movement, which, on the contrary, recovered its breath. In Bologna, once the armoured vehicles had been withdrawn, several Depts were reoccupied. But a difficult moment came next day in Rome when confrontation broke out afresh. On the morning of April 21st many comrades gathered outside in the Minerva quadrangle in the university to confine the demands formulated by the movement on April 1st. First among these was the demand the police withdraw from the university. The members participating had fallen slightly even though the determination to struggle was always very much alive. What’s more despite having endured hard battles the movement was as sound as ever. It continued to proclaim the university a liberated, free space to be appropriated in order to have a physical space in which to organize actions and ideas – a space that allowed individuals and groups of individuals to gather together to confront one another. Otherwise they would remain isolated in their own private spheres or by the sectarian logic of the groupuscules. It was a requirement each was mindful of and which had formed the basis of the mass confrontations, which had taken place up to then.

The assembly organised a march around the university campus. It furnished a new pretext for Roberti, the rector, to order the police to once more evacuate the university. The evacuation took place relatively calmly. The comrades present at the university were not in the least bit organised to mount a confrontation. They left without offering any resistance. But after a brief period, around 3 in the afternoon, the comrades had once more regrouped in the adjacent popular quarter of San Lorenzo where some of the more organised autonomous groups were located. They, in their turn attacked the university citadel, or rather the police detachments that were holding it. Immediately a front was established in the access roads leading from San Lorenzo to the university, which was not more than some 100 metres away. The police reacted by firing blindly and taking aim at body height (on the walls of the Via dei Sardi the holes left remain a testament to that day). The comrades reacted by hurling molotovs from behind barricades of buses creating a wall of fire to prevent a furious police assault from claiming further victims. But the armed force of the institutions did not let up, sending in a squad of police cadets firing at will in the direction of San Lorenzo. The comrades overwhelmed by the hail of bullets, this time responded by taking aim at the police. 3 cadets fell to the ground, one of them was dead, another gravely wounded.

Attempting to defend itself the movement had killed a cop. He was a proletarian just like the proletarian comrades killed by the state. Ordered to butcher he had been butchered on the contrary. The movement did not have any sacrificial lambs; it was not directed by generals locked away in sanitized rooms. The movement expressed the desires and anger of each one of its participants and each one laboured and suffered just so long as proletarians like Settimo Passamonti, a police cadet were exploited and manipulated all on account of their proletarian status.

It seems an obvious reflection but in April 1977 it wasn’t even remotely taken into consideration and the movement harboured in itself a lot that was questionable. The logic of division was established.

In the assembly held in the Architecture School immediately following the confrontation the groupuscules and the militants clashed indulging in a party political game playing the majority of the comrades were totally estranged from. They were playing reactions game finally, which, on the following day was unleashed in all its forms.
It remains necessary however, to give some consideration to this episode, which up to now has been described and analysed only for self-serving ends. Either that, or, in the majority of cases forgotten about.

The police cadet Passamonti had been killed as an act of defence by the movement. It had not been part of a pre-ordained strategy. No one in the movement of ’77 believed that Lo Russo had been killed in order to precipitate revolt (we can leave this sort of speculation to the Red Brigades). In the same way, no one in the movement wished to kill a cop to raise the tempo of combattivity (it was already too high for its own good). The fact is this last incident signalled the beginning of an action/re-action spiral which was wholly unfavourable to the movement. But like now, at that moment one could not pose the question whether the person who had killed Passamonti had acted advisedly or ill advisedly. Because, unlike the bullet that killed Lo Russo, which had been fired by the state, the shooting in Rome had not been the act of a bunch of fanatics but of an opposition movement in its entirety. Everyone shouldered the responsibility now; there was no shifting the responsibility onto others. But that was scarcely what happened the following day.

In fact, drawing sustenance from this incident, a concentrated reaction without let up was loosed. In the 20 or so schools occupied in Rome, the FUGCI and groups let fly with an anti-autonomy hysteria. The comrades belonging to the movement couldn’t muster the strength to reply. Defying public opinion the few who defended the movement risked being lynched. The quality newspapers like ” Il Messaggero” printed terrorist editorials like “it’s necessary to isolate them”. Amidst the general applause of all the institutions and their information channels, the Minister of the Interior, Cossiga, declared, “the State will respond with armed force”. In Rome, police H.Q. banned all demonstrations until May 31st.

But in San Lorenzo, the proletarian quarter, which was most involved with the revolt, the conflict with the PCI became very violent. More than half the militants and cadres of the local communist party quit to join the autonomous collectives.

On April 25th, liberation day, the PCI asked that it be allowed to stage a demonstration in contravention of the banning order. The authorisation to do so arrived two days after.

On the same day, the university senate had decided to reopen the university on May 2nd.

Meanwhile, the spectacle of terror continued, which the newspapers gave particular prominence too. In Turin, the Red Brigades killed Croce, a barrister and president of the bar. In Rome, the head of the Law Dept, Rosario Nicolo, was kidnapped and held to ransom.

In Bologna, where a meeting of the movement was to be held on April 29th / 30th, the university was closed and the town garrisoned. The implicit aim was to make sure the meeting was a failure. Many comrades from Bologna were in prison or on the run. It was a trying moment and in the course of the meeting, which was poorly attended, the weakness of the movement was obvious. The analyses on offer there, even if they were not totally wrong, were based on unreal presuppositions.

Even the group Zut/Atraverso, which had brought out “Rivoluzione” and which, during the days of revolt, had expressed a high degree of lucidity, indulged in overestimation. Confusion and the disjuncture between the movement and reality increased.

In Zut/Atraverso: “From Lyric to Epic (avoiding the tragic)” there appeared the following:

“After the trouble in March, the Italian situation was revealed in all its dramatic intensity to revolutionaries. There is no doubt this time about it, we are in a revolutionary situation – it is not just a phrase. What do you mean by that? We are going through a moment of historical rupture in the course of which the entire basis of existence for the masses, of the masses, of the relationship between people and between classes, is transformed. In the impenetrable web of everyday life, in the tension of desire, in material needs, in the form of life, in the conditions of production and reproduction – what’s specified in the Winter/Spring of 1976/’77 is an extraordinary large nucleus. No one can pretend not to see it nor believe anything will remain the same”.

That revolution can come about as a result of acts carried out by a marginalised minority of the population, however combative, is an illusion. Not that the French bourgeoisie or the Russian working class that carried out the greatest revolutions of modern times were a majority of the population. They were a minority but they were central to production even though in a minority. The Italian marginals who made up the ’77 movement were in fact excluded from the process of production and therefore as a result, without any influence on capitalist development. This does not mean they did not express a real situation of struggle and opposition. Only that, however much the movement was committed to creating a revolutionary situation, the support of living labour as the revolutionary subject – even if not the only one – becomes necessary to the movement. It was this premise, which the movement had radically inverted. As postulated by the movement of marginals the aim was to encircle the socially productive structures, thereby causing a rupture. However, the existing historical conditions were far from creating a rupture of this order.

In the assembly in Bologna this distance became tangible. The loudest voices were those of the militarists and the one fact emphasised by the bourgeois press as solidarity with terrorism voiced by some sectors of organised autonomy from northern Italy.

On May 1st in Rome during the official national demonstration, the movement clashed with union stewards. Counting on the dissatisfaction of the Lirico delegates and the workers from the south, especially from Italsider in Bagnola, the aim was to foment a division in the ranks. Though in a minority, comrades from autonomous collectives clashed with the stewards, then were charged by the police. At the same time, workers from Bagnola attempted to rush the speakers’ platform. However, it passed off without an echo and it was all over in a few minutes.

It was the beginning of the minority phase of the movement, which after the tragic May Days was no longer to find the strength to construct a revolutionary project.
In fact it was during the month of May that the repression thrown against comrades reached South American proportions without there being the pretext for it.

At the beginning of the month the DC (Christian Democrats) launched a campaign to reintroduce police detention for 48 hours, while at the judicial and informational level the idea of a plot was hatched. Judge Catalonalti (PCI ) in Bologna issued his first interrogation orders imputing the March revolt to certain comrades. The newspapers repeated this claim putting the revolt down to a plan worked out in advance by organized autonomy groups.

In this climate of a witch hunt an attempt was made in Rome on May 12th to hold a peaceful demonstration to celebrate the victory of the referendum on divorce in 1974. The police order banning all demonstrations in Rome from April 22nd was still in force. The demonstration on May 12th that had been organized by the Radical Party had been conceived as a festive occasion. A stand had been erected in the Piazza Navona on which musical groups could perform. It was an occasion on which comrades could meet up in the face of police terror. There was also the possibility on this neutral occasion of resuming a majority discussion discourse.

But on this occasion with deliberate premeditation the state organised a day of terror. On this day open war on every form of opposition announced a few days previously by Cossiga was expressed in all its brutality. Unfortunately, this time there were no armed comrades ready to defend the main body of comrades. At a point when the weaknesses were two fold – at the level of ideas and organisation – the movement was attacked frontally. May 12th was to actually resemble, in form but not in content, a demonstration in Chile the previous year.

Just after midday the police began by laying about the radical deputies (Mino Puto his face all swollen up rose to speak in Parliament that same evening). Then the attacks on the comrades began, who, unaware of what was happening were approaching the Piazza. They were all completely unarmed. The comrades withdrew concentrating in the area between the Campo di Fiori and Trastevere. Fighting broke out.

The police brought up their special squads. With the premeditated aim of killing people, plain-clothes police started firing at random. The comrades responded by hurling stones. Raising the flags from the pavements a weapon was to be had, the only one from the onset of the fighting.

Institutional repression took on the guise of a mad hysteria. At Trastevere even traffic cops armed with guns fired without warning on isolated groups of comrades. It was only later in the evening that a few molotovs succeeded in restoring a modicum of self-defence to the movement. But late in the evening the armed hand of the institutions by chance succeeded in claiming its first victim. Giorgiana Masi was assassinated by the police, shot in the back while attempting to run. So ended a day of police violence. One death was enough to serve as an example.

The events of May 12th were the maximum expression of the scale of confrontation a power intolerant of all opposition was determined on. It was a tangible expression of state determination to suppress all dissent at a critical moment in the restructuring of the productive models of capitalism. The fact that even traffic police started shooting like crazy was an indication of the hysteria attendant on pursuing such an objective.

On the following day, having decided once more to go on the offensive, there was a certain resurgence of the movement. But the killing of Giorgiana didn’t precipitate anything remotely comparable to the days in March, which Lorusso’s killing had detonated. It was clear that the movement had lost its mass characteristics, reduced to being the expression of opposing groupuscules. The mass defrauded of all opportunity for debate and active participation dwindled steadily.

It was at this point that the small groups belonging to organized autonomy took on an importance. In Rome their behaviour had been impeccable when it concerned all our comrades, but elsewhere they had openly favoured a militaristic ideology approximating ever more closely to the Stalinism of the Red Brigades.

Thus, what one had on May 13th in Rome were workers’ autonomy groups and collectives who had at this juncture made contact, to mount a counter-offensive. This time a series of small-scale combative neighbourhood demos was decided on. Up to a point the lesson of March 12th had been learnt but it was too late because it was now in a minority phase. Heavy fighting broke out and shots were fired in many city neighbourhoods – Garbatello, Prati, Montesacro, Appio. Unfortunately, they were short-lived, lasting a few hours. In Garbatello, a popular quarter, inspite of some support from the people who handed bottles and petrol to the comrades, finding a force at hand that stressed confrontation proved unsuccessful. The scale of repression reached dizzy heights. The police used guns, including machine guns, against the comrades on countless occasions, quickly becoming a standard fixture.

The comrades resisting this situation were ever fewer in number. Even if the potential for struggle remained undiminished, there was a lot of fear around. Many were either wounded, had been arrested or gone underground.

On May l4th, the police savagely attacked a peaceful sit-in by feminists on the spot where Giorgiana had been killed. The protagonists were certain sectors of organised autonomy. The victims, other than Custra, a cop killed for no reason, were some young comrades who, seized with an infatuation for armed struggle, allowed themselves to be photographed at the scene of the crime just as if it were a film.

There was a vast difference both formally and substantially between the assassination of Passamonti in Rome and that of Custra in Milan. The first had been killed as an act of defence, the second by a bunch of fanatics who were tail-ending the mass movement basically aspiring towards the setting up of an armed avant-garde organisation.
However, it is essential to point out the latter was expressive of the Milanese situation where for several years terrorism had already been operating. As a result, all mass action, a counterweight to the Stalinist shock tactics of groupuscules, had been sold short.

Still other incidents were to characterise May in Rome. On the one hand fights with fascists broke out once more in outlying districts, in particular in north Rome. Once highlighted they diverted the movement from its real objectives. On the other hand, from the assemblies held in the university it was impossible to hide from the conclusion the movement was now extremely weak. As a result the movement decided to forego any further street confrontations. The leftovers of groupusculisrn started to recompose as ill-concealed groups within the movement.

At the end of May the ban on demonstrations in Rome was lifted and the movement organized other actions in the ever-alive hope of discovering new arenas.
During summer and especially in September the scene changed radically. But it amounted to a substantially different phase, which will be examined in another text.
Here we end this description. It is followed by a chronology to make the reading easier.

********************

Chronological Summary

Spring 1975: Confrontation in Milan, Florence and Rome. 4 dead.

June 1975: Communist Party wins regional elections.

Sept. 28th 1975: Expropriation of shops in the Via del Corso. Repression is organised by the groups.

Oct 1975: National assembly of workers’ autonomy (Autonomia Operaia) in Rome.

June 1976: The Communist Party continues to advance in elections. The tri-partite union block inaugurates the “social contract” at the EUR Congress.

July 1976: Parco Lambro.

Nov. 1976: Auto-reductions at cinemas in Milan.

Dec 1976: Auto-reductions at cinemas in Rome result in confrontations.

Jan. 19 77: Humanities Dept occupied in Rome.

Jan. 1st 1977: Fascist attack on Humanities Dept in Rome.

Feb. 2nd. 1977: Exchange of fire in the Piazza Indipendenza.

Feb. 5th 1977: Rome University is completely occupied.

Feb. 17th 1977: Lama is chased out of Rome University. The university is closed.

Feb. 5th. 1977: National assembly of the movement in Rome.

March 5th 1977: A violent confrontation breaks out in Rome protesting against the sentence passed on Fabrizio Panzieri.

March 11th. 1977: Bologna. Francesco Lorusso is killed by the police. On the same day the comrades revolt, an unbelievable confrontation, a semi-insurrectional situation.

March 12th. 1977: 100,000 demonstrate in Rome. The City is laid waste with fire and sword.

April 12th. 1977: I In Rome, Passamonti, a cop, is killed.

May 12th. 1977: Giorgiana Masi is killed by police in Rome. May 13th.1977: Further confrontations in Rome.

May 14th, 1977: A high-ranking police officer, Custra, is killed in Milan.

______

source: https://libcom.org/history/memories-metropolitan-indian

A slice of an Assembly and some interventions by the Metropolitan Indians.

What do you want to talk about they ask her. “Sexuality”, she breathes, “about my sexuality”. Desperately gripping the mic Rebecca with eye-catching fear dare hardly speak. “Comrades ….I’ve had relationships with men and also with women comrades – that is I mean – I’ve also had lesbian relationships and it’s always been very beautiful….and one time I had a relationship with a gay boy who had never been with a girl……..for me there only exists comradely sexuality and sexuality is also to look a person in the eye and also to look at a flower because when I look at a flower I lose myself – this is what I wanted and I’ve never succeeded in saying it”. She stops shouting, leaves the microphone and hugs the first person she finds, laughs loudly, her words losing themselves amidst strained, anxious faces and then finally “the great petite-bourgeois taboo” breaks out in libertarian applause. In the assembly on sexuality in the occupied economics and business study building, young men and women, gays and drug addicts, frichettari, autonomists, Indians and militants of Lotta Continua participate in a heterogeneous and contradictory universe. “I believe in people, I believe in emotions” said Rebecca again and her interjection expresses better than any political discourse, the desire for liberation and love, a condition of anguish and solitude, the need to escape from the ghetto of marginalisation that is at the origin of the movement of these youths who have defined themselves with desperate irony, Metropolitan Indians.

Outside in the hall the Prevestino tribe have organised “a happening of war and festivity” as Fulvio and Theo call it, their faces painted like savages, empty beer cans in their hands, beating time on an overturned dustbin. Stefano and others are dancing in a circle. The only stall is selling frascati beer not ideological journals. “Wine Store, Wine Store” said a slogan: “Mineral water is only an illusion, the only way is the bottle” turning inside out one of the ultra-leftist preferred phrases: “The historic compromise is only an illusion, the only way is revolution”. In another room a dozen or so youths are beating on a bench. Someone comes up asking for a moment’s silence while he reads a communiqué against “Cossiga’s blue meanies” but provokes another slogan: “You are scum Cossiga look how many we are”.

It’s eight in the evening, 400 youths are standing around. I’m hungry shouts one. “Expropriate, expropriate” the others reply. Slowly they break up returning to their tribes in the villages. After a council of war -“if we are not blue meanies then we are palefaces”- the ones from Prevestino accept our invitation to have a bite to eat.

Waiting for the number 30 tram, the Indians hold a powwow between themselves. They decide that, “tonight Indians no auto-reduction. We shall pay the fare but we will make an intervention”. The half-empty tram arrives. The Indians get in shouting among themselves……………………Nello is the chief comedian. “I’m hungry,” he says with an imploring voice. “Hooligan, hooligan” his comrades echo back at him. Nello lies down in the gangway at the feet of the curious passengers. The others are standing pretending to push and shove. “5,000 hours for 35 lira this is the contract we want to pave the way for,” said Theo turning intentionally on a passenger reading a book who looks like a worker. An old woman gets on the tram and the Indians kindly give her a seat, which she takes with an embarrassed smile. “More shacks, less housing” the Indians shout wildly and provocatively while the tram conductor smiles and the worker shakes his head perplexed. Nello, tall, lanky, looking unreal with war paint on his thin face, winks: “But really what do these youths want, they are tramps, wretches and though you may not know it even drug addicts”…. “It’s my fault, it’s my fault, it’s my greatest fault” chant the Indians beating their chests, eyes cast to the ground.

Meanwhile, the tram has arrived at Travestere. Nello gets up and calls the tribe together. Then with a sly smile he turns to the passengers, “if we have disturbed you, excuse us. But to talk to you is the only way of getting to know us”.

Mario is in the habitual haunt of the Prevestino Indians. Pasta costs 1500 lira, you eat off a proper napkin, and the proprietor is a comrade. The Indians have removed their paint, unfastened the red ribbons that bound their hair and having washed off all the trappings and ingenuous arrogance and, appearing now before a pizza, become what they really are: the sub-proletariat of Rome. It’s a sad metamorphosis that unfolds before our very eyes. Also the accent has changed from that of “man of the people” to the bastardised thick, coarse Romanesque of the ghetto. “I was an illegitimate kid, used t’ut wok in Inman, then I worked in a car saleroom. They gave me 50 thousand lira without any health insurance, no taxes, no insurance said another guy also called Nello, an eighteen year old from Prevestino…… “Only now with a job, I realise there is a possibility of discussing your problems with others, the possibility of being gay without being grabbed by the neck as the PCI does, marginalising the fricchettori and heroin addicts. So with Metropolitan Indians it’s even fashionable to escape through drugs. We campaigned against heroin – the PCI and PSI have nothing to do with ’em, they chase ’em out. Before I went along with the Met’ Indians I was in Lotta Continua but I felt oppressed as an individual. I lacked creativity you see”.

Stefano is sitting next to him. He is also 18 and has had some experience of the FUGCI (Communist youth). “For a while I worked on the “Unita” festival but they kicked me out pretty quickly because certain things went on. For them the prime necessities were just eating and sleeping but pizzas cost me a lot as well not just the cinema and theatre. They did me for this, so I went along with the Indians which are the only groups trying to make a revolution. After the Lama affair the PCI accused us of being the new fascism but it’s not true because we are only unemployed, simply proletarians looking for work”.

Giampero is in his third year studying literature. He is sitting at the other side of the table. “I am a worker’s son and to keep myself I am a morning porter. At the coop you give them a cut, as they want half your wage. Most of the jobs though go to the party’s canvassers. My old man and woman belong to the PCI but they also live in a repressive situation even if my family is left wing. My mother suffers from my father’s repression even if it isn’t that harsh. My father repressed my mother because in the neighbourhood where he lived a woman is a woman and must submit. She wanted to be left wing but woe betides anyone who entered his castle. My father is the kind of person who wouldn’t allow anything to be discussed even though he’s been a card carrying member of the PCI for 30 years.”

The Metropolitan Indians appeared very recently. One heard about them at the end of November 1976 when a manifesto signed with a tomahawk called for “circles of young people” to come together. In turn circles appeared at the end of last summer in nearly all the sub-proletarian districts of Rome, in Tor Pignatori, Prevestino, Alberone, Monte Sacro and Tufello. They appeared up to a point because of the wave of news and experience of auto-reductions coming from Milan but more because of the need to escape from the desperate situation of isolation and ghettoisation in districts of Rome. “I lived in Prevestino,” said Mario, “and in Prevestino there is nothing, nowhere to meet, not a bar, no cultural events, not one moment of joy, nothing. The neighbourhood is ruled over by the PCI and the youths of FUGCI who come up with the usual things, a film by Eisenstein once in a while telling us to re-appropriate culture and a “Unita” festival good only for singing some shit, dreadful shit, then back into their holes again, everything over for them. We don’t want this. We want to reclaim our lives, which in our district are miserable, mad, and unhappy. The neighbourhood denies life and society denies life and then the PCI comes up to you proposing a film and some sacrifices”.

Even if Rome University has suffered some explosive moments the phenomena of the Metropolitan Indians comes out of the experience of the neighbourhood and for the greatest part they are made up of sub-proletarians who aren’t even students and who aren’t potentially unemployed people but simply are real, actual unemployed people. “We went to the university”, Mario said, “by way of a species of spontaneous migration because the university is the only liberated space, the only free zone, the only point of reference. But that’s not because we have much to do with bourgeois students of the 1968 variety who demand the right to study. For us, the right to life comes first”.
Some students of the ’68 variety arrive. They sit at our table. They are similar to the youths of ’68 not only because they are bourgeois and children of good families but because they suffer, today as then, from a profound sense of inferiority. Then because of the working class, for people who had a history and a definite role. Today, because of the sub-proletariat who are unemployed who more than ever they have, have the right to feel marginalised.

It is a marked contrast, a difference underlined in the way they dress, how they move, how they speak, two worlds apart, separated by origins and social strata but united by a couple of common spectres: unemployment and the lack of a future. There is Maria, 23 years of age and studying architecture. She has a house that’s hers and she invites everyone around even the Indians who not only don’t have a house, they don’t even have a neighbourhood. There is Bruno, 25 years old, a student of literature, the only one in the assembled company to play out even physically the role of the intellectual whilst the others are unemployed and look it. Perhaps it will happen to him but no one would say it. There is Chiara, 23 years of age, also studying literature. She has read Nietzsche and the Existentialists and thus arrived by an intellectual route. To the Indians she is a snob.

In Maria’s house a group is formed comprising a little of everything. PDUP, Autonomia Operaia, Lotta Continua, the collectivi. “To be an Indian,” said Massimo, 21 years of age and a militant of Lotta Continua, “is to choose a compartment not a political line. Meaning to conceive politics as joy, liberation, fantasy, meaning to quit finally the mystique of a militant made of iron who no longer lives, no longer expresses himself, who is cooped up in a structure that’s so rigid that ideas no longer come to him. These people, these old militants well, we actually really cannot call them militants”.

“And for this reason” continues Domenico, 21 years old and a student of medicine, “I have never belonged to any organisation. Even if it is useful, an organisation ends up being like a mother. To say I belong to Avanguardia Operaia is to look for an illusory security, to cling onto apron strings, to have an identity. Because politics up to now signified renouncing one’s personality, forgetting one’s real needs love, sex, interpersonal relationships”.

