Translated by Nikos Gatzikis

____________

Marxist theorist Mark Fisher (1968–2017) posed a critical question: “Are cultural resources running out in the same way as natural resources are?” (Fisher, 2009). Through an analysis of cultural production over the past fifty years, he argued that the popular culture of Western societies has ‘frozen’ in the 20^thcentury, with the present characterized by timeless repetitions, revivals, and a striking lack of innovation.

According to Fisher, the 20^th century was defined by the parallel development of technological and cultural forms: the emergence of new technologies allowed for formal changes in pop culture, giving it a distinct chronological “signature”(Fisher, 2009). As examples, we can consider how the synthesizer became emblematic of the music of the ’70s and the ’80s or how the ‘rough’ assembly of samplers characterized ’90s rave music.

However, from 2000 onward, this trend disappears, and technological progress becomes disconnected from cultural production: technology continues to advance in leaps, but popular culture remains stagnant, clinging to its old forms. In fact, as Fisher notes, new technologies often serve not to produce new cultural forms, but to more faithfully reproduce old ones.[1] In this way, today, technological innovations “have tended to be parasitic on old [cultural] media” (Fisher, 2009).

If Fisher diagnosed a cultural landscape trapped in an endless loop of the past,Generative AI is not just another instance of this inertia – it is its logical conclusion. I argue that applications for text, image, and sound production—such as ChatGPT, Midjourney, and Soundraw, which utilize data from human activity to generate content—exemplify the tendency Fisher identified.

To make this parallel clearer, we must first examine Fisher’s arguments more closely.

In the texts included in Ghosts Of My Life (Fisher, 2014a),as well as in his blog k-punk, Fisher argues that the Western culture of the 20^thcentury was essentially modernist, rejecting the past and striving to achieve some formal innovation. Moreover, in contrast to the elitist and largely inaccessible modernism of the first half of the 20^thcentury, the period from 1960 to 2000, which shaped Fisher’s aesthetic perception, was marked by the emergence of a “popular modernism” with mass appeal (Fisher, 2014b). The examples Fisher usesare mainly drawn from British music: 1960s psychedelic rock, 1970s punk, 1980s post-punk, and 1990s rave.

In contrast to this era of unprecedented innovation, the popular culture of the 21^st century has abandoned modernism. Cultural forms no longer rebel against the past, but embrace it and repeat it. Thus, the“nostalgia mode” of postmodern capitalism (a term by Fredric Jameson) exhibits a “formal attachment to the techniques and formulas of the past, a consequence of a retreat from the modernist challenge of innovating cultural forms” (Fisher, 2014a, p. 11).

The examples that can be used to support this idea are endless. Fisher points to the disappearance of the ‘retro’ genre in music, a category that has stopped making sense, since, today, everything is somewhat retro and essentially timeless. Thus, Adele and Amy Winehouse—whose “recordings are saturated with a vague but persistent feeling of the past” (Fisher, 2014a, p. 14)—were not considered retro, but entirely contemporary.

Fisher also refers to the inability to identify the distinctive “sound” of the 2000s or 2010s, as well as the sterile appropriation of rave by bands like the Black Eyed Peas (Fisher, 2014a, p. 180) or mod by groups like Blur and Oasis. Rather than genuine tributes, he argues, these repetitions were “confidence tricks which borrowed yesterday’s inventions and half-heartedly passed them off as today’s swagger” (Fisher, 2014b). In the 2020s, one need only look at Hollywood, which increasingly resembles an Ouroboros, endlessly regurgitating its own past through sequel after sequel, spin-offs no one asked for, and countless remakes.

But how can we explain the disappearance of popular modernism in the 21st century? Why has pop culture stopped drawing on the creativity of technological advances? According to Fisher, the main reason is the transition of Western societies from the social democracy of the post-war period (welfare state, relative safety) to the neoliberal era ushered in by Thatcher and Reagan (expansion of the market sphere, dominance of managerial logic). This shift coincided with the transition from Fordist capitalism (stable employment in a specific space with limited hours) to today’s post-Fordist capitalism (precarious work with flexible hours, work that you take home, pervasive anxiety).