So to reclaim life has become the slogan of the Metropolitan Indians. “To really succeed, said Fulvio “we have chosen the path of irony which in a world as serious as this is deadly. But above all we have upset the boundaries of any relations with the political: previously one left the public to arrive at the private, at least one searched to do so. But it is not a method that has produced much, leading people to paranoia, to schizophrenia. So today we are seeking to change ourselves because only in this way can we succeed in changing the people around us… and reality. The communists accuse us of wanting everything immediately but the truth is, we’ve never had anything”.
“It really is ridiculous,” maintains Bruno, “to accuse us of making irony the basis of our politics. For us irony is only an instrument, a means of recovering creativity, which up to now has been suffocated, the ideal way of demonstrating our refusal to be integrated, of annulling it. There is a great deal of confusion over this: the arena of creativity is not a ghetto in which there are some undergraduates, whilst politics is the work of others. Shouting at Lama, “sacrifice, sacrifice or “work more, pay less” is ironical but has a precise political significance”.

“The clashes with Lama and the confrontation with the PCI has unleashed all sorts of attacks against the Metropolitan Indians: a new fascism is mentioned, a parallel “squadrismo”. In reality we are not prejudiced against the unions and the Communist Party. That is not our counter-stance. But it becomes so when, by this route, normalisation proceeds. So amongst us unemployed and marginals no mediation is possible with the line the unions take. The unions are against us when they defend the employed juxtaposing them to the unemployed, big business juxtaposed to small businesses. The unions are against us the moment they renounce struggling to reduce the working day and accept overtime”.

“And on the matter of violence” said Massimo, “there has been a lot of confusion. We aren’t clockwork oranges. I don’t think I’m a theoretician of violence. However when I’m pushed about, I use it and I reply to violence. So it’s clear then on that Thursday we did not attack workers but a mass of party bureaucrats. So much so that workers who were in the university had rolled up their banners and hadn’t attacked us”.

Dawn is breaking. Fulvio falls asleep over his un-tuned guitar. Theo already very tired takes a spoonful of something from a big copper pot. Stefano knocks the bottom out of matchbox. Massimo says, “I dare say that after a week it will be all over and the movement will be institutionalised and reabsorbed. But these last few days have been a tremendous experience. And we want to believe in this because the alternative is going back to the neighbourhood and dying there”.

(An article in “L’Europeo”… and the date is lost!)

The post Memories of a Metropolitan Indian- Italian Autonomia appeared first on Void Network.

* * * * *

1. The Invisible Hand is strangling us

“The Invisible Hand is one of (neo)classical economics’ most enduring mythologies. Its magical power is to ensure that social benefit is maximised as long as everyone acts in their own self-interest through the market—apparently. But what if the Invisible Hand were less benign than this? The recent torrent of images of police brutality which have come out of the US, have got me wondering whether this is the Invisible Hand at work—keeping the Ponzi scheme we call capitalism at play. Maybe it was the Invisible Hand that knocked on my partner’s door a couple of years ago demanding instant payment on an old debt, ‘or else’. Perhaps it was the Invisible Hand that set off the brutal explosion that destroyed the 46,000 year old sacred caves of the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura people in the Juukan Gorge, on behalf of Rio Tinto.”

(The Invisible Hand, an art project by Lara Luna Bartley@MoneyLab#X)

The Invisible Hand is clearly strangling humankind, as Gunther Anders had predicted already during the years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In his text, We, Sons of Eichmann, Anderswrites that the template of Nazism will reach its perfection when technology will get the upper hand over human beings. Auschwitz had been the first experiment in the industrialised management of extermination, and today the conjoint forces of technology and racism are preparing the Endlosung on a planetary scale. As Anders wrote:

“We can expect that the horrors of the Reich to come will vastly eclipse the horrors of yesterday’s Reich. Doubtless, when one day our children or grandchildren, proud of their perfect ‘co-mechanization’, look down from the great heights of their thousand year Reich at yesterday’s empire, at the so-called ‘third’ Reich, it will seem to them merely a minor, provincial experiment.” (We Sons of Eichmann).

This appalling prediction is coming true. The automation of extermination, according to Anders, is the essential contribution brought about by the Nazi machinery, and in our postmodern and postindustrial age, the project of automated extermination can be implemented on a much larger scale than during the age of Hitler.

2. What we couldn’t see in the 1970s  

Activists that came of age during the second half of last century were not prepared to face a comeback of the sort of ferocity that once epitomized Nazism. But in the new century, that ferocity is back: the Trump administration has restaged horrific spectacles like the separation of migrant children from their families, one of countless acts of inhuman violence extending around the globe, and particularly against migrants. 

The culture of the Italian Autonomia movement, of which I was a participant back in the day, did anticipate many aspects of the present transformation in the field of labour, technology, and class composition, but was essentially unable to foresee the exhaustion of economic growth, and was equally unaware of the persistent dynamics of fascist subjectivation.

In spite of the publication of the report on The Limits of Growth (1971), we simply did not realize the long term effects entailed by a collapse of the physical environment, nor did we fully appreciate the effects of the psychic breakdown provoked by the unbounded exploitation of mental energies. 

This is why, if we want to think about the strategies of the contemporary movement and the tactical forms of resistance that are needed now, I don’t think that my experience of the Italian 1970s helps all that much.

In the following notes, I try to reconsider the possibility of autonomous subjectivation from within the horizon of extinction disclosed by the pandemic collapse. 

3. Convulsion

In Fall of 2019 a convulsion shook the planetary body: from Hong Kong to Bogotà, from Barcelona to Beirut, Quito, Baghdad, La Paz, Santiago and Valparaiso, young people, mostly unemployed and precarious workers took to the streets in a sort of global riot. No common strategy was visible in this upheaval, no common goals. What was common, however, was a sense of suffocation, of unbearable suffering, the sense of despair expressed by the words, ‘I can’t breathe’. Three movies of interest capture that moment: Joker, by Todd Phillips, Parasite by Bong Joon-ho, and Sorry we missed you, by Ken Loach.

Then, after the convulsion, the collapse.

The pandemics that spread in the first months of 2020 acted as a sort of psycho-deflation: the global machine came abruptly to a halt.

This breakdown should not be read as an insulated event, but rather as the revelation of a multiplicity of catastrophic processes that had been underway for many years, and which suddenly crashed together: economic stagnation, environmental devastation, psychic frailty of the social organism exhausted by techno-financial aggression and the digital acceleration of nervous stimulation. 

4. Apocalypse

Etymologically speaking, this is an Apocalypse: a moment of truth in which it becomes clear that the neoliberal economy is incompatible with the survival of humankind. What is the new horizon that we are (not so) slowly discovering during the pandemic threshold? Extinction. This word, which never belonged to the political lexicon, takes central stage in the social imagination for the first time in history.

Agonising movements for liberal democracy and neo-reactionary identity (national, racial, religious, cultural, and otherwise) converge towards global civil war: identitarian conflicts in every country of the world, violence against migrants, and geopolitical chaos. The economic aggressiveness of neoliberal globalisation has fuelled the dementio-cracy of Trump: demented senescent white males obsessed by the fading of their supremacy, by their impotence. 

At last, neoliberalism is revealed to be the economic strategy of Fascism.

Social movements can do nothing to dispel this tendency. We must survive the storm, and we must create, multiply, and defend—by any means necessary—virtual and physical spaces of respiration, self-therapy, social and technical experimentation.

5. Therapy

The insurrection that followed the public execution of George Floyd by the Ku Klux Klan in blue uniforms has marked the emergence of a subjectivity that is simultaneously anti-racist, multi-racial and anti-capitalist, and acts as massive therapy for the suffocating body of the precarious class, the new intergenerational and interracial proletariat of the United States.

In the wake of the pandemic, riots have been the only way of avoiding suffocation: insurrection is first aid for the social organism and the social brain.

But now, despite the fragmentation of the precarious social body, we must perform an act of strategic imagination: what is the agenda of the movement for the coming time, particularly in the U.S., where the elections—no matter who wins—will likely open a period of widespread instability and violence?

Should we be involved in the American struggle for power, or should we stay out of the fray while the disintegration of the U.S. unfolds? 

Social movements should not be trapped in the struggle between liberal (imperialist) democracy and nationalist dementio-cracy. Nevertheless we should seize every occasion for the creation of spaces of autonomous life, and we should constantly assert and reassert a simple concept: redistribution of wealth is the only way out of hell. Equality, frugality, and redistribution of wealth.

6. Collapse

Whatever financial measures the state may take, the capitalist economy will not resurrect itself. No recovery, no growth, no social peace are in sight for the next ten years. Still, as long as we are unable to escape the corpse of capitalism, this corpse will continue imposing its rules upon us, which no longer correspond whatsoever to the dynamics of social possibility.

In this period, as we resist the convergent aggressions of racism and corporate capital, as we attempt to survive, we must learn the lesson of the pandemic collapse: the integrated domain of techno-financial abstraction was severed by the biological materiality of the virus. What is needed now is not monetary abstraction, but useful products of knowledge and cooperation: food, care, education. Nutritional self-reliance, public health measures, and autonomy in education will be the concerns of the social movement. We know that this will not happen peacefully, and that the violence of economic power and of fascism will constantly threaten social autonomy. Therefore, the problem of self-defence must be a permanent subject of awareness and experimentation.

7. Trauma

Presently, as the pandemic continues to unfold, large corporations are extracting enormous profits from the widespread distress, and inequality is skyrocketing: a small minority of people are thriving on the suffering of the large majority of the human kind. 

This is the effect of a rule that is embedded like an automatism in our language, imagination, and daily life: subjection to monetary rule, and above all to debt—it’s a mental trap that the ongoing trauma just might possibly sever. This trauma will unfold over a long period of time, as its effects in culture, behavior, and in the collective unconscious are progressively registered. 

We must act upon our post-traumatic mental evolution: we need to heal and simultaneously to revive solidarity.

8. Insolvency

As the global economy will be in a state of permanent collapse, society must learn to become independent of the market, and must create the conditions for extra-market survival. We must experiment at a small and large scale with nutrition, education, sanitary self-reliance, and the deactivation of monetary rule over everyday life, whenever and wherever this is possible. 

The expropriation of the expropriators must to be organised scientifically—a redistribution of wealth is the only way to avoid a planetary holocaust. 

Non-recognition of debt must be declared whenever and wherever it is possible. A general insolvency has to be organized.

I know that this is wishful thinking at the present moment. 

I know that the majority of people are seeking protection in identity, belonging, nation, race… and this is escalating war. I know that we cannot stop this trend, as the aggressive energies accumulated in the past decades, and exacerbated in the Trump years, are inertially headed toward a clash. I know that this storm cannot be dispelled completely; however, we should try to sidestep the storm as much as possible, and to create spaces of autonomy. 

9. Happiness

Extinction has emerged as the horizon of our young century.

Let’s relax and accept this reality, and not panic. After all, to devolve sooner or later into nothing is the fate of every organism.

For now, the question is this: is a happy life possible within the horizon of extinction?

If not, we’re doomed, and extinction will be the only outcome of frantic competition and military enmity, after a period of expansive hell.

But I don’t believe that we are doomed—yes, a happy life is possible within the horizon of extinction. 

Individual extinction is in no way a new perspective: we are familiar with the prospect of our individual mortality. However, we have managed here and there to create the conditions for a happy life, haven’t we? So this is the task: to create and proliferate conditions for happiness, no matter what.

Reality is brutal, but we must avoid growing brutal ourselves: this, today, is one possible meaning of the word “autonomy.”

Only when a large minority (a movement) is able to show that a happy life is possible in the horizon of extinction, can a line of escape from extinction possibly be found.

Oct 23th, 2020

Images: David Maisel

source: Ill Will Editions

The post Extinction, Rebellion, Happiness- by Franco ‘BIFO’ Berardi appeared first on Void Network.

Félix Guattari is widely discussed among philosophers, particularly feminists and specialists in ecology and technology. But in the Anglophone world, political organisers tend to ignore him. In part this is due to academic paywalls and university strictures confining his work, but the problem goes further: the stylistic conservatism of so much of the Anglo-American left has impeded the capacity to learn from his insights, because they are presented in an nontraditional and unfamiliar style. This resistance has obscured his continuing activity as a participant and organiser in a variety of international struggles.

This is not merely of historical interest; these practical and conceptual experiences may prove to revitalise contemporary projects. Marxism has experienced a series of crises around the question of the relationship of “identity” to fundamental economic structures. Guattari contributed new ways of thinking and practicing politics that help us rethink this challenge. From a starting point in the Trotskyist movement, he integrated elements of Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalysis. However, his most famous writings were produced in collaboration with a philosopher, Gilles Deleuze. Guattari drew from a revolutionary interpretation of psychoanalysis, in order to express a theory of desire that exceeds the bourgeois family and the individualism it produces.

In his solely authored works, as well as his philosophical projects co-authored with Deleuze, Guattari expanded the Marxist conceptual armoury to help us better understand gender, sexuality, identification with capitalist values, and the necessity of revolutionary organisation. Moreover, his philosophical elucidation of the ‘assemblage’ provides a capacious and materialist way of thinking the interconnectedness of economic and social struggles against exploitation and oppression. His distinct ideas remain evident in rich descriptions of contemporary problems, such as Jasbir K. Puar’s approach to ‘homonationalism’ and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s exploration of American indigenous thought. It is helpful to reinvestigate the full scope of Guattari’s work in order to discover tools to assist revolutionary socialists today.

Marxism and Psychoanalysis

Guattari began his career with a dual fidelity; to the Marxist tradition as developed by Trotskyism, and to psychoanalysis as reinvented by Lacan. In the 1950s, French psychoanalysis was shaken by Lacan’s controversial insights. Sigmund Freud’s daughter, Anna, distorted the radical potential of psychoanalysis by advocating the strengthening of the ego (the conscious individual self). Lacan believed that this emphasis on the ego would only intensify social repression and miss the purpose of analysis, which was the discovery of unconscious desire. Especially in the United States, psychoanalysis has often had a history of conservative social practice – particularly in its inscription of a regime of repressive gender norms. In France, however, Lacan pioneered a strongly anti-authoritarian reading of Freud that might be mobilised against the oppression of women and those with same-sex attractions. Guattari’s Marxist politics led him to explore this potential to its fullest.

This outlook attracted the interest of a number of French Marxists. In particular, Louis Althusser commended Lacan and endorsed his views. Although a member of the French Communist Party, Althusser tried to develop an anti-Stalinist critique within it. His circle of intellectuals became increasingly sympathetic to the Chinese revolution and to Maoism, which they believed had overcome the state-capitalist economy of the Soviet Union. In the culturally avant-garde circles of the 1960s, there was a trend toward reading Lacan, Althusser, and Mao Zedong together. In this context, Guattari was unusual in that he was very sceptical of Althusser and Mao, and instead maintained a critical inheritance from Leon Trotsky. For Guattari, the Maoists were puritanical and joyless, and remained wedded to an authoritarian state structure. In contrast, he championed a viewpoint inspired by Trotskyism and the decolonisation movements; this critical viewpoint appeared in a journal he co-edited, titled La Voie Communiste.

Beginning in 1955, Guattari worked at La Borde, a clinic open to patients who were unresponsive to traditional methods. Guattari had no choice but to develop new techniques in order to treat psychosis. Freudian theory makes a distinction between neurosis, the product of excessive repression, and psychosis, arising from a failure to limit imagination by reality. Guattari initially drew from Lacan’s approach. In Lacan’s view, psychotics have not fully entered the Symbolic order; they have not developed an ego separate from the world in which they are immersed. For him, this disorder also carries a certain rigor or truth; psychosis reveals the artificiality of the ego. Lacan’s reading of Freud argues that the ego is a product of social repression and that analytic experience ought to counter it, and instead reveal the unconscious desires of the analysand. Analysis could then understand the social factors that determine ego-formation, and by this means, develop a practice conducive to a new form of subjectivity. The experience of subjectivity, drawing from the realisation of the unconscious as prior to the ego, might allow a renegotiation of the relationship with the social order. It was this potential that Guattari would go on to explore.

Rejecting Lacan, Encountering Deleuze

At the end of the 1960s, Guattari began to question some of Lacan’s theses and eventually certain preconceptions of psychoanalysis as a whole. Lacan had been inspired by the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure. This framework characterised analysis as attention to signifiers; the unconscious as manifested literally in spoken language. Lacan would come to speak of motérialité, a portmanteau combining the French words for ‘word’ and ‘materiality.’ He read Freud’s insight as the revelation of unconscious drives, through unexpected alternative interpretations of phrases or statements, or errors of communication that could reveal repressed desires. He hypothesised that the unconscious is ‘structured like a language.’ This did not indicate that the mind was comprised only of linguistic elements; rather, he meant that mental phenomena could be understood according to the mechanisms of signification described by Saussure. This attention to alternative interpretations, beyond intentional meaning, could reveal ambiguities in thought and speech that would escape the workings of social repression.

Further, Lacan believed that the apparent fixity of meaning was a product of an individual’s entry into the symbolic order, which required the self-recognition of a distinct ego. He believed that this ego formation, and the symbolic order which registered it, required a process of socialisation within the family. Freud placed emphasis on the profundity of the classical myth of Oedipus, the king who murders his father and marries his mother. In his account of the ‘mirror stage,’ Lacan formalised this myth. He described ego-formation as bound to an imitation of the father’s ability to speak, and enmeshed in relations of hostility, mortality, and sexuality as a result.

While Guattari had been convinced of this in the 1950s, by the end of the subsequent decade he began to question Lacan’s emphasis on the signification of language, and to see this as reliant on Oedipal relations (even in the formalised, abstract form that Lacan gave them). Guattari believed that this would continue to reify social conditions that limit the possibility of creativity. He approached the problem by reconsidering the relationship between individual subjects and social reality. In his efforts to do so, he became inspired by an unusual book of philosophy by Deleuze: Difference and Repetition, published in 1968.

Like Lacan, Deleuze was strongly affected by Saussure’s linguistics. He was also impressed by Althusser’s re-reading of Marx, itself indebted to Freud. However, Deleuze argued that difference could only be properly understood if it exceeded the question of representation. This presented a considerable challenge and modification to Saussure’s model, which presented signification (meaning) as reliant on differences between signs. For Deleuze, changes could be thought as immanent processes in which an element does not signify a secondary meaning; rather, each concept and object in the world could logically participate and affect one another without a process of signifying. That is to say, a concept does not stand in for a material object, but rather each is autonomous – the concept and the object reciprocally affect one another, without priority for one over the other.

Deleuze developed this method partly by attention to historical processes – each historical moment can only be understood by the interconnectedness of all of its elements; but further, this understanding is itself an intervention in the situation, participating among other factors. For example, Deleuze reads the novelist Marcel Proust as demonstrating the active and creative aspect of memory. For him, reminiscence is not simply a representation of the past, but a new process of invention. Over-emphasising the linguistic analysis of social reality would obscure the social process of determination by forces of production and their concrete relations. Deleuze argued that this insight would realise an affirmative mode of thought in which potentiality would be discovered and valorised, rather than confined or judged according to a prior norm. Potentiality described the raw capacity of action of any object or agent; Deleuze chose not to understand things according to their pre-given purpose or origin, but rather by their capacities. Production became an organising principle; representation was set aside in favour of an understanding of mechanisms participating in a world continually created by the multiplicity of entities. For Deleuze, affirmation opened a better awareness of the natural and social forces producing any event, as well as the ability to transform these relations. While this was primarily expressed in formal, theoretical terms, Guattari would apply these insights toward more concrete political problems.

In his essay of 1969, ‘Machine and Structure,’ Guattari applied this way of thinking to structuralism, trying to overcome its tendency to reduce real processes to language, by offering his conception of a ‘machine.’ He argued that subjectivity could be understood without the durability of an ego, rooted in imitation of the father. Lacan had already argued that this ego should be displaced in favour of the experience of desires that exceed it, but Guattari wished to radicalise this and to go further. Machines (both in thought and in practice) would exceed the bounds of Lacan’s signifier and its linguistic frame of reference. The machine, rather than depending on representation (words that could represent things), would be a process that co-implicates creation and interaction. Guattari suggests that the world should be conceived according to interconnected processes. These processes (‘machines’) make up individual and group activity, with each individual process a component of a larger one. This point of view led him to reject Lacan, and to begin a close collaboration with Deleuze. Together, they tried to produce a new creative project that would draw from psychoanalytic ideas, but overcome its reference to social normalisation – through the integration of a Marxist social analysis and political commitment to revolution from below.

Anti-Oedipus

Guattari’s break with Lacan was affected by the reading of Deleuze, but also by concrete events in the world around him. In May 1968, a student strike took place, followed by mass action by workers. These events took place without support by the PCF or its affiliated unions; Althusser was unwilling to break with the party line and refused to condone the strikes. Lacan was initially intrigued by the events, but subsequently took a dim view. He believed that the students were acting out, attempting to derive a reaction from authority figures rather than engaging in the ongoing work of uncovering and renegotiating desire. By contrast, Guattari and Deleuze were elated and inspired.

Behind the stable matrix of the law-giving Father, separating the individual from the desire of the Mother, Guattari identified social power. The Symbolic law existed in the cop and the boss just as much as in the presence of the Father – and indeed, familial authority might even be secondary to these other forms of economic and social power outside the home. To identify the transhistorical law of selfhood with the bourgeois family, then, would lead to reconciliation with a social order built on foundations of authority and domination. In contrast, they saw the new social movements as a vast range of social experimentation. Questioning and rejecting the police along with the family opened the possibility of practical changes in the condition of possibility for individual understanding, beyond the limits of the clinic or therapy.

The 1968 movement advocated a transformation of everyday life and refused the confinement to the economic sphere or to improved consumer goods. The militants of these events demanded a rethinking of the family order and of social taboos and restrictions around sexuality and creativity. This revolutionary outlook, then, confronted the structures and institutions that created an alienated experience of life. Deleuze and Guattari believed that their affirmative philosophy could add new conceptual tools in order to assist and mobilise this new spirit of liberation. They gave a new meaning to the notion of ‘alienation’; original human nature could not be retrieved and liberation could never be the recovery of a prior innocence. Yet, May 1968 showed that the social relations of the capitalist order repressed and limited the multiplicity and potential of the world, rendering subjects alienated in their inability to experience collective creativity. In their view, revolution would invent new forms of community.

In 1972, Deleuze and Guattari published Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. This book developed the earlier philosophical criticism of representative thinking, applying it to society and the mode of production. It was not only inspired by the May 1968 events, but also had a decisive effect on many revolutionaries of that generation, who believed that the book captured the new economic, social, and political realities of the era. Deleuze and Guattari argued that psychoanalysis misconceived consciousness as a theatre (a stage in which psychodramas are acted out), and instead psychic experience ought to be understood as a factory; a place of production. They were cognisant of Althusser’s theory of ideological state apparatuses, which materially produced individual subjects. The apparatuses produce certain capacities, skills, and bodies of knowledge, but they also transmit obedience to political authority and susceptibility to economic exploitation. However, they rejected the notion of ideology insofar as they believed that it was still too bound to questions of meaning and interpretation. They did not view ideological critique as fundamentally about the correction of false consciousness, which could be dispelled by a scientific viewpoint.

Instead, they argued that capitalism acted to set constraints on possible associations and activity, through channelling collective desires. Capitalism had the inevitable effect of inciting new needs and desires for individuals and groups, which it tried to satisfy through commodities (as well as disciplining the class through the coercive arm of the state). However, Deleuze and Guattari argued that the revolutionary struggle of workers would naturally exceed any satisfaction that could be offered through consumerism, or the punitive mechanisms of the law. They believed that working-class self-activity was inherently more affirmative and more active than the methods of punishment and reward offered by capitalist structures or institutions.

Deleuze and Guattari on Revolutionary Organisation

There is a common tendency to read Anti-Oedipus as an uncritical celebration of anarchic, undisciplined activity and romantic excess. For example, Alain Badiou and other French Maoists of this period called them ‘anarcho-desirers.’ However, a close reading of the book counters this impression, particularly in light of Guattari’s lifelong activities. Deleuze and Guattari do not call for hyper-individualism. Rather, they called for a new type of revolutionary group that could effectively counter recuperation by the capitalist state. In contrast to the contemporary doxa, which some have called ‘anarcho-liberalism’ – an emphasis on local struggles, modest demands, unstable structures, and proceduralism – Deleuze and Guattari always insisted on the need for organisation, and the ultimate goal of a new society. As Deleuze wrote in a preface to Guattari’s writings, published the same year as Anti-Oedipus: ‘Clearly, a revolutionary machine cannot remain satisfied with local and occasional struggles: it has to be at the same time super-centralised and super-desiring.’ This emphasis is explicit in a later book by the two authors, A Thousand Plateaus. There Deleuze and Guattari define their problem as ‘that of smashing capitalism, of redefining socialism, of constituting a war machine capable of countering the world war machine by other means.’ They stipulate that this war machine will avoid ‘the war of extermination’ and ‘the peace of generalised terror,’ but rather proceed toward ‘revolutionary movement.’ Guillaume Sibertin-Blanc describes this problematic as ‘neo-Leninist.’ He emphasises Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of the socialist ‘war machine’ by its distinction from state organs. In this regard, their viewpoint demands collective organisation from below, without emulating prior authorities. This war machine would emerge from situated experience, but would also refuse any limitation to a single sphere of struggle – the social, economic, and cultural would be practically intertwined.

Deleuze and Guattari express ambivalence about the Leninist legacy. In Anti-Oedipus, they admire Vladimir Lenin’s command of slogans and his ability to produce new modes of power, new popular machines. By declaring ‘All power to the Soviets’ at the right moment, Lenin was able to harness desires that exceed and overpower the state. However, they saw the historical circumstances of that time as necessitating the transformation of this novelty into a new form of state capitalism. They believed that the degeneration of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union produced a faulty organisational form, incapable of accomplishing a socialist revolution. ‘Leninist’ parties of their time, including the orthodox-Trotskyist variants, did not successfully reinvent the possibility of revolutionary organisation. Guattari believed that this could be done by creating a new revolutionary group that could coordinate and deepen various social struggles, transforming its members by their shared commitment to diverse fights against oppression.

They did not deduce an apathetic or individualist conclusion from their critique of the Stalinist legacy. While Deleuze’s work was primarily theoretical and philosophical in nature, Guattari remained actively committed to various social movements of his time. These included the beginnings of the LGBT movement in France, workers’ and students’ activity in Italy, and diverse social movements that countered the Brazilian military dictatorship. All of these social struggles should be studied further, and Guattari’s involvement in them is of considerable significance.

Guattari and International Social Movements: France, Italy, Brazil

Anti-Oedipus had immediate effects on French social movements. Among these was the beginning of what was then called the ‘gay liberation movement.’ In France, the Homosexual Front for Revolutionary Action (FHAR) was among the first organisations to demand social equality for lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals. In addition, the group had a conscious anti-capitalist political perspective. The group’s founder, Guy Hocquenghem, took inspiration from Anti-Oedipus. The desire to overcome the bourgeois family, and to reveal it as bound to other forms of social authoritarianism, inspired a practical and theoretical rejection of heteronormativity (to apply a later term produced by queer theory). Guattari helped to organise and publish the FHAR’s first public pronouncements, as well as arranging support from Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, and others. This led to political repression of the publication as well as legal action against Guattari himself, who was fined for his ‘affront to public decency.’ Guattari publicly defended himself and the right to expression of the FHAR, in a landmark case for French gays and lesbians. Guattari was also among the first French intellectuals to defend the rights of transgender people in France and abroad. In his defense of the FHAR, Guattari said:

This is, in fact, more about transsexuality than homosexuality: at issue is the definition of what sexuality would be in a society freed from capitalist exploitation and the alienation it engenders on all levels of social organisation. From this perspective, the struggle for the liberty of homosexuality becomes an integral part of the struggle for social liberation.

Guattari’s social commitment on this matter cleaved with his philosophy. In his writings with Deleuze, Guattari described a process of ‘becoming-woman’ that could alter the potential of one’s own body. This concept could include concrete transgender experience, as well as conceptual, imaginative innovations that may not involve an individual permanently transitioning from one gender to another. He saw such practices as politically valuable, because they free desire (in thought and action) from the constraints put on it by the capitalist order. A new vision of solidarity, beyond fixed, identity, is at stake here; rising from a struggle to change the way the body and mind has been conditioned by an alienated society. Guattari met with organisations that defended transgender people outside France; these included the Gay Group of Bahia, in Brazil. These practical gestures of solidarity and experiences of new social struggles enriched his understanding of global potential for collective reshaping of desire.

Despite their novelty of expression, the FHAR did not have a good understanding of the particular oppression of women and lesbians in capitalist society. As a result, in 1971 a separate group, the Goines Rouges (Red Dykes) split off. Their most famous figure, Monique Wittig, drew from the work of Deleuze and Guattari in order to dissolve sexual difference itself; she paraphrased their emphasis on singularity to contend that there are “as many sexes as individuals.” In this reading, Deleuze and Guattari’s position could be martialed in favour of a feminist strategy of gender abolition. However, others have subsequently received their work differently. Rosi Braidotti and Elizabeth Grosz believe that their emphasis on embodiment over representation is compatible with a contemporary approach to sexual difference that acknowledges the excess and contingency of sexed bodies. This draws in part from the reception of their ideas by feminists in Italy.

Anti-Oedipus and Guattari in particular were extraordinarily influential for the Italian left of the 1970s. Anti-Oedipus was translated into Italian in 1975, where a social crisis was taking place. With a high degree of unemployment, government austerity measures, and widespread dissatisfaction with the economic and political order, many young people sought out a revolutionary path. As François Dosse writes, a ‘series of far-left Italian currents found a new language in the theses of Deleuze and Guattari, notably in Anti-Oedipus […] and the notion of ‘desiring machines.’’ In September of 1977, Guattari appeared at a great colloquium in Bologna, comprised of people who organised and acted for politics beyond the official left. These included feminists, gay and lesbian groups, as well as workers’ organisation. As Guattari’s friend, the painter Gérard Fromanger, recalled:

This was the first time that we had seen a demonstration of twenty thousand young women shouting and making the ‘pussy’ sign with their hands. It was so beautiful! That was the first time we saw that it was possible! Women Power!

Guattari was regarded as a leading figure in this movement. He became friends with another radical philosopher, Antonio Negri. By 1978, the situation in Italy had become violent; the revolutionary movement had split between a terrorist wing, the Red Brigades, and forces based in more mass-oriented politics (like Autonomia Operaia, Negri’s group). The state was able to take the violence of the terrorist groups as a pretext to repress the movement as whole. The Italian state prosecuted Negri and held him responsible for the Red Brigades, in a famous and protracted episode of persecution. Guattari himself attempted to defend Negri and others.

In addition, Guattari drew on his own fame and reputation in the Italian scene in order to dissuade young militants from adopting terrorist tactics. Guattari became concerned that solidarity was becoming eroded by particularism, and that struggles in Europe were no longer communicating with one another. In a later discussion, he cites the case of a feminist group that split from Lotta Continua, one of the Italian revolutionary organisations. While the new feminist group made a number of theoretical and practical contributions, the splitting into smaller groups and the inability of them to communicate with one another was very detrimental to the Italian struggle. He tried to overcome this sectarianism in subsequent activities.

In the early 1980s, Guattari became interested in the Brazilian social movements, in danger of repression by the military dictatorship of João Figueiredo. In particular, he was intrigued by the convergence of popular opposition forces and their ability to work together. Guattari’s experiences in France and Italy had made him increasingly aware of the problems of a fragmented, divided revolutionary movement. As he had argued in his philosophical works with Deleuze, an organisational form capable of overcoming the state was necessary. Guattari hoped that a new revolutionary party could articulate the commonalities among different struggles – the workers’ movement, anti-racism, feminism, gay liberation, and other movements.

In Brazil at this time, the Worker’s Party had some success in coordinating among these different struggles. As Sue Branford and Jan Rocha summarise,

The Workers’ Party attracted traditionally incompatible groups, including Trotskyists, Leninists, Marxist, Catholics from the liberation wing of the Catholic Church, scarcely literate workers and renowned intellectuals. It was the first mass party in Brazil with predominantly socialist ideas and the only mainstream party with activists and political activity outside electoral periods.

As Omar G. Encarnación has documented, the Worker’s Party also coordinated all of these sectors with the beginnings of the LGBT movement, becoming one of the first political expressions of the Latin American queer community. Guattari was fascinated by the possibility that the Workers’ Party could fuse countercultural tendencies with working-class activity. This party formation, he believed, could function as an instrument of the Brazilian masses, guiding a united front against the military dictatorship. He applied the term ‘autonomy’ to refer to a range of liberating practices and workers’ self-activity, which he understood to be critical for developing an organisation’s revolutionary capacity. As he put in, in 1982:

Autonomy is a function. The ‘function of autonomy’ can be embodied effectively in feminist, black, ecological, homosexual, or other groups. But it can also be embodied in machines for struggle on a large scale – as in the case of the PT [Workers’ Party] at this time of electoral campaign.

I really believe that organisations such as parties or unions can be fields in which to exercise the function of autonomy.

In 1982, he interviewed the party’s leader, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who was at that time an idealistic trade-union organiser. Guattari understood that the Workers’ Party would succeed in organising popular forces in order to overcome the dictatorship. Through the early 1980s, Figueiredo presided over a transition to electoral democracy, responding to pressure from below. However, as the 1980s went on, the Workers’ Party shed its revolutionary character and became a more conventional social-democratic organisation. Lula was elected president of Brazil in 2002, after considerably centralising power in his own hands. The party had considerable popularity for years, but was ultimately driven from power after a number of corruption scandals, many of which were trumped-up. At present, Lula remains a rallying point for Brazilian democracy and resistance to new austerity measures.

The Workers’ Party has not answered Guattari’s hopes (and those of Brazilian people). However, his enthusiasm for its early phase was not misplaced. Guattari had the correct intuition that social struggles for different forms of individual empowerment and against social oppression required an alliance with working-class struggle for economic change. Today, it is necessary to reapply his theoretical orientation toward a ‘machine for struggle’ that could win social autonomy, in Brazil and elsewhere. The Workers’ Party ability to fight on multiple fronts, transforming society as a whole, was an early prototype for the capacity to link diverse struggles and to coordinate their potential to unsettle the alienating relations that maintain the capitalist state. Guattari helps us to recognise the various sectors of society whose potential for creativity might one day act as compositional elements of revolutionary agency; in this sense, solidarity is a responsibility to question the stability of our bodies and social practices. The question of politics becomes a collective project of building new revolutionary subjects, through abandoning the selves that capitalism assigns us.

Possibilities Opened by Guattari’s Legacy: Jasbir K. Puar and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro

In collaboration with Deleuze, Guattari developed his concept of machines toward a broader concept, the ‘assemblage.’ In his description, assemblages bring together an assortment of different practical machines. They do not produce a new dialectical unity, but they maintain functioning across disparate elements. Assemblage-theory can describe machines that oppress us, as well as new machines that overcome or exceed this oppression. Jasbir K. Puar, in her essay of 2005, ‘Queer Times, Queer Assemblages’ drew from this approach in order to understand multicultural experience in the world of the twenty-first century. Puar argued that this could present a more dynamic and capacious way of thinking identity and difference, in comparison with another highly influential model, intersectionality. In Puar’s critical presentation, intersectionality ‘presumes components – race, class, gender, sexuality, nation, age, religion – are separable analytics,’ whereas assemblage is ‘a series of dispersed but mutually implicated networks,’ ‘attuned to interwoven forces that merge and dissipate time, space, and body.’ Put briefly, she writes: ‘Intersectionality privileges naming, visuality, epistemology, representation, and meaning, while assemblage underscores feeling, tactility, ontology, affect, and information.’

An assemblage is constructed of imagination and desire, as well as nature and economic production. Puar applies this mode of thought to understand the specific mode of oppression faced by turbaned Sikh immigrants and prisoners. She argues that the social construction of their appearance cannot be understood very well by the addition of various qualities (raced, gendered, or otherwise) but rather can be better thought as formed by a series of complex and interrelated historical relations. She applies the same method to describe what she calls ‘homonationalism’: the re-evaluation of same-sex desire in order to establish a new form of patriotism and imperialist politics.

Homonationalism is an example of a social transformation and recuperation, along lines described by Deleuze and Guattari. Capitalism incites and liberates desires, but then domesticates them toward the ends of the capitalist state. These relations of sexuality, technology, national identity, racial distinction, and class relations cannot be understood independently, but only in their inseparability and co-determinacy. Deleuze and Guattari believed that a mode of thinking more aware of these complex relations, across nature, desire, and technology, would be better suited to produce new assemblages that could counter and overcome the limitations and domination exercised by the state.

They believed that this mode of thinking, towards the assemblage, drew from a variety of twentieth-century innovations in the arts and sciences. However, they also believed that they had rediscovered a more communal way of thinking that preceded the subordination of thought to capital accumulation and state dictates. For this reason, they were fascinated by the thought and practices of indigenous peoples whose societies had not been subordinated by a state. They have been a valuable aid to those who translate and interpret the philosophies of these indigenous populations.

Guattari’s visits to Brazil in the early 1980s had a strong effect on the intellectual culture there. His ideas were picked up not only in radical politics but also in clinical psychology and in anthropology. One result of this was the combination of his way of thinking with attempts to translate and understand the traditional philosophy of Brazilian Indians. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro writes,

The philosophy of Deleuze, and more particularly the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia that were written with Guattari, is where I found the most appropriate machine for retransmitting the sonar frequency that I had picked up from Amerindian thought. Perspectivism and multinaturalism, which are, again, objects that have been resynthesised by anthropological discourse (indigenous theories, I dare say, do not present themselves in such conveniently pre-packaged fashion!) are the result of the encounter between a certain becoming-Deleuzian of Amerindian ethnology and a certain becoming-Indian of Deleuze and Guattari’s thought.

‘Perspectivism’ and ‘multinaturalism’ are each concepts, as Viveiros de Castro says, that emerge from the study of traditional indigenous thought. They also describe aspects of Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage theory. The assemblage is a product of multiple interrelated sources and factors; each of these can be recognised as ‘natural,’ and each has an active character, rather than standing as a passive object of knowledge.

Perspectivism is an idea that revises the traditional conception of subjects and objects: Rather than a thinking, perceiving subject who gathers knowledge about a more passive object, as in certain forms of Western thought, American Indians of Brazil posited reciprocal knowledge and interconnected, dynamic relations among many different elements of a situation. This is not the same as a simple relativism where all views are equally correct – some ways of thinking and acting are better than others – but different cultures each have their own means of constructing their world, through experiment, imagination, and interaction.

‘Multinaturalism’ follows from an expanded concept of nature; the idea that human civilisation does not represent a break from natural processes. Deleuze and Guattari insisted,

[W]e make no distinction between man and nature: the human essence of nature and the natural essence of man become one within nature in the form of production or industry, just as they do within the life of man as a species.

This means that there is not a ‘fall’ from nature; the foundation of civilisation has not escaped natural laws, and a prior natural harmony also cannot be restored. Rather, present technology and the extractivism on which it relies takes place within a complex ecosystem in which human and non-human animals as well as botanical and geological formations all of have dynamic relations among one another. This develops Marx’s own views on nature, in that he also saw capitalism as producing an illusory division between society and nature. Deleuze and Guattari (and Viveiros de Castro’s exploration of their work in terms of indigenous thought) respond to the question that Marx poses regarding continuity between the human and natural worlds. In a world wracked by climate change, revolutionary struggles need to be imagined in ways that do not presume a passive nature, ready to be mastered by human technology. Rather, new political projects will draw from profound understanding of nature’s autonomous potential.

Indigenous communities are now at the forefront of anti-capitalist struggle, particularly in South America. Jeffery Webber has written powerfully of the ‘left-indigenous movements [that] increasingly come into confrontation with the compensatory state and the extractive model of accumulation,’ in Bolivia and elsewhere. However, indigenous resistance has also become startlingly significant in North America, with the Dakota Access Pipeline protests at Standing Rock Indian Reservation, which began in 2016. In order to relate to these movements and to treat indigenous thought and lands with respect, we must re-think some of our own categories. Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas proved helpful in this respect for Brazilians, and their innovations may assist us in becoming more open to indigenous concepts and understandings in the Anglophone world, as well.

Guattari contributed intriguing new ways of thinking and extended the tradition of philosophical creation. However, I insist that he developed these ideas as interventions to assist the social struggles of his time. To some degree, his work has become relegated to academic life or to the realm of aesthetic theory. His ideas should be reconsidered, though, for their process of development alongside the great collective practices of the late twentieth century – not only the insurrection of 1968, but feminism, the LGBT movements, and decolonisation struggles. His thought is not the disconnected or hermetic production of an eccentric, but born of practice and conversation with mass events. We ought to receive his critique of identity as produced by alienating institutions in capitalist society; but also draw on his work in order to rethink the way that questions of culture and desire can function socially and politically. Guattari can help us think of struggles around anti-racism and gender expression not as battles for representation or inclusion, but the reshaping of desire toward practical solidarity and creative activity.

Thanks to Fainan Lakha for her assistance with this essay.

Andrew Ryder teaches at Texas Christian University. He has written numerous articles on French Marxism, decolonisation struggles in Latin America, and twentieth-century Continental philosophy.

source: Salvage

The post ‘The Function of Autonomy’: Félix Guattari and New Revolutionary Prospects appeared first on Void Network.

ΧΡΟΝΟΣ και ΕΠΑΝΑΣΤΑΣΗ
στο έργο του Αντόνιο Νέγκρι.

Οι εποχές , οι πράξεις
τα συμβάντα και οι προοπτικές

Ομιλητές:

Νίκος Πρατσίνης (Μεταφραστής)
Παναγιώτης Καλαμαράς (Εκδότης)
Γιώργος Σωτηρόπουλος (διδ.Πολιτικής Φιλοσοφίας- Κενό Δίκτυο)

Παρουσίαση– συντονισμός Γιάννης Ραουζαίος– Κενό Δίκτυο
(κριτικός κινηματογράφου, συγγραφέας)

Πέμπτη 26/4/ 2018—ώρα 20.30
Ελεύθερος Κοινωνικός Χώρος ΝOSOTROS
Θεμιστοκλέους 66 Εξάρχεια

Η ΕΠΑΝΑΣΤΑΣΗ όπως και ο Χρόνος, είναι δύο σημαίνοντα τα οποία αναζητούν στην πολύπλοκη και γεμάτη αντιφάσεις εκτύλιξη κοινωνικής-ιστορικής διαδικασίας, την ανανοηματοδότηση τους.

Ο 21ος αιώνας ένας άγριος και τρομερός ως προς τα διακυβεύματα του αιώνας, μόλις τώρα αρχίζει πλέον να δείχνει τις φοβερότερες προεκτάσεις του προσώπου του.
Χρέος όσων απο εμάς επιζητούν την υπέρβαση αυτών των πλευρών και την συνολικοποίηση μιας διαφορετικής προσέγγισης σύμφωνης με την εποχή μας, που όμως το πρόσημο της είναι προς την πλευρά των ελευθεριακών πράξεων και ιδεών και των καταπιεσμένων κοινωνικών ομάδων και κοινοτήτων, είναι να συντελέσουν σε μια ριζική πολιτισμική πορεία-τομή πάνω στα όσα έχουν έως τωρα συμβεί και εγγραφεί στο κοινωνικό φαντασιακό, απελευθερώνοντας εκείνες τις δυνάμεις και τις πνευματικές και πολιτικές συλλήψεις, που θα φωτίσουν την οδό πρός την παγκόσμια ελευθεριακή συγκρότηση και την κοινωνική μεταμόρφωση.
Αυτό δεν μπορεί να γίνει εφικτό, εάν δεν επιτρέψουμε στους εαυτούς μας να στοχαστούν ενεργά και συλλογικά πάνω στα συμβάντα και στις θεωρήσεις που όρισαν αυτές τις έννοιες τους προηγούμενους αιώνες αλλά και τις δυναμικές δυνατότητες του παρόντος μας ως πρός αυτές και τις νέες αναδύσεις θέσεων και κοσμοαντιλήψεων που θα προκύψουν αναπόφευκτα απο την διάδραση τους.Κύκλος διαλέξεων-παρουσιάσεων

διοργάνωση:
ΚΕΝΟ ΔΙΚΤΥΟ https://voidnetwork.gr/
με την υποστήριξη του Ελεύθερου Κοινωνικού Χώρου Nosotros

Η εκδήλωση γίνεται με αφορμή την έκδοση του βιβλίου ΚΑΙΡΟΣ ΓΙΑ ΕΠΑΝΑΣΤΑΣΗ του Αντόνιο Νέγκρι (εκδόσεις Αλεξάνδρεια) μετάφραση Antonio Solaro- επιμέλεια: Γιώργος Καράμπελας.

The post ΕΠΑΝΑΣΤΑΣΗ και Χρόνος στο έργο του Αντόνιο Νέγκρι Πέμπτη 26/4 Nosotros- Κενό Δίκτυο appeared first on Void Network.

Octavio Alberola, Revolución o colapso

What follows is an exercise in the sharing of ideas, of visions.  The most recent essay by the invisible committee, NOW, continues a reflection-intervention that began with The Coming Insurrection and To Our Friends, and offers a powerful critique of contemporary politics, along with a defense of “autonomy”.  What is proposed here then is a partial translation, summary, and occasionally a commentary and exemplification, or simply a montage, of some of the ideas that animate their vision of our times.

It also may be taken as a commentary on our recent posts dedicated to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Jacques Rancière, as well as on Spain´s 15th of May movement.

The apparently seamless order of the our world belies its tattered fragments.  The promised unity of a global order is sustained only in the realm of illusion by the flickering of screens bleating forth a continuous flow of images.  The content of the latter is meaningless, it is the flow that matters, that there be images, the spectacle of our own ongoing passivity.  But all about us are the shards of “society”, “science”, “labour”, “states”.  The seeming homogeneity of desires is fractured by unmanageable spaces, proliferating knowledges, precarious, uncertain ways of survival and sovereign authorities that exist only through open or less than hidden states of exception. Fragmentation devours all that is solid in its path, like the touch of a King Midas of instability.

“Wage labour explodes in all sorts of niches, of exception, in conditions of anomaly.  The idea of the “precariat” opportunely conceals that there is simply no longer any common experience of work, even precarious.  So that as well there can no longer be any common experience of its cessation, and the old myth of the general strike can be placed on the shelf of useless accessories.  Western medicine is reduced to tinkering with techniques that explode its doctrinal unity, such as acupuncture, hypnoses or magnetism.  Beyond the usual parliamentary fiddling, there is no longer, politically, any majority for anything.  The wisest political commentary, during the conflict generated by the Labour Law of the spring of 2016 [France], noted that two minorities, a government minority and a demonstrating minority, clashed with each other before a theatre of spectators.” (the invisible committee, Now, 19-20)*

Even our own selves dissolve in a confusing stream of disconnected feelings, experiences, thoughts, held together again in the delusion that meaning is to be found in the blind collecting of consumed experiences.

“The contemporary experience of life in a world comprised of circulation, telecommunications, networks, a chaos of information in real time and of images aiming to capture our attention is fundamentally discontinuous.” (20)

The presumed general interest dissolves and states can do no more than call upon their militarised police and their policing military to see through even the most modest of plans (e.g., Val de Suse, Gezi Park, the airport at Notre-Dame-des-Landes, Standing Rock, and the like); each “public” investment, each infrastructure project, is seen for what it is, criminal theft.

The unities of the past, the person, the nation, the state, the society and economy, and so on, were always fictions, but they were effective fictions.  “What is for sure is that the illusion of unity no longer succeeds in making illusory, in reigning in, in disciplining.  In everything, hegemony is dead and the singularities become savage: they carry with them their own meaning, and await no general order.  The little overlooking point of view that allowed anyone with a little authority to act as ventriloquist  for everyone else, to judge, to classify, to hierarchise, to moralise, to notify each person what they must do and how they should do it, has become inaudible.  All of the things that “must” be done have been laid low.” (21)

History, progress, the roots of tradition and the hopes of the future fall away.  The fragments that remain reduce our temporality to the present, to a now.  The authority of states and all that they command must thus force the illusions of History evermore, but in so doing, only further reveal the emptiness of what is supposed to seduce.  History is nothing before the latest, new and improved, consumer object/relation/experience that is condemned to obsolescence in the very moment of its consumption.  If the State’s ambition is to manage, and to manage the totality of the social life that it gives form to/creates, then it is an ambition that is increasingly strained, depending on ever greater violence and police rule; the more it tightens its hold, the more “society” implodes at its base.