This transition brought significant changes to the production and consumption of art, and Fisher argues that these changes are responsible for the stagnation of contemporary pop culture. Regarding production, neoliberal capitalism “has gradually but systematically deprived artists of the resources necessary to produce the new” (Fisher, 2014a, p. 15). With the erosion of the welfare state, free tertiary education, and both private and public spaces (low rents, squats), the “indirect source of funding” that enabled experimentation in 20^thcentury pop culture has disappeared. Today, most artists are pressured “toproduce something that [is] immediately [profitable]”and thus turn to “cultural products that resembl[e] what [is] already successful” (Fisher, 2014a, p. 15).

At the same time, in terms of consumption, the audience of pop culture ends up desiring the reproduction of familiar forms, demanding ‘more of the same.’ The neoliberal condition of general uncertainty compels usto seek security in “established” cultural expressions, while the “besieging of attention” imposed by the technologies of communicative capitalism makes us “demand quick fixes,” such as the “easy promise of a minimal variation on an already familiar satisfaction” (Fisher, 2014a, p. 15). In this way, Fisher argues, neoliberalism is the primary mechanism behind the freezing of pop culture.[2]

I feel that Generative AI represents the culmination of the creative enervationthat Fisher diagnosed. Artificial intelligence is anachronistic by nature, inherently bound to the cultural production of the past. Its function is to metabolize the data of human activity (literature, painting, music) in orderto produce combinations of words, pixels, and sounds that satisfactorily respond to a given prompt.

Indeed, AI is very capable. ChatGPT can write a good paragraph “in the style of Woolf,” Midjourney can generate a good image “in the style of Monet,” So-VITS-SVC can even make songs with Tupac’s voice. But they cannot revolt. They cannot rupture. They cannot escape the weight of the pastand bring something new. Paraphrasing Fisher, we might say that “the law of [AI] is that everything comes back” (Fisher, 2014b), whether it be writing styles, artistic techniques, or even the dead themselves.

Thus, if AI artists are selling images online, if Kanye is releasing AI music videos, if Hollywood is considering using chatbots to write scripts and if inspired dissertations are already being drafted by ChatGPT, the result is utterly void. The only thingAI can do is ingest what has already happened and regurgitate it as formula, as undead forms that refuse to disappear. In this sense, Generative AI is the perfect realization of capital’s necromanticdream: culture that consumes itself endlessly, resurrecting the past while preventing the emergence of the new.

It follows that debates about AI’s “intelligence” or “consciousness” are absurd. The fact that we recognize our own reflectionin AI says more about us than it does about it. The ability of AI-generated self-help books or young adult fiction to selldoes not mean that AI writes ‘like a human’ – it means that, for decades, many humans have been writing, reading, and thinking like machines.

Thus, when we speak of AI’s (present or future, actual or virtual) “consciousness,” this tells us nothing about the algorithm’s“intelligence”, but insteadreveals how much we have mechanized our thinking, how much we have distancedourselves from our own bodies, our own experiences, andour own creative capacities, to the point that we now see our image reflected in binary code.

The moment we disconnect consciousness from the emergence of the new is the moment we surrender to the sterile timelessness of capitalist non-sense.

_____________

Haris Kalaitzidis

References

Fisher, M. (2014a). Ghosts of my life: Writings on depression, hauntology and lost futures. Zer0 Books.

Fisher, M. (2014b, January 5). Going overground. k-punk. https://k-punk.org/going-overground/

Fisher, M. (2009, April 15). Running on empty: The lack of innovation in pop music suggests that we are experiencing an energy crisis in culture. New Statesman. https://www.newstatesman.com/long-reads/2009/04/culture-technology-energy-rave

[1] Fisher cites the example of HD televisions, where “we see the same old things, but brighter and glossier” (Fisher, 2009). In the 21^st century, we might consider how Hollywood uses CGI to make aging actors appear younger (e.g., Robert De Niro) or to resurrect them entirely (e.g., Carrie Fisher).

[2]If Fisher’s analysis has a limitation, this ishis tendency to overwhelmingly focus on neoliberalism without situating it within the broader tendencies of capitalism and the oscillation between the contractual and the authoritarian poles of the state. As a result, and even though Fisher insists that he is not proposing some nostalgic return to social democracy, his work—or, at least, many interpretations of it—struggles to shake the sense that things ‘were better back then’, and that the main problem in today’s world is neoliberalism. I suspect this was one of the reasons that led him to take up one unviablepolitical position after another: engaging with accelerationism and left cybernetics in his youth, becoming enamoured with Syriza, Podemos, and Corbyn later on, and attacking the “neo-anarchist” tendency of horizontalism and rejection of parliamentary politics.

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FR. 20/12/2024
starts 23.00

Free Self Organized
THEATRE EMBROS
Riga Palamidi 2,
Psiri area / ATHENS

Techno Stage

Emex
Olga b2b Nadja
Mister M.
Nikos Thanos
Whodoes
WΔR

Psy Trance Stage

Sishiva
Crystal Zero
Greg Staikos
Iraklis Mindphaser
Sotokkan
El Mahico
Vertigo

Visuals:
Global Eye (London Void Network)
Void Optical Art Laboratories

Παραβιαστικές, σεξιστικές ή βίαιες συμπεριφορές δεν θα γίνουν ανεκτές. Εάν αντιμετωπίσετε προσωπικά ή πέσει στην αντίληψη σας κάποιο πρόβλημα παρακαλούμε μιλήστε με τα άτομα της συλλογικότητας μας στο μπαρ της εκδήλωσης.

ΚΕΝΟ ΔΙΚΤΥΟ
http://voidnetwork.gr

Ζούμε τα χειρότερα χρόνια της ζωής μας. Δουλεύουμε από το πρωί μέχρι το βράδυ σε ηλίθιες καταπιεστικές δουλειές για να πληρώνουμε πανάκριβα νοίκια και λογαριασμούς, δηλητηριασμένες τροφές και φθηνά ρούχα φασόν από κακοπληρωμένους εργάτες στην Κίνα. Ο πόλεμος απλώνεται παντού, από την Παλαιστίνη μέχρι τα Εξάρχεια όλος ο κόσμος είναι ένα πεδίο μάχης, οι ανθρώπινες κοινότητες στενάζουν κάτω από την απειλή των όπλων των κατακτητών, των επενδυτών, των καθαρμάτων. Τα σαββατόβραδα η πόλη, μας προσφέρει βλακώδεις, εμπορικές διασκεδάσεις ελεγχόμενες από τους μαφιόζους και την αστυνομία. Οτιδήποτε σε αυτή τη ζωή αρνείται τους όρους του εμπορεύματος καταστέλλεται & απαγορεύεται. Κατοικούμε φυλακισμένοι στο χειρότερο κράτος του κόσμου.

Εξαντλημένοι και απογοητευμένοι, διαδίδουμε σύγχυση , ηττοπάθεια, εγωισμό και ιδιώτευση σαν δηλητήριο ο ένας στον άλλον. Όσα όνειρα και αν κάνεις μόνος σου, μόνο με μια συλλογική έκρηξη μπορούμε να τα κάνουμε πραγματικότητα. Aυτό απαιτεί μια εσωτερική εξέγερση, έναν εναγκαλισμό με το αδιανόητο και μια τελευταία συνάντηση των γνωστών- αγνώστων. Το μόνο που φοβούνται οι κυβερνήτες είναι το πνεύμα του Δεκέμβρη του 2008, όλους εμάς τους χιλιάδες που τότε περπατήσαμε μες τις φωτιές και τις κρατάμε τόσα χρόνια κρυμμένες μέσα μας να σιγοκαίνε τα σωθικά μας. Φυσικά τρέμουν το κύμα που σχηματίζουμε όλοι εμείς οι απελπισμένοι, οι νέοι χωρίς μέλλον, οι μετανάστες χωρίς σύνορα, οι φτωχοί χωρίς φόβο, οι κοινωνικά αποκλεισμένοι, οι άνθρωποι μιας εποχής χωρίς ελπίδα.

Η απελευθέρωση των καταπιεσμένων θα έρθει από την βάση της κοινωνίας και τις σχέσεις που θα αναπτυχθούν ανάμεσα σε αυτούς που θα μοιράζονται μια ευτυχία χωρίς χρήματα και τον έρωτα που ζουν μεταξύ τους οι εξεγερμένοι.