“Of unity, only nostalgia remains, but it speaks louder and louder.  Everywhere candidates present themselves to restore national grander, to “Make America great again” or “bring order back to France”.  At the same time, when one is nostalgic for French Algeria, what can one be nostalgic for?  Everywhere, one promises then to remake by force the lost unity.  Only that the more one “cleaves” by discoursing on the “sentiment of belonging”, the greater the certainty that one does not belong to any of this spreads.  To mobilise the panic to restore order, is to miss what is essentially dispersive in panic.  The process of general fragmentation is so unstoppable that all of the brutalities which will be used to remake the lost unity will only accelerate it, rendering it more profound and more irreversible.  When there is no longer any common experience, except that found in front of screens, one may well create brief moments of national communion after “terrorist” attacks by deploying an array of drooling sentimentality, false and empty, one can decree all manner of “wars on terrorism”, one can promise to retake control of all “no-go areas” that one wants, all this remains a newsflash on BFM-TV, at the back end of a kebab shop, and whose sound can’t be heard.  This kind of nonsense is like medication: for it to remain effective, the dosage has to be continuously increased, until the final neurasthenia.  Those who look favourably on the perspective of ending their existence in a cramped and over-militarised citadel, even one as large as France, while all around, the water rises, carrying the bodies of the unlucky, may very well call “National traitors” all of those who displease them.  In their barking, nothing but their powerlessness is heard.” (27)

And for those who would contest, struggle against, this established order, to appeal to the same false unties that underlie capitalism would be to contribute to those same illusions, restraining what is possible within the frame of those illusions and a future order, or said differently, making possible the capture of struggles by the State.

Everything becomes plural, local, situated; paradoxically sharing the common trait of flight.  “It is not only that the people are wanting … they have already made their suitcases, in a thousand unsuspected directions.  They are not only abstentionist, in retreat, nowhere to be found: they are in flight, even if their flight would be nothing but interior or immobile.  They are already elsewhere.” (28)  And it will not be the new populists of the left, a Mélenchon or Iglesias, who will bring them back.  “What is called ‘populism’ is not only the glaring symptom of the disappearance of the people, it is a desperate attempt to hold on to what remains of the haggard and disoriented.” (29)

In the tired marches and demonstrations of labour unions and left-wing political parties, those who parade are like marionette ghosts, repeating gestures and slogans mechanically, lifelessly.  The Internationale falls like a corpse from their lips, to be swept up by the municipal street cleaners who follow.  What life erupts from these pacified processions of the living dead does so, as it did in France during the 2016 Spring, when the head of the marches were “taken” by those desirous to break with the imposed sleep, by the casseurs, the “violent rioters” quickly labelled “anarchists” and “black blocks”.  But the names hide more than they reveal, for what happened on these occasions, and again the French example is helpful, “is that a certain number of deserters created a political space where to compose their heterogeneity, an ephemeral space certainly, insufficiently organised undoubtedly, but attainable and, for the duration of a Spring, really existing.” (Now, 30)  Our fragmented world is acephalous, mirrored and multiplied in endless forms, including in the futile and paralysed left.  But those who took the “head” of the protests in Paris, for example, did not do so to provide them with a new leadership, but rather to unleash the autonomous multiple gestures that they harboured and rendered possible.

These last months, a remarkable wind of protest rose against labour law.
Facing it, the government, its ministers , its president and its police, have opted for political and police repression , at a rare level and multiplied the blows of force to quell the movement . Normalising, social violence and media manipulation are all so many symptoms that reflect the massive discomfort of a society where the people are strategically muzzled . This film is the voice of those who revolt, whoever they are, and especially those we never hear, despised by authorities, mass media and dominant discourse.]

[Gloss: The “global” occupy movement of 2011, beginning with the Arab Spring and seemingly replicating itself in numerous other countries and cities, is the most significant “social-political movement” of our time. To speak in the singular here though is to suggest a unity of intention and/or ideology across these movements which does not exist. And yet their shared occupation of city squares intimates some commonality, to be sought at other levels of lived reality. Tomás Ibáñez, writing of the Spanish movement 15M of 2011, states that it “marked in a clear way a before and an after in the scenario of protests and collective conflict.” (Anarquismos a contratiempo, 263) Ibáñez’s judgement may not be extendable to other countries for various reasons, but in the Spanish context, it echos true. However, the intensity and resonances of the movement are not due to any unified organisation, ideology or aim born with 15M. The “movement” was and remains as fragmented as the politics that it emerged to challenge. Its force, its radicalness, must therefore be found elsewhere. And for Ibáñez, everything changes the moment we focus on 15M’s organisational forms and practices of struggle, conceived and put into effect without any conscious appeals to past ways of doing politics (15M is a movement of the radical present, for good or ill).

“The originality of 15M consisted in the fact that it was an event, in the full sense of the word, that introduced new things into the political scenario charged with an unquestionable political radicalness, that curiously contrasted with the absence of any radicalness in its explicit demands.” (266) Instead of merely expressing opposition and through protest seeking change, typically at the level of State policy, 15M was much more. “Even though in the beginning, it was the usual popular concentration to express a protest and make a demand, this very quickly transformed itself into a different phenomenon. The thousands of people who invaded the streets and squares did not do so only to demonstrate against this or in favour of that, but they did so also to institute themselves or, more precisely, to self-institute themselves as subjects in a political process.” (267)

…

“This process of self-institution required that the people organise themselves, debate, elaborate collectively their own political discourse, and construct in common the necessary elements to make possible the maintenance of the mobilisation and the development of political action.”

“The importance that the rejection of representation acquired in the heart of the movement – the famous ‘they don’t represent us’, of course, but also accompanied by the refusal to be represented by any permanent entities: ‘no one can claim the right to represent us’ – indicates what the novelty was that the movement introduced into the conventional political game. In effect, a radical rupture was produced with practices that consisted of responding to agendas elaborated externally, that is by others who basically were not among the mobilised. In the public squares, diverted from its conventional and authorised uses, the imagination set to work to create spaces, construct conditions and elaborate procedures that would permit people to elaborate by themselves and collectively their own agenda, at the margin of pre-established and imported ideologies.”

“From the moment that the rejection of representation constituted itself as the active principle of the action of 15M, the only discourses, the only compromises, that were recognised and that were assumed as legitimate, were those that came from the very interior of the movement, those generated from within. Only what the movement produced through and by itself was accepted, autonomously, following the rules of free debate in a non-hierarchical frame.” (268)

The extraordinary significance of 15M thus lies not in what it promised for the future, nor in any rehabilitation of some glorious revolutionary past, ideological or practical, but in what it realised in the present. “If anything profoundly characterised 15M, it was its unyielding will for autonomy, a generalised demand for autonomy and self-determination that imposed the fixing of its own objectives and the determination of its own ways of being, as well as the rejection of domination, not allowing itself to be lead by any external entity, and to decide to act for itself.” (268)

As a political movement, an essentially plural movement, 15M sought not to weld the fragments of social life into a new, false unity, but to create a space of passage, a threshold, through and from which different agencies could enter, gain sustenance, and depart, to possibly return again. If 15M resonated and resonates still in the country, it is because its political children are many. And at its most intense, it not only shared ideas, but bodies. That is, for very, very many who came to the occupied squares of Spain’s cities, what they found was not a politics segregated from all other spheres of life, “politics” as usual, but a politics embedded in life and the care that makes possible the reproduction of forms of life in radical opposition to capitalism, if any such opposition is to be true. 15M was not ideology, organisation, fixed practices, leadership, representatives, but the sharing, to speak metaphorically, of wine and bread in a life giving meal that could be re-enacted and edified into a form of life.

Podemos is Judas at this supper, but the murder that it desires and with which it is complicitous has so far failed.

The invisible committee is critical of Nuit Debout, France’s incarnation of the “occupy movement”, precisely for its fetishism of form, democratic form, voting upon matters that could have no possible execution and which in the end only served to domesticate the occupation. If it too was lacking in any homogeneity, if unplanned gatherings and demonstrations also gestated in its midst, if it also contributed to making the movement against the proposed labour law reform of 2016 in France much more than simply another protest movement, it came to grief on the separation of politics from life and the presumed and desired sovereignty of the former; the belief that life can be governed, mirrored in the image of government of the self. (Now, 52-6)

The invisible committee’s argument here takes us further than most of the political readings of the occupy movements. For what emerges from their considerations is a re-thinking of the very concept of autonomy. So often imagined in terms of self-possession, it finds expression in the State and in the person in the concept of sovereignty. Neither of the two, State or person, are conceivable without it. But then neither are imaginable without violence, the violence that represses and/or destroys that which escapes rule. The task then is to think and live autonomy beyond sovereignty; a sovereignty which in any case has been irretrievably lost in the debris of capitalism’s disaster. The anonymous many who have filled streets and city squares are the uprooted and disoriented offspring of the disaster, who gather not as the “people united”, but as a community of the nameless.]

If any semblance of unity continues to structure State authority, it is only through fear, surveillance and the physical presence of police.  The law, the armour of declared and legislated rights that is supposed to protect each citizen’s moral and physical integrity, and thus the guarantor of social unity, is an edifice of ruins.  Indeed, as far as the invisible committee is concerned, the Law no longer exists. (33)

“As long as the security of our fellow citizens justifies it, as long as administrative search warrants [passed without a judicial decision] that only the state of emergency allow are indispensable, it is advisable to maintain the state of emergency.”  The words were proffered by Emmanuel Macron during the French presidential election campaign and they are now confirmed by his desired extension of the legal exception until the 1st of November, bringing the state of emergency in France up to two years.  Whatever hesitations he may have had in the past have vanished (“We cannot live permanently in a regime of exception.  It is necessary to return to ordinary law … and to act with the right instruments.  We have the legislative apparatus permitting us to respond, over time, to our situation”).  And in parallel, there is a proposal for a new and additional anti-terrorist law. (Liberation 24/05/2017)  As such laws multiply, both in France and elsewhere, states of emergency in fact cease to be exceptional; such laws create distinct legal subjects with different rights and duties.  And as they do so, the diminished rights of suspected criminals and terrorists seep into the fabric of general law, rendering everyone a potential suspect.

The German legal theorist Günther Jakobs elaborated a distinction between two criminal laws: one for “citizens” and another for “enemies”.  For Jakobs, the latter includes the rabble, radical opponents, thugs and rogues, “terrorists”, “anarchists”, in sum, all of those who fail to sufficiently respect the reigning democratic order and thereby represent a “danger” to the “normative structure of society”.  Should not then such “dangerous individuals” be treated as enemies of society? Do they not exclude themselves from ordinary criminal law, justifying the elaboration of a criminal law for enemies? (33)  But to elaborate a law for enemies, is to erase the Schmittian distinction of friend-enemy, which places the enemy outside a constituted sovereignty.  That is, it makes all of us potential enemies, it renders the exception normal, thus destroying “normal” criminal law altogether.  (The example of the increasing criminalisation of dissent in Spain in the wake of 15M, with the law of Citizen Security of 2013 and the recent police operations, pandoraand piñata, against anarchists, is but one example among many today).

“However paradoxical this affirmation may appear, we live in the time of the abolition of the Law.  The metastatic proliferation of laws is nothing but one aspect of this abolition.  If each law had not become insignificant in the rococo of contemporary law, would it be necessary to produce so many?  Would it be necessary to communicate, with each event, by means of the enactment of new legislation?  The aim of the great legal reforms over the last years in France amount almost all to the abolition of current laws, to the progressive dismantling of all judicial guarantees.  So much so that the Law, which professed to protect men/women and things before the hazards of the world, has instead become what adds to their precariousness.”  The state of exception today reigns “under the form of the law.” (34-5)

[Gloss: “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “emergency situation” in which we live is the rule. We must arrive at a concept of history which corresponds to this. Then it will become clear that the task before us is the introduction of a real state of emergency; and our position in the struggle against Fascism will thereby improve.” Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History]

There are two ways to respond to the state of emergency, we are told by the invisible committee.  The first is to denounce it and call for the return of a state of law; an illusory exercise that calls for what never really existed, because the law depends upon the exception, on the constitution of those who are outside the law.  There is no law without the violence of separation and that violence is always potentially and in fact directed at the body constituted by the State. The second response is to assume the exception of the law.  If the State frees itself from its laws under the exception, then it is for those who contest the State to do the same.  “There are those who protest against a phantom, the state of emergency, and there are those who take action and deploy from their own state of exception.” (38)

Before the permanent state of exception, “the maintenance of order is the principle activity of an already failed order”. (109)  And the greater the fragmentation of social order, the greater is the presence of an increasingly militarised police.

The loss of all hope among the increasingly superfluous many is also the condition for pure revolt, a “revolt that no longer seeks support in what it denies and which is its own self-authorisation”. (110)  Before such disobedience, potential or active, politics is reduced to a vast, daily police operation. (110)  And thus rebellion can only direct itself at the body of the State, namely, the police.  In Paris, the slogan was, “Everyone hates the police”.

That this statement should appear shocking to some is testimony to the successful imposition of sovereignty by modern State power.  At the beginning of the 17th century, for the first thinkers on sovereignty, the police were held to be the very constitution of the State, its very form, rather than a mere instrument of State authority.  The police was thus “all that can give ornament, form and splendour to the city” (Turquet de Mayerne), “the ensemble of means that serve the splendor of the whole State and the happiness of all of its citizens” (Hohenthal).  Its role is to “lead man to the most perfect felicity that he may enjoy in this life” (Delmare). (111-2)  The police then are the government of all of the conditions that render this felicity possible, from the cleanliness of streets to the imprisonment of vagabonds. (112)  It is the police as identical with to be policed, that is, ordered, administered, governed by policy, belonging to the city, the polis, the realm of the civilised, in contrast to the savage, those outside the city, inhabitants of unpolicedforests.  The police in this instance are the very end of sovereignty: the ideal, legal and ultimately fictional order of the world.  The police however must also assure that the order is real, or as real as possible.  And here it appears as a means to its own ideal end.  Yet without the former, the latter reveals itself as a fiction, and thus “the function of the police as a means is to ensure that from the outside the order desired appears to reign”.  Failure however haunts its double role.  To act from the “outside” with “necessary” violence is to act from outside the law, to act illegally, to preserve the law.  The police is the very embodiment of the paradox of sovereignty, the paradox that the sovereign who defines the legal order does so in an initial act that is a-legal; that the sovereign who defends the constituted order does so through illegalacts.  The police “are the proof that the legal is not the real, that order does not reign, that society does not hold because it does not hold by itself“; that all are the work and consequence of their force, a permanent agency of exception in the heart of constituted and “constitutional” political authority.  “If the state of exception is this temporary suspension of the law that permits re-establishing, by the most arbitrary and bloody measures, the condition for the rule of law, the police is what remains of the state of exception when these conditions have been restored.  The police, in their daily functioning, is what persists of the state of exception in normal circumstances.  It is why its sovereign functioning is itself so hidden.” (113)

A French CRS police officer, after arresting someone for no reason during the Paris Spring protests states: “I do what I want.  You see, it’s anarchy for me also!” (113)

“The police thus ensure an apparent order that is from within only disorder.  It is the truth of a world of lies, and by continuous lies.  It confirms that the reigning order is artificial, and that it will sooner or later be destroyed.” (114)

The police is unmasked.  It is not that everyone in fact hates the police.  They do not.  But for those who cry out loudly that they do, they have excellent reasons for doing so.  The fragmentation of State power and authority however changes the relation between government and police.  Once the mere instruments of politicians, the generalised discredit of the latter renders the police the very condition of government.  It is the politicians who now turn to them before any crisis, and cede to them on every demand.  Few police bodies would be able, or even willing, to assume openly political autonomy; and for such a body to do so would be to engender a government at war with all or a part of its population. (115-8)

And in response: “It would be senseless to seek a military victory over the police. … The police is a target and not an objective, an obstacle and not an adversary.  Whoever takes the cops for an adversary prohibits themselves  from breaking through the obstacle that they are.  To be able to sweep them aside, one has to aim beyond.  Against the police, there is only political victory.  Disorganise their ranks, strip them of all legitimacy, reduce them to impotence, hold them at a good distance, grant oneself a larger margin of manoeuvre at the desired moment, as in the chosen places: thus is the police destituted.” (118)

Suffered, the processes of fragmentation may push us towards misery, isolation, schizophrenia.  Life may be lived as a pure waste.  Nostalgia then possesses us; nostalgia for family, nation, or so many other fictions of wholeness.  For is not belonging the only thing that remains to those who no longer have anything?  Yet this same fragmentation can also be a starting point, it may also give rise to an intensification and pluralisation of the “relations that make us.” (41)  Perhaps then we may see finally that it was our “integration in society” that was “a slow loss of being, a continuous separation, a slipping towards ever greater vulnerability, and an ever more disguised vulnerability.” (41)

“There is in the fragmentation something that points towards what we call ‘communism’: it is the return to earth, the ruin of everything made equivalent, the restitution of all singularities to themselves, the failure of subsumption, abstraction, the fact that moments, places, things, beings and animals all acquire their own name – their own name.  Every creation is born of a rupture with the whole. … If the Earth is so rich in natural milieus, it is in virtue of is complete absence of uniformity.  To realise the promise of communism held within the fragmentation of the world calls for a gesture, a gesture to be repeated interminably, a gesture that is life itself: that of to provide passages between the fragments, to put them into contact, to organise their encounter, to open the paths that lead from one friendly bit of the world to another without passing through hostile territory, that of establishing the good art of distances between the worlds.” (43)

What these connected fragments are remains open, changing.  But they are held together in moving affinities of plural forms of life, archipelagos of life beyond the politics of institutionalised and enforced spectacular commoditification.

__________

*Unless otherwise indicated, all references are to the essay Maintenant, published by La fabrique, 2017.

source: http://autonomies.org/2017/05/reading-our-times-with-now-the-invisible-committee/

The post Reading our times with “NOW”: The invisible committee appeared first on Void Network.

The first one is that equality is not a goal to be reached. It is not a common level, an equivalent amount of riches or an identity of living conditions that must be reached as the consequence of historic evolution and strategic action. Instead it is a point of departure. This first principle immediately ties up with a second one: equality is not a common measure between individuals, it is a capacity through which individuals act as the holders of a common power, a power belonging to anyone. This capacity itself is not a given whose possession can be checked. It must be presupposed as a principle of action but it is only verified by action itself. The verification does not consist in the fact that my action produces equality as a result. It enacts equality as a process. I act, we act as if all human beings had an equal intellectual capacity. Emancipation first means the endorsement of the presupposition: I am able, we are able to think and act without masters. But we are able to the extent that we think that all other human beings are endowed with the same capacity. Second, emancipation means the process through which we verify this presupposition. Equality is not given, it is processual. And it is not quantitative, it is qualitative.

The idea of emancipation dismisses the opposition made by the so-called “liberal” tradition between freedom thought of as the inner autonomous power and dignity of the individual and equality thought of as the constraint of the collective over individuals. “Free” is just like “equal”: it does not designate a property of individuals. It designates the form of their action and of their relation to other individuals. The presupposition of equal capacity is a principle of shared freedom opposed to the presupposition that the human beings can only act rationally as individuals and cooperate rationally in a community according to a principle of subordination. “Autonomy” has been a key concept in modern emancipatory politics. But it must be understood correctly. It does not mean the autonomous power of a subject as opposed to external forces: it means a form of thinking, practice and organization free from the presupposition of inequality, free from the hierarchical constraint and the hierarchical belief. It means the opposition of two kinds of commonsense and two common worlds, one based on the process of verification of inequality and the other based on the process of verification of equality. This is what is entailed in the concept of disagreement that I proposed to conceptualize the political conflict. Disagreement is not a conflict of forces, nor even a conflicts of ideas and values. It is a conflict between two common worlds or two common senses. This is what is meant by the scenario of secession of the Roman plebeians on the Aventine that I put at the center of my analysis of what “disagreement” means. In the commonsense which grounds the domination of the patricians, there can be no discussion between the patricians and the plebeians because the plebeians do not speak. They just make noise. The presupposition of inequality is not a simple idea, it is embodied in the concrete reality of a sensory world so that the plebeians must not simply argue that they are speaking beings too but also invent a whole dramaturgy to create the sensory world where the heretofore unthinkable- and even imperceptible- fact that they speak is made perceptible.

This idea of emancipation makes us think of politics in terms of conflict of worlds in contrast to the dominant idea that assimilates it to a conflict of forces. It is a conflict of common worlds. Social emancipation is not the choice of community against individualism. The very opposition of community to individualism is pointless. A form of community is always a form of individuality at the same time. The point is not about the presence or absence of social links, it is about their nature. Capitalism is not the reign of individuality: it organizes a common world of its own, a common world based on inequality and constantly reproducing it, so that it appears as the world – the real existing world in which we live, move, feel, think and act. It is the already existing world with its mechanisms and its institutions. In front of its sensible evidence the world of equality appears as an always tentative world that must be perpetually re-drawn, reconfigured by a multiplicity of singular inventions of acts, relations and networks which have their proper forms of temporality and their proper modes of efficiency. That’s why the secession of the plebeians on the Aventine is paradigmatic: the world of equality is a “world in the making”, a world born of specific breaches in the dominant commonsense, of interruptions of the “normal” way of the world. It implies the occupation of specific spaces, the invention of specific moments when the very landscape of the perceptible, the thinkable and the doable is radically reframed. The conflict of worlds is dissymmetrical in its principle.

But the fact is that this dissymmetry has long been obscured by the evidence of a middle term that seemed to be common to the world of equality and the world of inequality and also to designate at the same time a world and a force. That term was work- with its twin, named labour. On the one hand, work was the name of the force that capitalism gathered and organized for its own benefit and the reality of the condition of those who were exploited by capitalism. But, on the other hand, it was the force that could be re-assembled against that capitalist power, reassembled both as a force of struggle in the present and the form of life of the future. In such a way the world of labour appeared to be both the product of inequality and the producer of equality. The two processes were made one single process. The Marxist tradition set up this conjunction within the “progressive” scenario according to which inequality is a means, a historical stage to go through, in order to produce equality. Capitalism was said to produce not only the material conditions of a world of equal sharing of the common riches but also the class that would   overthrow it and organize the common world to come. To play this role, the workers’ organisation had to take up and internalize, first in the present of struggle, next in the future of collective production the virtue that had been instilled into them by capitalism, the virtue of factory discipline.

The anarchist tradition opposed to that view of inequality producing equality another view emphasizing the constitution of free collectives of workers anticipating the community to come through both egalitarian forms of organization and the constitution in the present of forms of cooperative work and other forms of life. But this counter-position still rested on the idea of the “middle term”: the idea of work as being at once a form of life, a collective force of struggle and the matrix of a world to come. It is clear that work can no more be posited to-day as the identity of a force and a world, the identity of a form of struggle in the present and a form of life of the future. Much has been said about either the end of work or its becoming immaterial. But capitalism did not become immaterial even if part of its production is knowledge, communication, information and so on. Material production did not disappear from the common world that it organizes. Instead it was relocated, far from its ancient locations in Old Europe, in new places where the work force was cheaper and more used to obeying. And immaterial production also implies both classic forms of extraction of plus-value from underpaid workers and forms of unpaid labour provided by the consumers themselves. Work did not disappear. Instead it was fragmented, torn out and dispersed in several places and several forms of existence separated from one another so as to constitute no more a common world.