ΚΕΝΟ ΔΙΚΤΥΟ
http://voidnetwork.gr

The post Underground Resistance – 2 stages Rave- FR 20/12 Theatre Embros- Athens appeared first on Void Network.

Like Franz, my brother took his life in April of last year. Rodney left no note, just several empty bottles of vodka. Until a few hours before he died, he had been two months sober, trying a keto diet, and going for thirteen-mile runs while working full time. As we later learned, the last thing he googled was: “does vodka have more calories than rum?” He was struggling to better himself until the last moment but came up against more powerful forces. It is not a unique story. These days, it seems as if everything in the world conspires against human flourishing.

Deaths like Rodney’s are now frequently called “deaths of despair,” a category that includes fatalities by overdose and from drug and alcohol abuse, but they don’t have a box for that on death certificates. I remember watching the funeral-home director type “suicide” into the form instead. Above him hung a page of Microsoft Word art, framed and drop-shadowed, informing us that payment is due at time of arrangement. A student-loan company called my mom the next day to ask about payment of another kind. “He’s dead,” she replied. The agent offered her condolences but explained that death did not alter the terms of their contract. Who owns the world, and whose tomorrow is tomorrow? For now, the answer is obvious. It belongs to a bunch of assholes. And I, for one, would really like to kick them all in the teeth.

As my family was laying Rodney to rest, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported yet another decline in life expectancy in the United States, the richest country in the world. It was official: opioids, alcohol, and guns are easier to get than healthcare and a steady job. With no hope for the future, Americans were dying en masse by drug overdose, liver failure, and suicide. That spring, the deaths of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain brought these morbid facts into the spotlight. Celebritized sympathy facilitated the spread of news about a much wider epidemic: seventy thousand more Americans died in 2017 than 2016; forty-seven thousand of those additional deaths were self-inflicted, 120 souls per day. Over a million and a half others tried, but did not succeed. Those who did mostly used a firearm, like my brother.

The scatter plot of deaths pulling life expectancies lower occurred mostly among young and middle-aged men, and especially among those aged twenty-five to forty-four. Most of the change is driven by increasing mortality among poor, non-college-educated white men, though people of color are no strangers to deaths of despair. Opioid deaths are on the rise in those communities as well. Rodney was thirty-four when he died, in the middle of this bracket. My dad, Bill, was forty-four, right on the cusp, when he committed suicide almost two decades ago in 2001. The uptick in self-inflicted deaths began around 1999 and rose steadily thereafter. My shrinking family is thus a microcosm of a national tragedy. I find myself asking, Why should a family that experienced economic hardship, to be sure, but also so much laughter and love, have to suffer so much? That isn’t a rhetorical question. It is the foundation of my politics. I want to do whatever it takes to make it possible for everyone, around the world, to enjoy a life worth living.

Rodney worked the festival circuit with such enthusiasm was because it freed him from the debt collectors. If he worked any job for longer than six months, student-loan creditors were able to find him and garnish his wages.

If we are to achieve this goal, we have to start by calling these deaths what they are: deaths of despair, yes, but more precisely capital punishment for those who fall down in a winner-takes-all society. The United States has set up the Matthew principle as the law of the land: “For to every one who has will more be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away.” After getting what little they have taken away, and then taken away again — through debt, addiction, and homelessness — many people find it easier to lie down than to get back up again.

From 1991 to 2018, I watched the promise of a good American life crumble. Amid the jobless recovery of the early 1990s, my father abandoned a once-promising career as a mutual funds salesman. After losing a series of jobs, his failure to find work was exacerbated by a drug habit he could not shake. Since Bill did not have a stable place of his own, Rodney and I would visit with him on the weekends by tracing worn paths around the shopping mall. He was a pianist who wrote songs about regretful mistakes, rock ’n’ roll angels, and romance. Lacking a piano, he would practice in public, so our most frequent destination on mall wanderings was Guitar Center. There he would “test out” pianos for hours — a thin excuse to sing us his blues. Sitting on price-tagged leather benches, we listened to my dad’s jeremiad on America.