Along with this economic disruption came the legislative reforms adopted all over the world to make work again a private affair. Those reforms  did not simply remove  the rights and the social benefits acquired by the workers’ struggles of the past, they tended to turn work, wages, job contracts and pensions into a mere individual affair, concerning workers taken one by one and no more a collective. Work has not disappeared but it has been stripped of the power that made it the materially existing principle of a new world, embodied in a given community. This means that we are now obliged to think of the process of emancipation, the process of equality creating its own world as a specific process, disconnected from the transformations of the global economic process. We are also facing the difficulty of dealing with this situation. I think that this new situation and the difficulty to deal with it are perfectly expressed by the slogans that have resonated in several languages during the recent movements: “democracia real ya”, “Nuit debout”, “occupy everything” or “Na min zisoume san douli”. All of them take their efficiency in an ambiguous interface between the logic of the conflict of forces and a logic of opposition of worlds.

“Occupy” and “occupation” are the most telling examples of this ambiguity.  They come from the historical tradition of working class struggle. The “sit-in strikes” of the past strikes when workers occupied the workplace, made a conflict of forces identical with a demonstration of equality. Not only did the strikers block the mechanism of exploitation but also  they affirmed a collective possession of the workplace and the instruments of work and they turned the place dedicated to work and obedience into a place for free social life. The new “occupation” takes up the principle of transforming the function of a space. But this space is no more an inside space, a space defined within the distribution of economic and social activities. It is no more a space of concrete fight between Capital and Labour. As Capital has increasingly become a force of dislocation which destroys the places where the conflict could be staged, occupation now takes place in the spaces that are available: those buildings that the contingencies of the real estate market has left empty or the streets which are normally destined to the circulation of the individuals and the commodities – and sometimes to the demonstrations of the protesters. The occupying process transforms those spaces destined to the circulation of persons, goods and value into places where people stay and affirm by the very fact of staying their opposition to the capitalist powers of circulation and dislocation.

The name “occupation” is still the same and it still about perverting the normal use of a space but the occupying process is no more a conflict of forces to take over a strategic place in the process of economic and social reproduction. It has become a conflict of worlds, a form of symbolic secession that is both materialized and symbolised in a place aside. Occupy Wall Street took place in a park situated besides the center of this financial power that has destroyed the factories that previously were the site of occupation movements. The Spanish movement of the Indignados created, during an electoral campaign, assemblies presenting themselves as the seat of “real democracy now”. Real democracy was pitted against the self-reproduction of the representative caste. But “real democracy” also was, in the Marxist tradition, the future of material equality opposed to bourgeois “formal democracy”. It was a future promised as a consequence of the takeover of the State power and the organisation of collective production. Now it designates a form of relation between human beings that must be practiced in the present both against and besides the hierarchical system of representation. Real democracy in a sense became more formal than the “formal democracy” stigmatized by the Marxist tradition. Not only did it equate the enactment of equality with the form of the assembly where all individuals have an equal right but it imposed a number of rules such as the equality of time allowed to all speakers and the power for individuals to block the decision of the majority.

Occupation has become the name of a secession. But that secession is no more the action of a specific community claiming their rights. Instead it appears to be the materialization of an aspiration to the common, as if the common were something lost, something that had to be reconstructed through the specific act of the assembling of a multitude of anonymous individuals publicly performing their being equal as the same as their being-in-common. That’s why that secession, that being-aside, was expressed in paradoxical terms, and notably by the strange slogan adopted by many assemblies as the affirmation of real democracy: ”Consensus instead of leaders”. It seems paradoxical to posit consensus as the specific virtue of the dissensual assembly gathered in occupied spaces. It can be objected that the dissensus precisely consists in the constitution of another form of community based on horizontality and participation. But the problem of democracy is not so much about the number of people that can agree on the same point as it is about the capacity to invent new forms of collective enactment of the capacity of anybody.

By underlining this paradox, I am not willing to disparage those movements. Some people have pitted against the pacifism of the consensual assemblies the necessity of violent action directly confronting the enemy. But the “confrontation with the enemy itself” can be thought of and practiced in different ways and most of the forms of direct action opposed to the pacific assemblies – for instance destructions of bank automats, shop windows or public offices – had the same character as them: they were also symbolic expressions of an opposition of worlds rather than strategic actions in a struggle for power.  Other people have precisely criticized this lack of strategy; they said that those movements could change nothing to Capitalist domination and they made new calls for the edification of avant-garde organizations aimed at taking over the power. But such an answer is unable to solve the paradoxes of emancipation. The strategic world view that sustains it is a view of inequality producing equality. That strategy has been enacted by the communist parties and the socialist states of the XXth century and we all know their results. Inequality only produces inequality and it does it ceaselessly. Moreover this strategic world view has lost the basis on which it rested, namely the reality of work/labour as a common world.

We are now facing again the dissymmetry between the process of equality and the process of inequality. Equality does not make worlds in the same way as inequality. It works, as it were, in the intervals of the dominant world, in superimposition to the “normal” – meaning the dominant – hierarchical – way of world making. And one of the main aspects of the dissymmetry is precisely the fact that the process of equality dismisses the very separation of the ends and the means on which the strategy of inequality producing equality is predicated. This is what freedom means ultimately .Freedom is not a matter of choice made by individuals. It is a way of doing.  A free action or a free relation is an action or a relation that finds its achievement in itself, in the verification of a capacity and no more in an external outcome. In the hierarchical societies of the past it was the privilege of a small category of human beings, called the “active men” in contrast to all those who were subjected to the reign of necessity.  In modern times, freedom was democratized first in the aesthetic domain with the Kantian and Schillerian category of free play as an end in itself and a potentiality belonging to everyone. Then the young Marx did more as he made it the very definition of communism that he equated with the end of the labour division: communism, he said in the Paris Manuscripts means the humanisation of the human senses; it is the state of things in which this capacity of humanisation is deployed in itself instead of being used as a simple means for earning one’s living. And he illustrated it with the case of these communist workers in Paris who gathered at a first level to discuss their common interests but did it more deeply to enjoy their new social capacity as such.

True enough Marx’s analysis relied on the identification of work as the essential human capacity. When work can no more play this role, the task of creating a world where the ends of the action are no more distinct from their means may seem to become paradoxical in itself. The free and equal community is something that can no more rely on a given empirical substratum. It must be created as an object of will. But, on the other hand, this will can no more be posited in the terms of the means and ends relation. That’s why it tends to become a global desire for another form of human relations. This turn was best illustrated in the Occupy Wall Street movement by the multiple extensions of the use of the verb “occupy” that made it the signifier of a global conversion to another way of inhabiting the world: “occupy language”, “occupy imagination”, “occupy love”, and eventually “Occupy everything” which seems to mean: change your way of dealing with everything and with all existing forms of social relationships. Perhaps this enigmatic slogan finds its best translation in the Greek slogan “Na min zisoume can douli” (“Don’t live any more like slaves”). This sentence did not only invite to rebel against the intensification of the capitalist rule. It invited to invent here and now modes of action, ways of thinking and forms of life opposed to those which are perpetually produced and reproduced by the logic of inequality, the logic of capitalist and state domination.

I think that this request found a response in the invention of this form called “free social space” – a form that took on a particular cogency in the social movements of this country. What makes this notion significant in my view is that it calls into question the traditional oppositions between the necessities of the present and the utopias of the future or between harsh economic and social reality and the “luxury” of “formal “democracy. Those who opened such spaces made it clear that they did not only wanted to respond to situations of need, dispossession and distress created by the intensification of the capitalist rule. They did not want only to give shelter, food, health care, education or art to those who were deprives of those goods but to create new ways of being, thinking and acting in common. We can draw from this a wider definition of this form: a free social space is a space where the very separation of spheres of activity – material production, economic exchange, social care, intellectual production and exchange, artistic performance, political action, etc. – is thrown into question. It is a space where assemblies can practice forms of direct democracy intended no simply to give an equal right of speech to everybody but to make collective decisions on concrete matters. In such a way a form of political action tends to be at the same time the cell of another form of life. It is no more a tool for preparing a future emancipation but a process of invention of forms of life and modes of thinking in which equality furthers equality.

What this sentence asks us to do is to change all the forms of organization of life and the modes of thinking that are determined by the logic of inequality, the logic of capitalist and state domination.

Of course we know that these cells of a new social life are constantly subjected to internal problems and external threats. This “already present future” is always at once a precarious present. But it is pointless, I think, to see there the proof that all is vain as long as a global revolution has not “taken” the power and destroyed the Capitalist fortress. This kind of judgement is a way of putting the fortress in our heads, of instituting a circle of impossibility by proclaiming that nothing can be changed before everything has been changed. Emancipation has always been a way of inventing, amidst the “normal” course of time another time, another manner of inhabiting the sensible world in common. It has always been a way of living in the present in another world instead of deferring its possibility. Emancipation only prepares a future to the extent that it hollows in the present gaps which are also grooves. It does so by intensifying the experience of other ways of being, living, doing and thinking. The free social spaces created by the recent movements inherit the world forms – cooperatives of production and forms of popular education – created by the workers’ movements of the past and notably by anarchist movements. But our present can no more share the belief that sustained the forms of self-organization of the past. It can no more rely on the presupposition that  Capitalism produces the conditions of its own destruction and that work constitutes an organic world of the future already in gestation  in the belly of the old world. More than ever the world of equality appears to be the always provisory product of specific inventions. Our present urges us to rediscover that the history of equality is an autonomous history. It is not the development of strategies predicated on the technological and economic transformations. It is a constellation of moments- some days, some weeks, some years which create specific temporal dynamics, endowed with more or less intensity and duration. The past left us no lessons, only moments that we must extend and prolong as far as we can.

*The present text is the speech of Jacques Rancière at B-FEST (International Antiauthoritarian Festival of Babylonia Journal) that was held on 27/05/17 in Athens with the title “Democracy, Equality, Emancipation in a Changing World”. The Greek translation can be found here.

source: http://www.babylonia.gr/2017/06/11/jacques-ranciere-democracy-equality-emancipation-changing-world/

The post Jacques Rancière: Democracy, Equality, Emancipation in a Changing World- talk at Bfest 2017 appeared first on Void Network.

“If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development.”

Marx/Engels – Preface to the Russian edition of the manifesto, 1882.

This perspective was not realized. The European industrial proletariat missed its rendez-vous with a revitalized Russian peasant commune.

Brest-Litovsk, 1917 and 1939

Brest-Litovsk, Poland, December 1917: the Bolsheviks propose peace without annexations to a Germany intent on taking over a large swath of the old Tsarist empire, stretching from Finland to the Caucusus. But in February 1918, the German soldiers, “proletarians in uniform” though they were, obey their officers and resume the offensive against a Russia still ruled by soviets. No fraternization occurs, and the revolutionary war advocated by the Bolshevik left proves impossible. In March, Trotsky has to sign a peace treaty dictated by the Kaiser’s generals. “We’re trading space for time”, as Lenin put it, and in fact, in November, the German defeat turns the treaty into a scrap of paper. Nevertheless, practical proof of the international link-up of the exploited had failed to materialize. A few months later, returning to civilian life with the war’s end, these same proletarians confront the alliance of the official workers’ movement and the Freikorps. Defeat follows defeat: in Berlin, Bavaria and then in Hungary in 1919; the Red Army of the Ruhr in 1920; the March Action in 1921…

September 1939. Hitler and Stalin have just carved up Poland. At the border bridge of Brest-Litovsk, several hundred members of the KPD, refugees in the USSR subsequently arrested as “counter-revolutionaries” or “fascists”, are taken from Stalinist prisons and handed over to the Gestapo.

1917-1937, twenty years that shook the world. The succession of horrors represented by fascism, then by World War II and the subsequent upheavals, are the effect of a gigantic social crisis opening with the mutinies of 1917 and closed by the Spanish Civil War*.

*This is a shorter, entirely reconceived version of the preface to the collection Bilan/Contre-révolution en Espagne 1936-1939, Paris, 1979 (now out of print). A text in progress will deal further with the question of the development of fascism, and thus of anti-fascism, in our own epoch.

“Fascism and Big Capital”

If it is precisely the case, to use the formulation made famous by Daniel Guerin, that fascism serves the interests of big capital, 99% of the people articulating this perfectly accurate thesis hasten to add that, in spite of everything, fascism could have been averted in 1922 or 1933 if the workers’ movement and/or the democrats had mounted enough pressure to bar it from power. If only, in 1921, the Italian Socialist Party and the newly-founded Italian Communist Party had allied with republican forces to stop Mussolini; if only, at the beginning of the thirties, the KPD had not launched a fratricidal struggle against the SPD, Europe would have been spared one of the most ferocious dictatorships in history, a second world war, a Nazi empire of almost continental dimensions, the concentration camps, and the extermination of the Jews. Above and beyond its very true observations about classes, the state, and the ties between fascism and big industry, this vision fails to see that fascism arose out of a two-fold failure: the failure of the revolutionaries after World War I, crushed as they were by Social Democracy and parliamentary democracy, and then, in the course of the 1920’s, the failure of the democrats and Social Democrats in managing capital. Without a grasp of the preceding period as well as of the earlier phase of class struggle and its limits, the coming to power and, still more, the nature of fascism remain incomprehensible. For the rest, it is no accident that Guerin misjudges both the Popular Front, in which he sees a “failed revolution”, and the real significance of fascism .

What is the real thrust of fascism, if not the economic and political unification of capital, a tendency which has become general since 1914? Fascism was a particular way of bringing about that unity in countries–Italy and Germany– where, even though the revolution had been snuffed out, the state was unable to impose order, including order in the ranks of the bourgeoisie. Mussolini was no Thiers, with a solid base of power, ordering regular armed forces to massacre the Communards. An essential aspect of fascism is its birth in the streets, its use of disorder to impose order, its mobilization of the old middle classes half-crazed by their own decline, and its regeneration, from without, of a state unable to deal with the crisis of capitalism . Fascism was an effort of the bourgeoisie to forcibly tame its own contradictions, to turn working-class methods of mass mobilization to its own advantage, and to deploy all the resources of the modern state, first against an internal enemy, then against an external one.

This was indeed a crisis of the state, during the transition to the total domination of capital over society. First, worker organizations had been necessary to deal with the proletarian upsurge; then fascism was required to put an end to the ensuing disorder. This disorder was, of course, not revolutionary, but it was paralyzing, and stood in the way of solutions which, as a result, could only be violent. The crisis was only erratically overcome at the time; the fascist state was efficient only in appearance, because it forcibly integrated the wage-labor work force, and artificially buried conflicts by projecting them into militarist adventure. But the crisis was overcome, relatively, by the multi-tentacled democratic state established in 1945, which potentially appropriated all of fascism’s methods, and added some of its own, since it neutralizes wage-worker organizations without destroying them. Parliaments have lost control over the executive. With welfare or with workfare, by modern techniques of surveillance or by state assistance extended to millions of individuals, in short by a system which makes everyone more and more dependent, social unification goes beyond anything achieved by fascist terror, but fascism as a specific movement has disappeared. It corresponded to the forced-march discipline of the bourgeoisie, under the pressure of the state, in the particular context of newly-created states hard-pressed to also constitute themselves as nations.

The bourgeoisie even took the word “fascism” from working-class organizations in Italy, which were often called fasci.. It is significant that fascism first defined itself as a form of organization and not as a program. Its only program is to organize everyone, to forcibly make the component parts of society converge. Dictatorship is not a weapon of capital (as if capital could replace it with other, less brutal weapons); dictatorship is one of its tendencies, a tendency realized whenever it is deemed necessary. A “return” to parliamentary democracy, as it occurred (for example) in Germany after 1945, indicates that dictatorship is useless for integrating the masses into the state (at least until the next time). The problem is therefore not the fact that democracy ensures a more pliant domination than dictatorship; anyone would prefer being exploited in the Swedish mode to being abducted by the henchmen of Pinochet. But does one have the CHOICE? Even the gentle democracy of Scandinavia would be transformed into dictatorship if circumstances demanded it. The state can only have one function, which it fulfills democratically or dictatorially. The fact that the former is less harsh does not mean that it is possible to reorient the state to dispense with the latter. Capitalism’s forms depend no more on the preferences of wage workers than they do on the intentions of the bourgeoisie. Weimar capitulated to Hitler with open arms. Leon Blum’s Popular Front did not “avoid fascism”, because in 1936 France required neither an authoritarian unification of capital nor a shrinking of its middle classes.

There is no political “choice” to which proletarians could be enticed or which they could forcibly impose. Democracy is not dictatorship, but democracy does prepare dictatorship, and prepares itself for dictatorship.

The essence of anti-fascism consists in resisting fascism by defending democracy; it no longer struggles against capitalism but seeks to pressure capitalism into renouncing the totalitarian option. Since socialism is identified with total democracy, and capitalism with an accelerating tendency to fascism, the antagonisms between proletariat and capital, communism and wage labor, proletariat and state, are rejected for a counterposition of democracy and fascism presented as the quintessential revolutionary perspective. The official left and far-left tell us that a real change would be the realization, at last, of the ideals of 1789, endlessly betrayed by the bourgeoisie. The new world? Why, it is already here, to some extent, in embryos to be preserved, in little buds to be tended: already-existing democratic rights must be pushed further and further within an infinitely perfectible society, with ever-greater daily doses of democracy, until the achievement of complete democracy, or socialism.

Thus reduced to anti-fascist resistance, social critique is enlisted in dithyrambs to everthing it once denounced, and gives up nothing less than that shop-worn affair, revolution, for gradualism, a variant on the “peaceful transition to socialism” once advocated by the Communist Parties, and derided, before 1968, by anyone serious about changing the world. The retrogression is palpable.

We won’t invite ridicule by accusing the left and the far left of having discarded a communist perspective which they knew in reality only when opposing it. It is all too obvious that anti-fascism renounces revolution. But anti-fascism fails exactly where its “realism” claims to be effective: in preventing a possible dictatorial mutation of society.

Bourgeois democracy is a phase in capital’s seizure of power, and its extension in the twentieth century completes capital’s domination by intensifying the isolation of individuals. Proposed as a remedy for the separation between men and community, between human activity and society, and between classes, democracy will never be able to solve the problem of the most separated society in history. As a form forever incapable of modifying its content, democracy is only a part of the problem to which it claims to be the solution. Each time it claims to strengthen the “social bond”, democracy contributes to its dissolution. Each time it papers over the contradictions of the commodity, it does so by tightening the hold of the “safety net” which the state has placed under social relations. Even in their own desperately resigned terms, the antifascists, to be credible, have to explain to us how local democracy is compatible with the colonization of the commodity which empties out public space and fills up the shopping malls. They have to explain how an omnipresent state to which people constantly turn for protection and help, this veritable machine for producing social “good”, will not commit “evil” when explosive contradictions require it to restore order. Fascism is the adulation of the statist monster, while anti-fascism is its more subtle apology. The fight for a democratic state is inevitably a fight to consolidate the state, and far from crippling totalitarianism, such a fight increases totalitarianism’s stranglehold on society.

Rome, 1919-1922

The countries where fascism triumphed are also the countries in which the revolutionary assault after World War I matured into a series of armed insurrections. In Italy, an important part of the proletariat, using its own methods and goals, directly confronted fascism. There was nothing specifically anti-fascist about its struggle: fighting capital compelled workers to fight both the Black shirts and the cops of parliamentary democracy.

Fascism is unique in giving counter-revolution a mass base and in mimicking revolution. Fascism turns the call to “transform the imperialist war into civil war” against the workers’ movement, and it appears as a reaction of demobilized veterans returning to civilian life, where they are nothing, held together by nothing but collective violence, and bent on destroying everything they imagine to be a cause of their dispossession: trouble-makers, subversives, enemies of the nation, etc.

Thus from the outset fascism became an auxiliary of the police in rural areas, putting down the agricultural proletariat with bullets, but at the same time developing a frenzied anti-capitalist demagogy. In 1919, when it represented nothing, fascism demanded the abolition of the monarchy, the Senate and all titles of nobility, the vote for women, the confiscation of the property of the clergy, and the expropriation of the big landowners and industrialists. Fighting against the worker in the name of the “producer”, Mussolini exalted the memory of the Red Week of 1914 (which had seen a wave of riots, particularly in Ancona and Naples), and hailed the positive role of unions in linking the worker to the nation. Fascism’s goal was the authoritarian restoration of the state, in order to create a new state structure capable (in contrast to democracy, said Mussolini), of limiting big capital and of controlling the commodity logic which was eroding values, social ties and work.

Traditionally, the bourgeoisie had tried to deny the reality of social contradictions; fascism, on the contrary, proclaimed them with violence, denying their existence between classes and transposing them to the struggle between nations, denouncing Italy’s fate as a “proletarian nation”.

Fascist repression was unleashed after a proletarian failure engineered mainly by democracy and its main fallback options: the parties and unions, which alone can defeat the workers by employing direct and indirect methods in tandem. It is false to present fascism’s arrival in power as the culmination of street battles in which it defeated the workers. In Germany, the proletarians had been crushed eleven or twelve years earlier. In Italy they were defeated by both ballots and bullets.

In 1919, federating pre-existing elements with other elements close to him politically, Mussolini founded his fasci. To counter clubs and revolvers, while Italy was exploding along with the rest of Europe, democracy called…for a vote, from which a moderate and socialist majority emerged.

“Victory, the election of 150 socialist deputies, was won at the cost of the ebb of the insurrectionary movement and the political general strike, and the rollback of the gains that had already been won”, Bordiga commented 40 years later.

At the time of the factory occupations of 1920, the state, holding back from a head-on assault, allowed the proletariat to exhaust itself, with the support of the CGL (a majority-socialist union), which wore down the strikes when it did not break them openly.

As soon as the fasci appeared, sacking the Case di Popolo, the police either turned a blind eye or confiscated the workers’ guns. The courts showed the fasci the greatest indulgence, and the army tolerated their exactions when it did not actually assist them. This open but unofficial support became quasi-official with the Bonomi circular of Oct. 20, 1921, providing 60,000 demobilized officers to take command of Mussolini’s assault groups. What did the parties do? Those liberals allied with the right did not hesitate to form a “national bloc”, including the fascists, for the elections of May 1921. In June-July of the same year, confronting an adversary without the slightest scruple, the PSI concluded a meaningless “pacification pact” whose only concrete effect was to further disorient the workers.

Faced with an obviously political reaction, the C.G.L. declared itself apolitical. Sensing that Mussolini had power within his grasp, the union leaders dreamed of a tacit agreement of mutual tolerance with the fascists, and called on the proletariat to stay out of the face-off between the CP and the National Fascist Party.

Until August 1922, fascism scarcely existed outside the agrarian regimes, mainly in the north, where it eradicated all traces of autonomous agrarian worker unionism. In 1919, fascists did burn down the headquarters of the socialist daily newspaper, but they held back from any role as strikebreakers in 1920, and even gave verbal support to worker demands. In the urban areas, the fasci rarely were dominant. Their “March on Ravenna” (September 1921) was easily routed. In November 1921, in Rome, a general strike prevented a fascist congress from taking place. In May 1922, the fascists tried again, and were stopped again.

The scenario varied little. A localized fascist attack would be met by a working- class counter-attack, which would then relent (following calls for moderation from the reformist workers’ movement) as soon as reactionary pressure tapered off; the proletarians trusted the democrats to dismantle the armed bands. The fascist threat would pull back, regroup and go elsewhere, over time making itself credible to the same state from which the masses were expecting a solution. The proletarians were quicker to recognize the enemy in the black shirt of the street thug than in the “normal” form of a cop or soldier, draped in a legality sanctioned by habit, law and universal suffrage.

At the beginning of July 1922, the C.G.L., by a two-thirds majority (against the Communist minority’s one-third), declared its support for “any government guaranteeing the restoration of basic freedoms”. In the same month, the fascists seriously stepped up their attempts to penetrate the northern cities…

On August 1, the Alliance of Labor, which included the railway workers’ union, the C.G.L. and the anarchist U.S.I., called a general strike. Despite broad success, the Alliance officially called off the strike on the 3rd. In numerous cities, however, it continued in insurrectionary form, which was finally contained only by a combined effort of the police and the military, supported by naval cannon, and, of course, reinforced by the fascists.

Who defeated this proletarian energy? The general strike was broken by the state and the fasci but it was also smothered by democracy, and its failure opened the way to a fascist solution to the crisis.

What followed was far less a coup d’etat than a transfer of power with the support of a whole array of forces. The “March on Rome” of the Duce (who actually took the train) was less a showdown than a bit of theatre: the fascists went through the motions of assaulting the state, the state went through the motions of defending itself, and Mussolini took power. His ultimatum of Octobre 24 (“We Want To Become the State!”) was not a threat of civil war, but a signal to the ruling class that the National Fascist Party represented the only force capable of restoring state authority, and of assuring the political unity of the country. The army could still have contained the fascist groups gathered in Rome, which were badly equipped and notoriously inferior on the military level, and the state could have withstood the seditious pressure. But the game was not being played on the military level. Under the influence of Badoglio, in particular (the commander-in-chief in 1919-1921) legitimate authority caved in. The king refused to proclaim a state of emergency, and on the 30th he asked the Duce to form a new government. The liberals — the same people anti-fascism counts on to stop fascism–joined the government. With the exception of the Socialists and the Communists, all parties sought a rapprochement with the PNF and voted for Mussolini: the parliament, with only 35 fascist deputies, supported Mussolini’s investiture 306-116. Giolitti himself, the great liberal icon of the time, an authoritarian reformer who had often been president of the state council before the war and who had again been head of state in 1920-1921, whom fashionable thought still fancies in retrospect as the sole politician capable of opposing Mussolini, supported him up to 1924. The dictator not only received his power from democracy; democracy ratified him.

We might add that in the following months, several unions, including (among others) those of the railway workers and the sailors, declared themselves “national”, pro-patriotic and therefore not hostile to the regime; repression did not spare them.

Turin 1943

If Italian democracy surrended to fascism almost without a fight, the latter spawned democracy anew when it no longer corresponded to the balance of social and political forces.

The central question after 1943, as in 1919, was how to control the working class. In Italy even more than in other countries, the end of World War II shows the class dimension of international conflict, which can never be explained by military logic alone. A general strike erupted at FIAT in October 1942. In March 1943, a strike wave rocked Turin and Milan, including attempts at forming workers’ councils. In 1943-1945, worker groups emerged, sometimes independent of the CP, sometimes calling themselves “Bordigists”, often simultaneously antifascist, rossi, and armed. The regime could no longer maintain social equilibrium, just as the German alliance was becoming untenable against the rise of the Anglo-Americans, who were seen in every quarter as the future masters of western Europe. Changing sides meant allying with the winners-to-be, but also meant rerouting worker revolts and partisan groups into a patriotic objective with a social content. On July 10, 1943, the Allies landed in Sicily. On the 24th, finding himself in a 19-17 minority on the Grand Fascist Council, Mussolini resigned. Rarely has a dictator had to step aside for a majority vote.

Marshal Badaglio, who had been a dignitary of the regime ever since his support for the March on Rome, and who wanted to prevent, in his own words, the “the collapse of the regime from swinging too far to the left”, formed a government which was still fascist but which no longer included the Duce, and turned to the democratic opposition. The democrats refused to participate, making the departure of the king a condition. After a second transitional government, Badoglio formed a third in April 1944, which included the leader of the Communist Party, Togliatti. Under the pressure of the Allies and of the CP, the democrats agreed to accept the king (the Republic would be proclaimed by referendum in 1946). But Badaglio stirred up too many bad memories. In June, Bonomi, who 23 years earlier had ordered the officers to take over the fasci, formed the first ministry to actually exclude the fascists, and the situation was reoriented around the tripartite formula (PC+PS+Christian Democracy) which would dominate in both Italy and France in the first years after the war.

This game of musical chairs , often played by the self-same political class, was the theatre prop behind which democracy metamorphosed into dictatorship, and vice-versa, while the phases of equilibrium and disequilibrium in the conflicts of classes and nations unleashed a succession and recombination of political forms aimed at maintaining the same state, underwriting the same content. No one was more qualified to say it than the Spanish CP, when it declared, either out of cynicism or naiveté, during the transition from Francoism to democratic monarchy in the mid-1970’s:

“Spanish society wants everything to be transformed so that the normal functioning of the state can be assured, without detours or social convulsions. The continuity of the state requires the non-continuity of the regime.”

VOLKSGEMEINSCHAFT vs. GEMEINWESEN

Counter-revolution inevitably triumphs on the terrain of revolution. Through its “people’s community”, National Socialism would claim to have eliminated the parliamentarism and bourgeois democracy against which the proletariat revolted after 1917. But the conservative revolution also took over old anti-capitalist tendencies (the return to nature, the flight from cities…) that the workers’ parties, even the extremist ones, had negated or misestimated by their inability to integrate the a-classist and communtarian dimension of the proletariat, by their inability to critique the economy, and their inability to think of the future world as anything but an extension of heavy industry. In the first half of the nineteenth century, these themes were at the center of the socialist movement’s preoccupations, before they were abandoned by “Marxism” in the name of progress and Science, and they survived only in anarchism and in sects.

Volksgemeinschaft vs. Gemeinwesen, people’s community or the human community… 1933 was not the defeat, but only the consummation of the defeat. Nazism arose and triumphed to defuse, resolve and to close a social crisis so deep that we still don’t fully appreciate its magnitude. Germany, cradle of the largest Social Democracy in the world, also gave rise to the strongest radical, anti-parliamentary, anti-union movement, one aspiring to a “worker’s” world but also capable of attracting to itself many other anti-bourgeois and anti-capitalist revolts. The presence of avant-garde artists in the ranks of the “German radical left” is no accident. It was symptomatic of the attack on capital as “civilization” in the way that Fourier criticized it. The loss of community, individualism and gregariousness, sexual poverty, the family both undermined but also affirmed as a refuge, the estrangement from nature, industrialized food, increasing artificiality, the prostheticization of man, regimentation by time, social relations increasingly mediated by money and technique: all these alienations passed through the fire of a diffuse and multiformed critique. Only a superficial backward glance sees this ferment purely through the prism of its inevitable recuperation.

The counter-revolution triumped in the 1920’s only by laying the foundations, in Germany and in the U.S., of a consumer society and of Fordism, and by pulling millions of Germans, including workers, into industrial, commodified modernity. Ten years of fragile rule, as the mad hyperinflation of 1923 shows. This was followed in 1929 by an enormous earthquake, in which not the proletariat but capitalist practice itself repudiated the ideology of progress and an ever-increasing consumption of objects and signs.

Nazi extremism, and the violence it unleashed, were adequate to the depth of the revolutionary movement it took over and negated, and to these two rebellions, separated by 10 years, against capitalist modernity, first by proletarians, then by capital. Like the radicals of 1919-1921, Nazism proposed a community of wage-workers, but one which was authoritarian, closed, national, and racial, and for 12 years it succeeded in transforming proletarians into wage-workers and into soldiers.

Berlin 1919-1933

Dictatorship always comes after the defeat of social movements, once they have been chloroformed and massacred by democracy, the leftist parties and the unions. In Italy, several months separated the final proletarian failures from the appointment of the fascist leader as head of state. In Germany, a gap of a dozen years broke the continuity and made Jan. 30, 1933 appear as an essentially political or ideological phenomenon, not as the effect of an earlier social earthquake. The popular basis of National Socialism and the murderous energy it unleashed remain mysteries if one ignores the question of the submission, revolt, and control of labor, and of its position in society.

The German defeat of 1918 and the fall of the empire set in motion a proletarian assault strong enough to shake the foundations of society, but impotent to revolutionize it, thus bringing Social Democracy and the unions to center stage as the key to political equilibrium. The Social Democratic and union leaders emerged as men of order, and had no scruples about calling in the Freikorps, fully fascist groupings with many future Nazis in their ranks, to repress a radical worker minority in the name of the interests of the reformist majority. First defeated by the rules of bourgeois democracy, the communists were also defeated by working-class democracy: the “works councils” placed their trust in the traditional organizations, not in the revolutionaries easily denounced as anti- democrats.

In this juncture, democracy and Social Democracy were indispensable to German capitalism for regimenting the workers, killing off the spirit of revolt in the polling booth, for winning a series of reforms from the bosses, and dispersing the revolutionaries.

After 1929, on the other hand, capitalism needed to eliminate part of the middle classes, and to discipline the proletarians, and even the bourgeoisie. The workers’ movement, defending as it did political pluralism and immediate worker interests, had become an obstacle. As mediators between capital and labor, working-class organizations derive their function from both, but also try to remain autonomous from both, and from the state. Social Democracy has meaning only as a force contending with the employers and the state, not as a force absorbed into them. Its vocation is the management of an enormous political, municipal, social, mutualist and cultural network, along with everything which today would be called “associative”. The KPD, moreover, had quickly constituted its own network, smaller but vast nonetheless. But as capital becomes more and more organized, it tends to pull together all its different strands, bringing a statist element to the enterprise, a bourgeois element to the trade-union bureaucracy, and a social element to administration. The weight of working-class reformism, which ultimately pervades the state, and its existence as a “counter-society” make it a factor of social conservation and Malthusianism which capital in crisis has to eliminate. By their defense of wage labor as a component of capital, the SPD and the unions fulfilled an indispensable anti-communist function in 1918-1921, but this very same function later led them to put the interest of the wage-labor work force ahead of everything else, to the detriment of the reorganization of capital as a whole.

A stable bourgeois state would have tried to solve this problem by anti-union legislation, by recapturing the “worker fortresses”, and by pitting the middle classes, in the name of modernity, against the archaism of the proles, as Thatcher’s England did much later. But such an offensive assumes that capital is relatively united under the control of a few dominant factions. But the German bourgeoisie of 1930 was profoundly divided, the middle classes had collapsed, and the nation-state was in shambles.

By negotiation or by force, modern democracy represents and reconciles antagonistic interests, to the extent that it is possible. Endless parliamentary crises and real or imagined plots (for which Germany was the stage after the fall of the last socialist chancellor in 1930) in a democracy are the invariable sign of long-term disarray in ruling circles. At the beginning of the 1930’s, the crisis whipsawed the bourgeoisie between irreconcilable social and geopolitical strategies : either the increased integration or the elimination of the workers’ movement; international trade and pacifism, or autarchy laying the foundations of a military expansion. The solution did not necessarily imply a Hitler, but it did presuppose a concentration of force and violence in the hands of the central government. Once the centrist-reformist compromise had exhausted itself, the only option left was statist, protectionist and repressive.

A program of this kind required the violent dismantling of Social Democracy, which in its domestication of the workers had come to exercise excessive influence, while still being incapable of unifying all of Germany behind it. This unification was the task of Nazism, which was able to appeal to all classes, from the unemployed to the captains of industry, with a demagogy that even surpassed that of the bourgeois politicians, and an anti-Semitism intended to build cohesion through exclusion.

How could the working-class parties have made themselves into an obstacle to such xenophobic and racist madness, after having so often been the fellow travelers of nationalism? For the SPD, this had been clear since the beginning of the century, obvious in 1914, and signed in blood in the 1919 pact with the Freikorps, who were cast very much in the same warrior mould as their contemporaries, the fasci. The KPD, for its part, had not hesitated to ally with the nationalists against the French occupation of the Ruhr in 1923, and openly talked of a “national revolution” to the point of inspiring Trotsky’s 1931 pamphlet Against National-Communism.

In January 1933, the die was cast. No one can deny that the Weimar Republic willingly gave itself to Hitler. Both the right and the center had come around to seeing him as a viable solution to get the country out of its impasse, or as a temporary lesser evil. “Big capital”, reticent about any uncontrollable upheaval, had not, up to that time, been any more generous with the NSDAP than with the other nationalist and right-wing formations. Only in 1932 did Schacht, an intimate adviser of the bourgeoisie, convince business circles to support Hitler (who had, moreover, just seen his electoral support slightly decline) because he saw in Hitler a force capable of unifying the state and society. The fact that the big bourgeoisie neither foresaw nor still less appreciated what then ensued, leading to war and then defeat, is another question, and in any event they were not notable by their presence in the clandestine resistance to the regime.

On January 30, 1933, Hitler was appointed chancellor, in complete legality, by Hindenberg, who himself had been constitutionally elected president a year earlier, with the support of the socialists, who saw in him a rampart against. …Hitler. The Nazis were a minority in the first government formed by the leader of the NSDAP.

In the following weeks, the masks were taken off: working-class militants were hunted down, their offices were sacked, and a reign of terror was launched. In the elections of March 1933, held against the backdrop of violence by both the Stormtroopers and the police, 288 NSDAP deputies were sent to the Reichstag (while the KPD still retained 80 and the SPD 120). Naive people might express surprise at the docility with which the repressive apparatus goes over to dictators, but the state machine obeys the authority commanding it. Did the new leaders not enjoy full legitimacy? Did eminent jurists not write their decrees in conformity with the higher laws of the land? In the “democratic state”–and Weimar was one–if there is conflict between the two components of the binomial, it is not democracy which will win out. In a “state founded on laws”–and Weimar was also one–if there is a contradiction, it is law which must be made to serve the state, and never the opposite.

During these few months, what did the democrats do? Those on the right accepted the new dispensation. The Zentrum, the Catholic party of the center, which had even seen its support increase in the March 1933 elections, voted to give four years of full emergency powers to Hitler, powers which became the legal basis of the future dictatorship. The Zentrum was forced to dissolve itself in July.

The socialists, for their part, attempted to avoid the fate of the KPD, which had been outlawed on February 28 in the wake of the Reichstag fire. On March 30, 1933, they left the Second International to prove their national German character. On May 17, their parliamentary group voted support for Hitler’s foreign policy. Nevertheless, on June 22, the SPD was dissolved as “an enemy of the people and the state”.

The unions followed in the footsteps of the Italian CGL, and hoped to salvage what they could by insisting that they were apolitical. In 1932, the union leaders had proclaimed their independence from all parties and their indifference to the form of the state. This did not stop them from seeking an accord with Schleicher, who was chancellor from November 1932 to January 1933, and who therefore was looking for a base and some credible pro-worker demagogy. Once the Nazis had formed a government, the union leaders convinced themselves that if they recognized National Socialism, the regime would leave them some small space. This strategy culminated in the farce of union members marching under the swastika on May 1, 1933, which had been renamed “Festival of German Labor”. It was wasted effort. In the following days, the Nazis liquidated the union and arrested the militants.

Having been schooled to contain the masses and to negotiate in their name, or, that failing, to repress them, the working-class bureaucracy was still fighting the last war. Its furtive acts of propitiation got it exactly nowhere. The labor bureaucrats were not being attacked for their lack of patriotism, but rather as a useless expense for the capitalist class. What bothered the bourgeoisie was not the bureaucrats’ lingering lip service to the old pre-1914 internationalism, but rather the existence of trade unions, however servile, retaining a certain independence in an era in which capital no longer tolerated any other community than its own, and in which even an institution of class collaboration became superfluous if the state did not completely control it.

Barcelona, 1936

In Italy and in Germany, fascism took over the state by legal means. Democracy capitulated to dictatorship, or, worse still, greeted dictatorship with open arms. But what about Spain? Far from being the exceptional case of a resolute action that was nonetheless, and sadly, defeated, Spain was the extreme case of armed confrontation between democracy and fascism in which the nature of the struggle still remained the same clash of two forms of capitalist development, two political forms of the capitalist state, two state structures fighting for legitimacy in the same country.

Objection!

“So, in your opinion, Franco and a working-class militia are the same thing? The big landowners and impoverished peasants collectivizing land are in the same camp?”

First of all, the confrontation happened only because the workers rose up against fascism. All the power and all the contradictions of the movement were manifest in its first weeks: an undeniable class war was transformed into a capitalist civil war (though there was, of course, no worked-out agreement and and no assignment of roles in which the two bourgeois factions orchestrated every action of the masses).

The history of a class-divided society is ultimately shaped by the need to unify those classes. When, as happened in Spain, a popular explosion combined with the disarray of the ruling groups, a social crisis becomes a crisis of the state. Mussolini and Hitler triumphed in countries with weak, recently-unified nation-states and powerful regionalist currents. In Spain, from the Renaissance until modern times, the state was the colonial armed might of a commercial society it ultimately ruined, choking off one of the pre-conditions of industrial expanion, agrarian reform. In fact, industrialization had to make its way through monopolies, the misappropriation of public funds, and parasitism.

Space is lacking here for a summary of the nineteenth-century crazy quilt of countless reforms and liberal impasses, dynastic factions, the Carlist wars, the tragicomic succession of regimes and parties after World War I, and the cycle of insurrections and repression that followed the establishment of the Republic in 1931. Beneath all these rumblings was the weakness of the rising bourgeoisie, caught as it was between its rivalry with the landed oligarchy and the absolute necessity of containing peasant and worker revolts. In 1936, the land question had not been resolved; unlike France after 1789, the mid-19th century selloff of the Spanish clergy’s lands wound up strengthening a latifundist bourgeoisie. Even in the years after 1931, the Institute for Agrarian Reform only used one-third of the funds at its disposal to buy up large holdings. The conflagration of 1936-1939 would never have reached such political extremes, up to and including the explosion of the state into two factions fighting a three-year civil war, without the tremors which had been rising from the social depths for a century.

In the summer of 1936, after giving the military rebels every chance to prepare themselves, the Popular Front elected in February was prepared to negotiate and perhaps even to surrender. The politicians would have made their peace with the rebels, as they had done during the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera (1923-1931), which was supported by eminent socialists (Cabellero had served it as a technical counselor, before becoming Minister of Labor in 1931, and then head of the Republican government from September 1936 to May 1937). Furthemore, the general who had obeyed republican orders two years earlier and crushed the Asturias insurrection — Franco– couldn’t be all that bad.

But the proletariat rose up, blocked the putsch in half of the country, and hung onto its weapons. In so doing, the workers were obviously fighting fascism, but they were not acting as anti-fascists because their actions were directed against both Franco and against a democratic state more unsettled by the workers’ initiative than by the military revolt. Three prime ministers came and went in 24 hours before the fait accompli of the arming of the people was accepted.

Once again, the unfolding of the insurrection showed that the problem of violence is not primarily a technical one. Victory does not go to the side with the advantage in weaponry (the military) or in numbers (the people), but rather to the side which dares to take the initiative. Where workers trust the state, the state remains passive or promises the moon, as happened in Zaragoza. When their struggle is focused and sharp (as in Malaga), the workers win; if it is lacking in vigor, it is drowned in blood (20,000 killed in Seville).

Thus the Spanish Civil War began with an authentic insurrection, but such a characterization is incomplete. It holds true only for the opening moment of the struggle: an effectively proletarian uprising. After defeating the forces of reaction in a large number of cities, the workers had the power. But what were they going to do with it? Should they give it back to the republican state, or should they use it to go further in a communist direction?

Created immediately after the insurrection, the Central Committee of Antifascist Militias included delegates from the CNT, the FAI, the UGT, the POUM, the PSUC (product of the recent fusion of the CP and the SP in Catalonia), and four representatives of the Generalitat, the Catalan regional government. As a veritable bridge between the workers’ movement and the state, and, moreover, tied if not integrated into the Generalitat’s Department of Defense by the presence in its midst of the latter’s councilor of defense, the commissar of public order, etc. the Central Committee of the Militias quickly began to unravel.

Of course, in giving up their autonomy, most proletarians believed that they were, in spite of everything, hanging onto real power, and giving the politicians only the facade of authority, which they mistrusted, and which they could control and orient in a favorable direction. Were they not armed?

This was a fatal error. The question is not: who has the guns? but rather: what do the people with the guns do? 10,000 or 100,000 proletarians armed to the teeth are nothing if they place their trust in anything beside their own power to change the world. Otherwise, the next day, the next month or the next year, the power whose authority they recognize will take away the guns which they failed to use against it.

The insurgents did not take on the legal government, i.e. the existing state, and all their subsequent actions took place under its auspices. It was “a revolution that had begun but had never consolidated”, as Orwell wrote. This is the main point which determined both the course of an increasingly losing armed struggle against Franco as well as the exhaustion and violent destruction by both camps of the collectivizations and socializations. After the summer of 1936, real power in Spain was exercised by the state and not by organizations, unions, collectivities, committees, etc. Even though Nin, the head of the POUM, was an advisor to the Ministry of Justice, “the POUM nowhere succeeded in having any influence over the police”, as one defender of that party admitted . While the worker militias were indeed the flower of the Republican army, and paid a heavy price in combat, they carried no weight in the decisions of the military high command, which steadily integrated them into regular units (a process completed by the beginning of 1937), preferring to wear them down rather than tolerating their autonomy. As for the powerful CNT, it ceded ground to a CP which had been very weak before July 1936 (having elected 14 deputies to the Popular Front chamber in February 1936, as opposed to 85 Socialists), but which was able to insinuate itself into part of the state apparatus and turn the state increasingly to its own advantage against the radicals, and particularly against the militants of the CNT. The question was: who was master of the situation? And the answer was: the state can make brutal use of its power when it is necessary.

If the Republican bourgeoisie and the Stalinists lost precious time dismantling the peasant communes, disarming the POUM militias, and hunting down Trotskyist “saboteurs” and other “agents of Hitler” at the very moment when anti-fascism was supposed to be throwing everything into the struggle against Franco, they did not do so from a suicidal impulse. For the state and for the CP, (which was becoming the backbone of the state through the military and police) these operations were not a waste of time. The head of the PSUC supposedly said: “Before taking Zaragoza, we have to take Barcelona”. Their main objective was never crushing Franco, but retaining control of the masses, because this is what states are for. Barcelona was taken away from the proletarians. Zaragoza remained in the hands of the fascists.

Barcelona, May 1937

The police attempted to occupy the Telephone Exchange, which was under the control of the anarchist (and socialist) workers. In the Catalan metropolis, heart and symbol of the revolution, legal authority stopped at nothing in disarming whatever remained alive, spontaneous and anti-bourgeois. The local police, morever, was in the hands of the PSUC. Confronted by an openly hostile power, the proletarians finally understood that this power was not their own, that they had given it the gift of their insurrection ten months earlier, and their insurrection had been turned against them. In reaction to the power grab by the state, a general strike paralyzed Barcelona. It was too late. The workers still had the capacity to rise up against the state (this time in its democratic form) but they could no longer push their struggle to the point of an open break.

As always, the “social” question predominated over the military one. Legal authority cannot impose itself by street battles. Within a few hours, instead of urban guerrilla warfare, a war of position, a faceoff of apartment building against apartment building set in. It was a defensive stalemate in which no one could win because no one was attacking. With its own offensive bogged down, the police would not risk its forces in attacks on buildings held by the anarchists. Broadly speaking, the CP and the state held the center of the city, while the CNT and the POUM held the working-class districts. The status quo ultimately won out by political means. The masses placed their trust in the two organizations under attack, while the latter, afraid of alienating the state, got people to go back to work (though not without some difficulty) and thereby undermined the one force capable of saving them politically and…”physically”. As soon as the strike was over, knowing that it henceforth controlled the situation, the government brought in 6,000 Assault Guards, the elite of the police. Because they accepted the mediation of “representative organizations” and councils of moderation from the POUM and the CNT, the very same people who had defeated the fascist military in July 1936 surrended without a fight to the Republican police in May 1937.

At that point, repression could begin. Only a few weeks were necessary to outlaw the POUM, to arrest its leaders, to kill them legally or otherwise, and to disappear Nin. A parallel police was established in secret locales, organized by the NKVD and the secret apparatus of the Comintern, and answering only to Moscow. From that point onward, anyone showing the slightest opposition to the Republican state and its main ally, the USSR, would be denounced and hunted down as a “fascist”, and all around the world an army of well-meaning, gentle souls would repeat the slander, some from ignorance, others from self-interest , but every one of them convinced that no denunciation was too excessive when fascism was on the march. The fury unleashed against the POUM was no aberration. By opposing the Moscow trials, the POUM condemned itself to be destroyed by a Stalinism locked in a merciless world struggle against its rivals for control of the masses. At the time, most parties, commentators and even the League for the Rights of Man came out in endorsement of the guilt of the accused. Sixty years later, mainstream ideology denounces these trials and sees them as a sign of the Kremlin’s mad will to power. As if Stalinist crimes had nothing to do with anti-fascism! Anti-fascist logic will always align itself with the most moderate forces and will always fight against the most radical ones.

On the purely political level, May 1937 gave rise to what, a few months before, would have been unthinkable: a Socialist even farther to the right than Caballero, Negrin, heading a government which came down hard on the side of law and order, including repression against the workers. Orwell–who almost lost his life in these events–realized that the war “for democracy” was obviously over. What remained was a faceoff between two fascisms, with the difference that one was less inhuman than its rival . Nevertheless, Orwell clung to the necessity of avoiding the “more naked and developed fascism of Franco and Hitler”. From that point onward, the only issue was fighting for a fascism less bad than the opposing one…

War Devours the Revolution

Power does not come from the barrel of a gun any more than it comes from a ballot box. No revolution is peaceful, but the military dimension is not the central one. The question is not whether the proles finally decide to break into the armories, but whether they unleash what they are: commodified beings who no longer can and no longer want to exist as commodities, and whose revolt explodes the logic of capitalism. Barricades and machine guns flow from this “weapon”. The more vital the social realm, the more the use of guns and the number of casualties will diminish. A communist revolution will never resemble a slaughter: not from any non-violent principle, but because it will be a revolution only by subverting more than by actually destroying the professional military. To imagine a proletarian front facing off against a bourgeois front is to conceive the proletariat in bourgeois terms, on the model of a political revolution or a war (seizing someone’s power, occupying their territory). In so doing, one reintroduces everything that the insurrectionary moment had overwhelmed: hierarchy, a respect for specialists, for knowledge that Knows, and for techniques to solve problems, in short for everything that diminishes the common man. In the service of the state, the working- class “militia man” invariably evolves into a “soldier”. In Spain, from the fall of 1936 onward, the revolution dissolved into the war effort, and into a kind of combat typical of states: a war of fronts.

Formed into “columns”, workers left Barcelona to defeat the fascists in other cities, starting with Zaragoza. Taking the revolution beyond areas under republican control, however, meant completing the revolution in the republican areas as well. But even Durruti did not seem to realize that the state was everywhere still intact. As Durruti’s column (70% of whose members were anarchists) advanced, it extended the collectivizations: the militias helped the peasants and spread revolutionary ideas. But, Durruti declared, “we have only one aim: to crush the fascists”. However much he reiterated that “these militias will never defend the bourgeoisie”, they did not attack the bourgeoisie either. Two weeks before his death (Nov. 21, 1936), he stated: “We have only one thought and one goal (…): to crush fascism (…) For now, no one should be thinking of wage increases or a shorter work week…we must sacrifice and work as much as necessary (…) we must have the solidity of granite. The moment has come to call on trade-union and political organizations to end their bickering once and for all. On the home front, what we need is administration (…) After this war, we must not, by our own incompetence, provoke another civil war among ourselves (…) Against fascist tyranny, we should stand as one; only one organization, with only one discipline, should exist.”

Durruti and his comrades embodied an energy which had not waited for 1936 to storm the existing world. But all the combative will in the world is not enough when workers aim all their blows against one particular form of the state, a nd not against the state as such. In mid-1936, accepting a war of fronts meant leaving social and political weapons in the hands of the bourgeoisie behind the lines, and moreover meant depriving military action itself of the initial vigor it drew from another terrain, the only one where the proletariat has the upper hand.

In the summer of 1936, far from having decisive military superiority, the nationalists held no major city. Their main strength lay in the Foreign Legion and in the “Moors” recruited in Morocco, which had been under a Spanish protectatorate since 1912 but which had long since rebelled against the colonial dreams of both Spain and France. The Spanish royal army had been badly defeated there in 1921, largely due to the defection of Moroccan troops. Despite Franco-Spanish collaboration, the Rif war (in which a general named Franco had distinguished himself) ended only when Abd el-Krim surrendered in 1926. Ten years later, the announcement of immediate and unconditional independence for Spanish Morocco would, at minimum, have stirred up trouble among the shock troops of reaction. The Republic obviously gave short shrift to this solution, under a combined pressure from conservative milieus and from the democracies of England and France, which had little enthusiasm for the possible breakup of their own empires. At the very same time, moreover, the French Popular Front not only refused to grant any reform worthy of the name to its colonial subjects, but dissolved the Etoile Nord-Africaine, a proletarian movement in Algeria.

Everyone knows that the policy of “non-intervention” in Spain was a farce. One week after the putsch, London announced its opposition to any arms shipment to the legal Spanish government, and its neutrality in the event that France was drawn into a conflict. Democratic England thus put the Republic and fascism on the same level. As a result, the France of Blum and Thorez send a few planes, while Germany and Italy sent whole armies and their supplies. As for the International Brigades, controlled by the Soviet Union and the Communist Parties, their military value came at a heavy price, namely the elimination of any opposition to Stalinism in working-class ranks. It was at the beginning of 1937, after the first Russian arms shipments, that Catalonia removed Nin from his post as adviser to the Ministry of Justice.

Rarely has the narrow conception of history as a list of battles, cannons and strategies been more inept in explaining the course of a directly “social” war, shaped as it was by the internal dynamic of anti-fascism. Revolutionary elan initially broke the elan of the nationalists. Then the workers accepted legality; the conflict was stalemated, and then institutionalized. From late 1936 onward, the militia columns were bogged down in the siege of Zaragoza. The state armed only the military units it trusted, i.e. the ones which would not confiscate property. By early 1937, in the poorly-equipped POUM militias fighting the Francoists with old guns, a revolver was a luxury. In the cities, they rubbed shoulders with perfectly outfitted regular soldiers. The fronts bogged down, like the Barcelona proletarians against the cops. The last burst of energy was the republican victory at Madrid. Soon thereafter, the government ordered private individuals to hand in their weapons. The decree had little immediate effect, but it showed an unabashed will to disarm the people. Disappointment and suspicions undermined morale. The war was increasingly in the hands of the specialists. Finally, the Republic increasingly lost ground as all social content and revolutionary appearances faded away in the anti-fascist camp.

Reducing the revolution to war simplifies and falsifies the social question into the alternative of winning or losing, and in being “the strongest”. The issue becomes one of having disciplined soldiers, superior logistics, competent officers and the support of allies whose own political nature gets as little scrutiny as possible. Curiously, all this means taking the conflict further from daily life. It is a peculiar quality of warfare that, even for its enthusiasts, no one wants to lose but everyone wants it to end. In contrast to revolution, except in the case of defeat, war does not cross my doorstep. Transformed into a military conflict, the struggle against Franco ceased to be a personal commitment, lost its immediate reality, and became a mobilization at once economic (working for the front), ideological (wall posters in the street, meetings) and human: after January 1937, voluntary enlistments tapered off, and the civil war, in both camps, came to depend mainly on compulsory military service. As a result, a militia man of July 1936, leaving his column a year later, disgusted with republican politics, could be arrested and shot as a “deserter”!

In different historical conditions, the military evolution from antifascsm- insurrection to militias and then to a regular army is reminiscent of the anti-Napoleonic guerrilla warfare (the term passed into French during the First Empire) described by Marx:

“If one compares the three periods of guerrilla warfare with the political history of Spain, one notes they represented the three corresponding degrees to which the counter-revolutionary government had reduced the spirit of the people. In the beginning, the entire population rose up, then guerrilla bands carried on a war of attrition backed up by entire provinces; and finally, there were bands without cohesion, always on the verge of turning into bandits or dissolving into regular regiments.”

For 1936 as for 1808, the evolution of the military situation cannot be explained exclusively or even mainly by the art of war, but flows from the balance of political and social forces and its modification in an anti-revolutionary direction. The compromise evoked by Durruti, the necessity of unity at any cost, could only hand victory first to the republican state (over the proletariat) and then to the Francoist state (over the Republic).

There was the beginning of a revolution in Spain, but it turned into its opposite as soon as the proletarians, convinced that they had effective power, placed their trust in the state to fight against Franco. On that basis, the multiplicity of subversive initiatives and measures taken in production and in daily life were condemned to fail by the simple and terrible fact that they took place in the shadow of a perfectly intact state structure, which had initially been put on hold, and then reinvigorated by the necessities of the war against Franco, a paradox which remained opaque to most revolutionary groups at the time. In order to be consolidated and extended, the social transformations without which revolution remains an empty word had to pose themselves as antagonistic to a state clearly designated as the adversary. But, after July 1936, dual power existed in appearance only. Not only did the instruments of proletarian power which emerged from the insurrection, and those which subsequently oversaw the socializations, tolerate the state, but they accorded the state a primacy in the anti-Franco struggle, as if it were tactically necessary to pass through the state in order to defeat Franco. In terms of “realism”, the recourse to traditional military methods accepted by the far left (including the POUM and the CNT) in the name of effectiveness almost invariably proved inneffective. Fifty years later, people still deplore the fact. But the democratic state is as little suited for armed struggle against fascism as it is for stopping its peaceful accession to power. States are normally loathe to deal with the social war, and normally fear rather than encourage any fraterization. When, in March 1937 in Guadalajara, the antifascists addressed themselves as workers to the Italian soldiers sent by Mussolini, a group of Italians defected. But such an episode remained the exception.

From the battle for Madrid (March 1937) to the final fall of Catalonia (February 1939), the cadaver of the aborted revolution decomposed on the battlefield. One can speak of war in Spain, not of revolution. This war wound up having as its first function the resolution of a capitalist problem: the constitution in Spain of a legitimate state which succeeded in developing its national capital while keeping the popular masses in check. In February 1939, Benjamin Peret analyzed the consommation of the defeat as follows:

“The working class (…), having lost sight of its own goals, no longer sees any urgent reason to be killed defending the bourgeois democratic clan against the fascist clan, i.e. in the last analysis, for the defense of Anglo-French capital against Italo-German imperialism. The civil war increasingly became an imperialist war.” (Cl‚, No. 2)

The two camps undeniably had quite different sociological compositions and social meanings. If the bourgeoisie was present on both sides, the immense majority of workers and poor peasants supported the Republic, whereas the archaic and reactionary strata (landed property, small holders, clergy) lined up behind Franco. This class polarization gave a progressive aura to the republican state, but it does not disclose the historical meaning of the conflict, any more than the percentage of working-class members of the SPD, SFIO or PCF exhausts the question of the nature of these parties. Such facts are real, but secondary to the social function in question. The party with a working-class base which controls or opposes any proletarian upsurge softens class contradictions. The republican army had a large number of workers, but for what, with whom and under whose orders were they fighting? To ask the question is to answer it, unless one considers it possible to fight the bourgeoisie in an alliance with the bourgeoisie.

“Civil war is the supreme expression of the class struggle” (Their Morals and Ours, 1938). Trotsky’s assertion is right, as long as one adds that, from the so-called Wars of Religion to the Irish or Lebanese convulsions of our own time, civil war is also, and most often, the form of an impossible or failed social struggle, where class contradictions which cannot assert themselves as such erupt as ideological or ethnic blocs, still further delaying any human emancipation.

Anarchists in the Government

Social Democracy did not “capitulate” in August 1914, like a fighter throwing in the towel; it followed the normal trajectory of a powerful movement which was internationalist in rhetoric and which, in reality, had become profoundly national long before. The SPD may well have been the leading electoral force in Germany in 1912, but it was powerful only for the purpose of reform, within the framework of capitalism and according to its laws, which included, for example, accepting colonialism, and also war when the latter became the sole solution to social and political contradictions.

In the same way, the integration of Spanish anarchism into the state in 1936 is only surprising if one forgets its nature: the CNT was a union, an original union undoubtedly but a union nonetheless, and there is no such thing as an anti-union union. Function transforms the organ. Whatever its original ideals, every permanent organism for defending wage laborers as such becomes a mediator, and then a conciliator. Even when it is in the hands of radicals, even when it is repressed, the institution is doomed to escape control of the base and to become a moderating instrument. Anarchist union though it may have been, the CNT was a union before it was anarchist. A world separated the rank-and-file from the leader seated at the bosses’ table, but the CNT as an apparatus was little different from the UGT. Both of them worked to modernize and rationally manage the economy: in a word, to socialize capitalism. A single thread connects the socialist vote for war credits in August 1914 to the participation in the government of the anarchist leaders, first in Catalonia (September 1936) and then in the Republic as a whole (November 1936). As early as 1914, Malatesta had called those of his comrades (including Kropotkin) who had accepted national defense “government anarchists”.

From one compromise to the next, the CNT wound up renouncing the anti- statism which was its raison d’etre, even after the Republic and its Russian ally had shown their real faces and unleashed their fury on the radicals in May 1937, not to mention in everything that followed, in the jails and secret cellars. Then, like the POUM, the CNT was all the more effective in disarming proletarians, calling on them to give up their struggle against both the official and Stalinist police bent on finishing them off. Some of them even had the bitter surprise of being in a prison administered by an old anarchist comrade, stripped of any real power over what when on in his jail. In 1938, a CNT delegation which had gone to the Soviet Union requesting material aid did not even criticize the Moscow trials.

Everything for the anti-fascist struggle…

Everything for cannons and guns…

But even so, some people might object, the anarchists by their very nature are vaccinated against the statist virus. In appearance…

Some “Marxists” can recite whole pages of Marx on the destruction of the state machine, and pages of Lenin saying in State and Revolution that one day cooks will administer society instead of politicians. But these same “Marxists” can still practice the most servile state idolatry, once they come to see the state as the slightest agent of progress and of historical necessity. Because they see the future as a capitalist socialization without capitalists, as a world still based on wage labor but egalitarian, democratized and planned, every thing prepares them to accept a state (transitional, to be sure) and to go off to war for a capitalist state they see as bad, but against another one they see as worse.

For its part, anarchism overestimates state power by seeing authority as the main enemy, and thus underestimates it with the belief that state power can be destroyed by itself. Anarchism does not see the effective role of the state as the guarantor but not the creator of the wage labor relation. The state represents and unifies capital, it is neither capital’s motor nor its centerpiece. Anarchism deduced, from the undeniable fact that the masses were armed, that the state was losing its substance. But the substance of the state resides not in its institutional forms, but in its unifying function. The state ensures the tie which human beings cannot or dare not create among themselves, and creates a web of services which are both parasitic and real. When, in the summer of 1936, it seemed weak in republican Spain, it subsisted as a framework capable of picking up the pieces of capitalist society, and it continued to live in hibernation. Then it awoke and gained new strength when the social relations opened up by subversion were loosened or were torn apart; it revived the hibernating organs, and, the occasion permitting, assumed control over those which subversion had caused to emerge. What had been seen as a mere nuisance showed itself capable not merely of revival, but of emptying out the parallel forms of power in which the revolution thought it had best embodied itself.

The CNT’s ultimate justification of its role comes down to the idea that the legal government no longer really had power, because the workers’ movement had taken power de facto. “(…) the government has ceased to be a force oppressing the working class, in the same way that the state is no longer the organism dividing society into classes” (Solidaridad Obrera, September 1936)

No less than “Marxism”, anarchism fetishizes the state and imagines it as being incarnated in a place. Blanqui had already thrown his little flock into attacks on city halls or on barracks, but he at least never claimed to base his actions on the proletarian movement, only on a minority which would awaken the people. A century later, the CNT declared the Spanish state to be a phantom relative to the tangible reality of the “social organizations” (i.e. militias, unions). But the existence of the state, its raison d’etre, is to paper over the shortcomings of “civil” society by a system of relations, of links, of concentrations of force, an administrative, police, judicial, military network which goes “on hold”, as a backup, in times of crisis, awaiting the moment when police investigators can go sniffing into the files of the social services. The revolution has no Bastille, police station or governor’s mansion to “take”; its task is to render harmless or destroy everything from which such places draw their sustenance.

The Failure of the Collectivizations

The depth and breadth of the industrial and agrarian socializations after July 1936 was no historical fluke. Marx noted the Spanish tradition of popular autonomy, and the gap between the people and the state which made itself manifest in the anti-Napoleonic war, and then in the revolutions of the nineteenth century, which renewed age-old communal resistance to the power of the dynasty.The absolute monarchy, he observed, did not shake up various social strata to forge a modern state, but rather had left the living forces of the country intact. Napoleon could see Spain as a “cadaver”, “but if the Spanish state was indeed dead, Spanish society was full of life” and “what we call the state in the modern sense of the word is materialized, in reality, only in the army, in keeping with the exclusively “provincial” life of the people”.

In the Spain of 1936, the bourgeois revolution had been made, and it was vain to dream of scenarios such as 1917, not to mention 1848 or 1789. But if the bourgeoisie dominated politically, and capital dominated economically, they were nowhere near the creation of a unified internal market and a modern state apparatus, the subjugation of society as a whole, and the domination of local life and its particularisms. For Marx, in 1854, a “despotic” government coexisted with a lack of unity that extended to the point of different currencies and different systems of taxation: his observation still had some validity 80 years later. The state was neither able to stimulate industry nor carry out agrarian reform; it could neither extract from agriculture the profits necessary for capital accumulation, nor unify the regions, nor still less keep down the proletarians of the cities and the countryside.

It was thus almost naturally that the shock of July 1936 gave rise, on the margins of political power, to a social movement whose realizations with communist potential were reabsorbed by the state they allowed to remain intact. The first months of a revolution, already ebbing, but whose extent still concealed its failure, looked liked nothing so much as a splintering process in which each region, commune, enterprise, collective and muncipality escaped the central authority without attacking it, and set out to live differently. Anarchism, and even the regionalism of the POUM, express this Spanish originality within the workers’ movement, which is wrongly grasped if one sees only the negative side of this “late development” of capitalism. Even the ebb of 1937 did not eradicate the elan of hundreds of thousands of workers and peasants who took over land, factories, neighborhoods, villages, seizing property and socializing production with an autonomy and a solidarity in daily life which struck both observers and participants.Sad to say, if these countless acts and deeds, sometimes extending over several years, bear witness (as do, in their own way, the Russian and German experiences) to a communist movement remaking all of society, and to its formidable subversive capacities when it emerges on a large scale, it is equally true that its fate was sealed from the summer of 1936 onward. The Spanish Civil War proved both the revolutionary vigor of communitarian bonds and forms which have been penetrated by capital but which are not yet directly reproduced by capital, and also their impotence, taken by themselves, in bringing off a revolution. In the absence of an assault against the state, and of the establishment of different relationships throughout the country, they condemned themselves to a fragmentary self-management preserving the content and even the forms of capitalism, notably money and the division of activities by individual enterprise. Any persistence of wage labor perpetuates the hierarchy of functions and incomes.

Communist measures could have undermined the social bases of the two states (republican and nationalist), if only by beginning to resolve the agrarian question: in the thirties, more than half the population was under-nourished. A subversive force erupted, bringing to the fore the most oppressed strata, those farthest from “political life” (e.g. women), but it could not go all the way and eradicate the system root and branch.

At the time, the workers’ movement in the major industrial countries corresponded to those regions of the world which had been socialized by a total domination of capital over society, where communism was both closer at hand as a result of this socialization, and at the same time farther away because of the dissolution of all relations into commodity form. The new world, in these countries, was most commonly conceived as a worker’s world, if not necessarily as an industrial one.

The Spanish proletariat, on the contrary, continued to be shaped by a capitalist penetration of society that was more quantitative than qualitative. From this reality it drew both its strength and its weakness, as attested by the tradition and demands for autonomy represented by anarchism.

“In the last hundred years, there has not been a single uprising in Andalusia which has not resulted in the creation of communes, the sharing out of land, the abolition of money and a declaration of independence (…) the anarchism of the workers is not very different. They too demand, first of all, the possibility of managing their industrial community or their union themselves, and then the reduction of working hours and of the effort required from everyone (…).

Vast numbers of proposals were made, some of them were realized, and others were initiated. Communism is also the re-appropriation of the conditions of existence.

One of the main weaknesses was the attitude towards money. The “disappearance of money” is meaningful only if it entails more than the replacement of one instrument for measuring value with another one (such as labor coupons). But, like the majority of radical groups, whether they call themselves Marxist or anarchist, Spanish proletarians did not see money as the expression and abstraction of real relationships, but as a tool of measurement, an accounting device, and they thereby reduced socialism to a different management of the same categories and fundamental components of capitalism.

The failure of the measures taken against commodity relations was not due to the power of the UGT union (which was opposed to the collectivizations) over the banks: as if the abolition of money was first of all something to be undertaken by the centers of power! The closing of private banks and of the central bank puts an end to mercantile relations only if production and life are organized in a way no longer mediated by the commodity, and if they, on this basis, gradually come to dominate the totality of social relationships. Money is not the “evil” to be removed from an otherwise “good” production, but the manifestation (today becoming increasingly immaterial) of the commodity character of all aspects of life. It cannot be destroyed by eliminating signs, but only when exchange itself disappears as a social relationship.

In fact, only agrarian collectives managed to do without money, and they often did so with the help of local currencies, with coupons often being used as “internal money”. Unable to extend non-commodity production beyond different autonomous zones with no scope for global action, the soviets, collectives and liberated villages were transformed into precarious communities and sooner or later were either destroyed from within or violently suppressed by either the fascists or the republicans. In Aragon, the column of the Stalinist Lister made this a specialty. Entering the village of Calanda, his first act was to write on a wall: “Collectivizations are theft”.

Collectivize or Communize?

Ever since the First International, anarchism has counterposed the collective appropriation of the means of production to Social Democratic statification. Both visions, nonetheless, begin from the same exigency of collective management. But the problem is: management of what? Of course, what Social Democracy carried out from above, and bureaucratically, the Spanish proletarians practiced at the base, armed, with each individual responsible to everyone, thereby taking the land and the factories away from a minority specialized in the organizing and exploitation of others. The opposite, in short, of the co-management the Coal Board by socialist or Stalinist unions. Nevertheless, the fact that a collectivity, rather than the state or a bureaucracy, takes the production of its material life into its own hands does not, by itself, do away with the capitalist character of that life.

Wage labor means the passage of an activity, whatever it might be, plowing a field or printing a newspaper, through the form of money. This money, even as it makes the activity possible, is also expanded by it. Equalizing wages, deciding everything collectively, and replacing currency by coupons has never beeng nough to eradicate the wage-labor relationship. What money brings together cannot be free, and sooner or later money becomes its master.

Substituting association for competition on a local basis was a guaranteed recipe for disaster. Because if the collective did abolish private property within itself, it also set itself up as a distinct entity and as a particuliar element among others in the global economy, and therefore as a private collective, compelled to buy and to sell, to engage in commerce with the outside world, thereby becoming in its turn an enterprise which, like it or not, had to play its part in regional, national and world competition, or else disappear.

One can only rejoice in the fact that one part of Spain imploded: what mainstream opinion calls “anarchy” is the necessary condition for revolution, as Marx wrote in his own time. But these movements made their subversive impact on the basis of a centrifugal force which also fed into localism. Rejuvenated communitarian ties also locked everyone into their village and their barrio, as if the point were to rediscover a lost world and a degraded humanity, to counterpose the working-class neighborhood to the metropolis, the self-managed commune to the vast capitalist domain, the countryside of the common folk to the commercialized city, in a word the poor to the rich, the small to the large and the local to the international, all the while forgetting that a cooperative is often the synonym for the longest road to capitalism.

There is no revolution without the destruction of the state: that is the Spanish “lesson”. But be that as it may, a revolution is not a political upheaval, but a social movement in which the destruction of the state and the elaboration of new modes of debate and decision go hand in hand with communization. We don’t want “power”; we want the power to change all of life. As an historical process extending over generations, can one imagine, over such a time frame, continuing to pay wages for food and lodging? If the revolution is supposed to be political first and social later, it would create an apparat whose sole function would be the struggle against the supporters of the old world, i.e. a negative function of repression, a system of control resting on no other content than its “program” and its will to realize communism the day that conditions finally allow for it. This is how a revolution ideologizes itself and legitimizes the birth of a specialized stratum assigned to oversee the maturation and the expectation of the ever-radiant day after tomorrow. The very stuff of politics is not being able, and not wanting, to change anything: it brings together what is separated without going any further. Power is there, it manages, it administers, it oversees, it calms, it represses: it is. Political domination (in which a whole school of thought sees problem #1) flows from the incapacity of human beings to take charge of themselves, and to organize their lives and their activity. This domination persists only through the radical dispossession which characterizes the proletarian. When everyone participates in the production of their existence, the capacity for pressure and oppression now in the hands of the state will cease to be operative. It is because wage-labor society deprives us of our means of living, producing and communicating, not stopping short of the invasion of once-private space and of our emotional lives, that its state is all-powerful. The best guarantee against the reappearance of a new structure of power over us is the deepest possible appropriation of the conditions of existence, at every level. For example, even if we don’t want everyone generating their own electricity in their basements, the domination of the Leviathan also comes from the fact that energy (a significant term, another English word for which is power) makes us dependent on industrial complexes which, nuclear or not, necessarily remain external to us and escape any control.

To conceive the destruction of the state as an armed struggle against the police and the armed forces is to mistake the part for the whole. Communism is first of all activity. A mode of life in which men and women produce their social existence paralyzes or reabsorbs the emergence of separate powers.

Balance Sheet

The Spanish failure of 1936-37 is symmetrical to the Russian failure of 1917-21. The Russian workers were able to seize power, but not to use it for a communist transformation. Backwardness, economic ruin and international isolation by themselves to do not explain the involution. The perspective set out by Marx, and perhaps applicable in a different way after 1917, of a renaissance in a new form of the communal agrarian structures, was at the time not even thinkable. Leaving aside Lenin’s eulogy for Taylorism, and Trotsky’s justification of military labor, for almost all the Bolsheviks and the overwhelming majority of the Third International, including the communist left, socialism meant a capitalist socialization PLUS soviets, and the agriculture of the future was conceived as the large landholdings managed democratically. (The difference– and it is a major one!– between the German-Dutch left and the Comintern on this question was that the left took soviets and democracy seriously, whereas the Russian communists–as their practice proved–saw in them nothing but tactical formulas.

In any case, the Bolsheviks are the best illustration of what happens to a power which is only a power, and which has to hold on without changing real conditions very much. Very logically and, at first, in perfectly good faith, the state of the soviets perpetuated itself at any cost, first in the perspective of world revolution, then for itself, with the absolute priority being to preserve the unity of a society coming apart at the seams. This explains, on one hand, the concessions to small peasant property, followed by requisitions, both of which resulted in a futher unraveling of any communal life or production. This explains, on the other hand, the repression against workers and against any opposition within the party. A power which gets to the point of massacring the Kronstadt mutineers (who were, for their part, only raising democratic deands) in the name of a socialism it could not realize, and which goes on to justify its actions with lies and calumny, is only demonstrating that it no longer has any communist character. Lenin died his physical death in 1924, but the revolutionary Lenin had died as head of state in 1921, if not earlier. The Bolshevik leaders were left with no option but to become the managers of capitalism.

As the hypertrophy of a political perspective hell bent on eliminating the obstacles which it could not subvert, the October Revolution also dissolved into a self-cannibalizing civil war. Its pathos was that of a power which, unable to transform society, degenerated into a counter-revolutionary force. In the Spanish tragedy, the proletarians, because they had left their own terrain, wound up prisoners of a conflict in which the bourgeoisie and its state were present behind the front lines on both sides. In 1936-37, the proletarians of Spain were not fighting against Franco alone, but also against the fascist countries, against the democracies and the farce of “non-intervention”, against their own state, against the Soviet Union, against….

1936-37 closed the historical moment opened by 1917.

In a future revolutionary period, the most subtle and most dangerous defenders of capitalism will not be the people shouting pro-capitalist and pro-statist slogans, but those who have understood the possible point of a total rupture.

Far from eulogizing advertising and obedience, they will propose to change life…but to that end will call for building a true democratic power first. If they succeed in dominating the situation, the creation of this new political form will use up people’s energies, fritter away radical aspirations and, with the means becoming the end, will once again turn revolution into an ideology. Against them, and of course against overtly capitalist reaction, the proletarians’ only path to success will be the multiplication and coordinated extension of concrete communist initiatives, which will naturally be denounced as anti-democratic or even as…”fascist”. The struggle to establish places and moments for deliberation and decision, making possible the autonomy of the movement, is inseparable from practical measures aimed at changing life.

“(…) in all past revolutions, the mode of activity has always remained intact and the only issue has been a different distribution of this activity and a redistribution of work among different persons; whereas the communist revolution is directed against the mode of activity as it has existed up till now and abolishes work and the domination of all classes by abolishing classes themselves, because it is carried out by the class which is no longer, in society, considered as a class and which is already the expression of the dissolution of all classes and all nationalities, etc. within society itself (…) (Marx, The German Ideology, 1845-46)

Gilles Dauvé (1979)

source: http://prole.info/texts/insurrectionsdie.html

The post When Insurrections Die by Gilles Dauvé appeared first on Void Network.

UNDERGROUND RESISTANCE
Nosotros Free Social Space:
10 Years against social apathy

SATURDAY 9 APRIL 2016
starts 23.00

TECHNO STAGE

Venus Melena
Loo (aka Berlin Brides)
Junior X
War

POST PUNK STAGE

Sanity Assasssin
Chaotic Moon
Grinding Halt

Free Social Space NOSOTROS
Themistokleous 66 Exarchia
https://www.facebook.com/NosotrosSocialCentre/?fref=ts

To Kενό Δίκτυο έχοντας πάρει μέρος στην δημιουργία,
οργάνωση και λειτουργία του
Ελεύθερου Κοινωνικού Χώρου ΝΟSOTROS
συμμετέχει στον μήνα εορταστικών εκδηλώσεων
για τα ΔΕΚΑ ΧΡΟΝΙΑ ύπαρξης του χώρου.

Void Network took part in the creation, organization and function of Free Social Space NOSOTROS in Exarchia Athens from the first day until now. We participate during all April 2016 with a serial of events at the celebrative month for the 10 YEARS of the social center.

KENO ΔΙΚΤΥΟ
(Θεωρία, Ουτοπία, Συναίσθηση, Εφήμερες Τέχνες)
https://voidnetwork.gr/

The post UNDERGROUND RESISTANCE Nosotros Free Social Space 10 YEARS celebration SAT. 9/4/2016 appeared first on Void Network.

KENO ΔΙΚΤΥΟ 
[Θεωρία, Ουτοπία, Συναίσθηση, Εφήμερες Τέχνες] 
http://voidnetwork.blogspot.com/

ΙΝDIE FREE FESTIVAL #25 
2 days for 25 years in the city

επετειακό φεστιβάλ για τα 25 χρόνια διοργάνωσης 
Παρασκευή 26-Σάββατο 27/6/2015

ΠΑΡΚΟ ΠΕΔΙΟΝ ΑΡΕΩΣ -ΑΘΗΝΑ
(είσοδος ελεύθερη / από οδό Αλεξάνδρας) 

ΠΑΡΑΣΚΕΥΗ 26/6/2015
έναρξη: 8 μ.μ.
1. LIVE CONCERT STAGE 
2. HIP HOP LIVE STAGE

ΣΑΒΒΑΤΟ 27/6/2015
έναρξη: 8 μ.μ.
1. LIVE CONCERT STAGE
2. DRUM N BASS+
    DUBSTEP STAGE
3. PSY TRANCE AREA


ΠΑΡΑΣΚΕΥΗ 
26/6/2015 
EΝΑΡΞΗ 20.00

live concert stage
starts 20.00

20.30-21.00 EMPTY SOULS
21.00-21.45 ANIMA TRISTE
21.45-22.30 THREE WAY PLANE
22.30-23.15 BLUE NIGHT TRIP
23.15-12.00 THE BOY
12.00-12.45 MΠΑΛΑΝΤΕΣ ΓΙΑ ΦΟΝΟΥΣ
12.45-01.30 ΧΩΡΙΣ ΠΕΡΙΔΕΡΑΙΟ
01.30-02.15 FUNDRACAR
02.15-03.00 RADIO SOL  
03.00-03.45 MUCHATRELA BAND
03.45- end  BAD BID

hip hop stage
starts 20.00

20.00-20.30  CARNALS
20.30-21.00  WOLVES
21.00-21.30  XAΡΤΟΠΟΛΕΜΟΣ
21.30-22.00    Α5
22.00-22.30  ΤΕ PAVARURIT
22.30-23.00  MAMALETTA
23.00-23.30  45
23.30-12.00  FLOW JOB 
12.00-12.30  VΑVΕL Α.D.
24.30-01.00  MENTIRA WITCH PROJECT
01.00-01.30  ΣΠΕΙΡΑ
01.30-02.00  ΕΚΠΡΟΣΩΠΟΣ ΜΗΔΕΝ
02.00-02.30  ΠΡΟΜΗΘΕΥΤΗΣ
02.30-03.00  ΝΕΚΡΟΙ ΑΠΟ ΚΟΥΝΙΑ
03.00-03.30  POR HOUITOS
03.30-04.00  NASTIE REBEL
              +MC ΔΙΧΩΣ ΧΡΩΜΑ
04.00-04.30  TWO BUMS

ΣΑΒΒΑΤΟ 27/6/2015 
ΕΝΑΡΞΗ: 20.00

live concert stage
starts 20.00

20.15-20.45 TRIBAL WEST
20.45-21.30  LIE
21.30-22.15  DUOYU
22.15-23.00 CLOSER
23.00-23.45  FILM
23.45-12.30  ΜC YINCA
12.30-01.15 THE CALLAS
01.15-02.00 MΙΚAEL DELTA
02.00-02.45 ACID BARRETTS
02.45-03.30 I SAW 43 SUNSETS
03.30- end  REVERSED NATURE

psychedelic trance stage 
starts 21.00

21.00-22.00 WAR
22.00-23.00 SISSY STARDUST
23.00-12.00  RISING CALAXY
12.00-01.00 JUNIOR X
01.00-02.00 CACTUS ARISING
02.00-03.00  UNDERVERSE
03.00-04.00 CONFO
04.00-05.00  IRAKLIS MINDPHASER

06.00-07.00 PACHANOI

enemies of the state 
drum ‘n bass / dubstep stage
starts 22.00: 

23.00- 00.00  HyDrone 
00.00 – 01.00 BAN 
01.00 – 02.00 Kernelcoremode 
02.00 – 03.00 D-jahsta 
03.00 – 04.00 Abend 
04.00 – 05.30 Disphonia 
05.30 – 06.30 Joz Moz
Hosted by   MC Dash
Visuals by   MANARAVER / KINOMATIK


αναλυτικό ωρολόγιο πρόγραμμα εμφανίσεων 
θα ανακοινωθεί σύντομα εδώ:
http://voidnetwork.blogspot.com


Iδέα :
Η αδιάκοπη διοργάνωση από το 1990 έως σήμερα ενός ποιοτικού, νεανικού, οικολογικού Φεστιβάλ αφιερωμένου στην αγάπη για την ανεξάρτητη underground δημιουργικότητα, την μουσική, την υπεράσπιση της ελευθερίας της έκφρασης στον δημόσιο χώρο και την προστασία του περιβάλλοντος. Ένα εθελοντικό και αφιλοκερδές φεστιβάλ που φέρνει σε άμεση βιωματική επαφή ένα μεγάλο αριθμό ανθρώπων με το Πεδίο του Άρεως συνεχίζοντας το Indie Free Festival για 25η χρονιά στον ιστορικό χώρο διοργάνωσης του.

Το πρόγραμμα και η αισθητική του Φεστιβάλ περιλαμβάνει όλες τις διαφορετικές underground κουλτούρες έτσι ώστε να σπάει κάθε αποκλεισμό, κάθε διαχωρισμό και να μπορεί να απευθύνεται σε ένα πολύ ευρύ κοινωνικό δυναμικό. Το Ιndie Free Festival από το 1990 έως σήμερα είναι καταξιωμένο στην συνείδηση των πολιτικά και κοινωνικά ευαισθητοποιημένων ανθρώπων ως το μακροβιότερο και σημαντικότερο φεστιβάλ ανεξάρτητων και πειραματικών μουσικών σχημάτων. 

Σε μια εποχή που το διαδίκτυο δίνει την ευκαιρία σε πολλούς αξιόλογους ανεξάρτητους καλλιτέχνες να παρουσιάσουν άμεσα το έργο τους σε ένα ευρύ κοινό, η σύνδεση του Indie Free Festival με όλα αυτά τα δημιουργικά άτομα και σχήματα απαιτεί την διαφύλαξη και καλλιέργεια των υψηλών προδιαγραφών ποιότητας, τεχνικής και αισθητικής αρτιότητας από μεριάς της διοργανώτριας συλλογικότητας. Σκοπός του φεστιβάλ είναι να αποτελεί μέρος της underground σκηνής που με την δράση της και το έργο της στέκεται ανταγωνιστικά προς την κυρίαρχη εμπορευματική κουλτούρα και την βιομηχανία της μαζικής διασκέδασης..

Στο Indie Free Festival όπως και σε όλες τις άλλες εκδηλώσεις του Κενού Δικτύου δεν υπάρχουν αμοιβές. Περισσότεροι από 50 εθελοντές και μέλη της πολιτικής-πολιτιστικής συλλογικότητας Κενό Δίκτυο παίρνουν μέρος στην διοργάνωση και επιμέλεια του φεστιβάλ. Μαζί τους, κάθε χρόνο περισσότεροι από 100 μουσικοί, καλλιτέχνες και video artists προσφέρουν την τέχνη τους δωρεάν και αφιλοκερδώς στέλνοντας ένα κάλεσμα στην άγρια νεολαία της πόλης για συμμετοχή στις πολιτικές-κοινωνικές διαδικασίες αυτοοργάνωσης, αλληλεγγύης και ελεύθερης κοινωνικής συνεισφοράς. 

Μεγάλο μέρος των μελών της ομάδας μας και βασικοί εμπνευστές της διοργάνωσης του Indie Free Festival ήδη από το 1990 υπήρξαν και συνεχίζουν να είναι κάτοικοι της ευρύτερης περιοχής της Πλ. Βικτωρίας και του Αγ. Παντελεήμονα, περιοχές που αποτέλεσαν και την βάση δημιουργίας της συλλογικότητας Κενό Δίκτυο, παιδιά που μεγάλωσαν και αποφοίτησαν στα τοπικά σχολεία της περιοχής, έζησαν το πάρκο από πολύ μικρή ηλικία στις αρχές της δεκαετίας του’80 και συνεχίζουν μέχρι σήμερα να δραστηριοποιούνται, εκτός των άλλων, στους τοπικούς αγώνες κατοίκων της περιοχής ενάντια στον ρατσισμό και τους κοινωνικούς αποκλεισμούς, ενάντια στα εμπορικά και μαφιόζικα συμφέροντα που λυμαίνονται την περιοχή, για ένα Πεδίο του Άρεως προσβάσιμο σε όλες τις ηλικίες και όλες τις διαφορετικές κουλτούρες, ανοιχτό 24 ώρες, όμορφο και λειτουργικό όπως το ονειρευόμαστε όλοι οι Αθηναίοι και πολύ περισσότερο οι ευαισθητοποιημένοι κάτοικοι της περιοχής.

Το Κενό Δίκτυο είναι μια πολιτισμική, θεωρητική και πολιτική συλλογικότητα μη-αμοιβομένων πολιτισμικών ακτιβιστών που εμφανίστηκε στην Αθήνα το 1990 με την επονομασία “Η Ομάδα Στον Τρόμο Του Κενού” και με σκοπό την ριζοσπαστικοποίηση της καθημερινής ζωής, την κοινωνική αμφισβήτηση, την ανάδειξη της κριτικής σκέψης, την εκστατική συλλογική συμβίωση και την δημιουργική έκφραση της διαφορετικότητας. 

Η δράση της συλλογικότητας οργανώνεται μέσα από την πολύμορφη συμμετοχή στους ευρύτερους χειραφετητικούς πολιτικούς και κοινωνικούς αγώνες, την δημιουργία Προσωρινής Αυτόνομης Ζώνης (Τ.Α.Ζ.), τη συμμετοχή σε κοινωνικά κέντρα, καταλήψεις και αυτοδιαχειριζόμενους χώρους, την κατασκευή καταστάσεων στον δημόσιο χώρο και την εφήμερη τέχνη. 

Από το 1990 έως σήμερα το Κενό Δίκτυο προσφέρει αδιάκοπα στον Δημόσιο Χώρο το έργο του για την πνευματική καλλιέργεια, την καλλιτεχνική έκφραση και την κοινωνική ευαισθητοποίηση διοργανώνοντας μουσικά φεστιβάλ, διαλέξεις ακτιβιστών και επιστημόνων από όλο τον κόσμο, multi media βραδιές ποίησης, εικαστικές εκθέσεις, διεθνή συνέδρια, θεατρικές παραστάσεις, εκδόσεις βιβλίων, ενημερωτικές καμπάνιες, διαδηλώσεις, δράσεις και πολύμορφες παρεμβάσεις.

Εκατοντάδες συγκροτήματα όπως οι Στέρεο Νόβα, ο Μιχάλης Δέλτα, οι Raining Pleasure, oι Bokomolech, οι Make Believe, τα Διάφανα Κρίνα, οι Closer, οι Film, οι Groove Machine, oι Terminal Curve, oι Baby Guru, οι DrogAtek, oι Horror Vacui, οι Purple Overdose, οι Νight Stalker και τόσοι μα τόσοι άλλοι ξεκίνησαν την πορεία τους από το Indie Free Festival και συνεχίζουν να το στηρίζουν με τις αφιλοκερδείς εμφανίσεις τους σε αυτό αποτελώντας οργανικό μέρος της διοργάνωσης του. 

Περισσότεροι από 150 καλλιτέχνες εμφανίστηκαν μόνο την περσινή χρονιά. Συνολικά στα 25 χρόνια του Ιndie Free Festival με πρόχειρους υπολογισμούς από τις 3 σκηνές του φεστιβάλ έχουν περάσει 3.000 καλλιτέχνες, μέλη συγκροτημάτων, μουσικοί παραγωγοί, video artists και d.j.s 

Με μεγάλη μας χαρά λοιπόν, καλούμε τους νέους και τους παλιότερους φίλους μας στην επετειακή διήμερη περιπέτεια του ΙΝDIE FREE FESTIVAL #25

KENO ΔΙΚΤΥΟ 
[Θεωρία, Ουτοπία, Συναίσθηση, Εφήμερες Τέχνες] 
http://voidnetwork.blogspot.com/ 
επαφή: voidinternational@gmail.com 

ο αναλυτικός κατάλογος των καλλιτεχνών 
θα ανακοινωθεί εδώ σύντομα:
http://voidnetwork.blogspot.com

The post INDIE FREE FESTIVAL #25 FR.26- SAT.27 June 2015 PEDION AREOS PARK – Athens Greece appeared first on Void Network.

ΚΕΝΟ ΔΙΚΤΥΟ
[Θεωρία, Ουτοπία, Συναίσθηση, Εφήμερες Τέχνες]
http://voidnetwork.blogspot.com/

ΓΙΑ ΤΑ ΚΟΙΝΑ ΤΗΣ ΕΛΕΥΘΕΡΙΑΣ
ΟΜΙΛΙΑ | ANOIXTH ΔΗΜΟΣΙΑ ΣΥΖΗΤΗΣΗ

ΤΡΙΤΗ 3/2/2015

ΩΡΑ: 21.00

Ελεύθερο Αυτοδιαχειριζόμενο
Θέατρο ΕΜΠΡΟΣ
Ρ. ΠΑΛΑΜΗΔΗ 3 | ΨΥΡΡΗ, ΑΘΗΝΑ

Ο καθηγητής Πολιτικής Θεωρίας Αλέξανδρος Κιουπκιολής
μιλά με αφορμή το βιβλίο του «Τα Κοινά της Ελευθερίας»
που κυκλοφορεί από τις εκδόσεις Εξάρχεια
Από το Κενό Δίκτυο
θα μιλήσουν ο συγγραφέας Γ. Ραουζαίος
& o διδ. Πολιτικής Φιλοσοφίας Γ. Σωτηρόπουλος

Τα «κοινά», οι συλλογικοί, φυσικοί και πολιτισμικοί πόροι που διαχειριζόμαστε από κοινού με συμμετοχικές πρακτικές, αναδεικνύονται σήμερα στην κριτική θεωρία και πράξη ως ένας από τους βασικούς κόμβους της αυτόνομης ανοικοδόμησης της ζωής. Η ενδυνάμωσή τους δεν πλουτίζει μόνο την εμπειρία της κοινωνικής αυτοκυβέρνησης μέσα από αμεσοδημοκρατικούς θεσμούς και κοινότητες σε πολιτισμικούς χώρους, στην εκπαίδευση, το διαδίκτυο, την κατανάλωση και την παραγωγή. Κτίζει εδώ και τώρα τα μικροθεμέλια της καθημερινής επιβίωσης και συμβίωσης με τους όρους των άλλων κόσμων στους οποίους προσβλέπουμε, εξασφαλίζει τις υλικές και θεσμικές προϋποθέσεις της μετάβασης προς αυτούς και διαπλάθει την άλλη εξισωτική ηθική της κοινής αυτοδιεύθυνσης.
Η αργή μεταμορφωτική δύναμη της επανάστασης η οποία μετασχηματίζει έννοιες, σχέσεις, δομές, σημαίνοντα και σημαινόμενα, δεν μπορεί να έχει άλλο στόχο παρά την δημιουργία ενός ευρύτατου ΚΟΙΝΩΝΙΚΟΥ ΜΕΤΩΠΟΥ, το οποίο θα αποτελεί την κεντρική δυναμική της επαναστατικής διαδικασίας. Από την στιγμή που η επαναστατική κουλτούρα της πανανθρώπινης απελευθέρωσης διαχυθεί ευρέως κοινωνικά θα γίνει κυρίαρχη κουλτούρα στην θέση της κουλτούρας της κυριαρχίας, ηγεμονεύουσα κοινωνική κουλτούρα ενάντια στην κουλτούρα όλων των ηγεμόνων.

ΚΕΝΟ ΔΙΚΤΥΟ
[Θεωρία, Ουτοπία, Συναίσθηση, Εφήμερες Τέχνες]
http://voidnetwork.blogspot.com/

Ο Αλέξανδρος Κιουπκιολής γεννήθηκε (1975) και μεγάλωσε στην Αθήνα, στην περιοχή των Εξαρχείων. Σπούδασε ελληνική φιλολογία (κλασσική κατεύθυνση) στο Πανεπιστήμιο Αθηνών και πολιτική θεωρία στα Πανεπιστήμια του Έσσεξ και της Οξφόρδης. Σήμερα διδάσκει σύγχρονη πολιτική και κοινωνική θεωρία στο Τμήμα Πολιτικών Επιστημών του Αριστοτελείου Πανεπιστήμιου. Τα ερευνητικά και πολιτικά του ενδιαφέροντα επικεντρώνονται στη νεωτερική σύλληψη της ελευθερίας, τη φιλοσοφία του δικαίου, τις θεωρίες και τα πρότυπα της δημοκρατίας, την ανάλυση και την κριτική της εξουσίας.

Έχει δημοσιεύσει, μεταξύ άλλων, τα βιβλία Radical Democracy and Collective Movements Today. The biopolitics of the multitude versus the hegemony of the people, συλλογικός τόμος με επιμέλεια Α. Κιουπκιολή και Γ. Κατσαμπέκη (Ashgate, Λονδίνο 2014), Freedom after the critique of foundations. Marx, liberalism and agonistic autonomy (Palgrave-Macmillan, Hampshire 2012), και Πολιτικές της ελευθερίας. Αγωνιστική δημοκρατία, μετα-αναρχικές ουτοπίες και η ανάδυση του πλήθους (Εκκρεμές, Αθήνα 2011).

The post For the Commons of Freedom / Open Public Talk at Occupied Theatre Embros. Athens// ΓΙΑ ΤΑ ΚΟΙΝΑ ΤΗΣ ΕΛΕΥΘΕΡΙΑΣ ΟΜΙΛΙΑ | ANOIXTH ΔΗΜΟΣΙΑ ΣΥΖΗΤΗΣΗ appeared first on Void Network.