Eventually, he ran into legal trouble. Involved in a robbery that went awry, he decided to do time in his own way. He left a note saying that Rodney and I should split his final paycheck, which came out to around $340.

The United States has seen more and more stories like my own. As inequality rose, so did its victims. Between 1980 and 2014, the income share of the richest 1 percent of American adults doubled, rising from around 10 percent up to 20, while that of the bottom 50 percent was halved, falling from around 20 percent down to 12. Research has shown that societies with high inequality are also societies with high levels of status anxiety — and for good reason: as inequality rises, one’s relative social standing comes to matter much more in determining one’s life chances. Yet as inequality rises, so does the fixity of the status hierarchy. Social mobility declines, so fewer poor parents have rich children, and fewer rich parents have poor children. The wealthy are piling into gated communities and closing the gates behind them.

In this context, people take risks to get ahead against increasingly impossible odds, and mostly they lose. That’s how risk works. And so, here, in the richest country in the world, we have rates of mental illness, drug use, violence, and homicide that are among the highest in the world. We have a massive prison population, facing much harsher sentences than prisoners in other countries. We respond to this drastic situation by giving up our lives. For fuck’s sake, life expectancy is declining in America. On a dying planet we are dying sooner. It’s like being in an otherwise quiet room with the loud ticking of a nearby clock. Can’t you hear it?

After my father died, Rodney would always tell everyone it was me and him against the world. That became our motto. We became travelers: I hopped trains, hitchhiked to Chiapas, and played in punk bands. Meanwhile, Rodney spent his life chasing jam bands around the country, selling food along the way to afford the adventure. Wherever the music was, he was there. His impact on that community was felt everywhere. Thousands of people knew and loved him from the jam-band circuit. He was an anarchist, but ethically rather than politically. I found these lines in one of his notebooks, after he passed away: “Every time you loan a tool to a neighbor, share food with the hungry, or give a ride to a stranger you are embracing the anarchist ideal. Live it.” But he couldn’t live it always.

Every autumn Rodney crawled back into the straight world and tried to hold on for nine long months until summertime returned again. One reason Rodney worked the festival circuit with such enthusiasm was because it freed him from the debt collectors. If he worked any job for longer than six months, student-loan creditors were able to find him and garnish his wages. The crisis of never finishing college later became a source of lifelong shame for Rodney, as debt collectors hounded him for money he didn’t have. The way they hunted him across the country meant that he was never sitting still for more than six months his entire adult life.

Rodney was well over the average US student-loan debt level of $48,000, yet he was never able to finish college. Instead, he worked and worked without achieving any stability, long after his friends had begun to settle down. In between summer touring seasons, when he would hit the road selling falafel at festivals, he worked for whoever was hiring: logging companies, landscapers, law firms, nightclubs. Like everyone who is poor, he was always working. When he didn’t have a job, he was hustling.

My brother’s life as a worker started young. At fourteen he worked part-time at Dunkin’ Donuts, pouring black half-decafs and tossing pink rainbow-sprinkled donuts in paper bags. Some summers we worked a beach parking lot for a guy named, I kid you not, Roy Dickover. When he went to college, Rodney tried to insinuate himself, however he could, into the world that also animated our father: music. It started small. He brought a George Foreman grill to festivals: two dollars, you get a grilled cheese; three dollars, you get a grilled cheese and a shot; four dollars, you get a grilled cheese, a shot, and I also get a shot. He negotiated his own pleasure into his business deals. But Rodney lacked the inherited wealth and avaricious instinct necessary to succeed in business life.

Running in place for so long is exhausting. He would get his life together, and then somehow it would fall apart. In the months before he died, everyone agreed that he seemed to be on the up-and-up: making plans for the upcoming touring season while working as a landscaper with his roommate. So it was surprising when, one day in April, my mom and I suddenly found ourselves alone.

_____

A few months after Rodney passed away, I mustered up the energy to travel to Puerto Rico alone. Tasked with writing about mutual aid and collectivities born of ecological disaster, I traced my sadness down rain-soaked, late-summer streets. The island was preparing for another storm and tacking plywood to storefronts still busted up from Hurricane Maria a year earlier. Everyone was talking about suicides, both general trends and specific experiences.

The crisis in Puerto Rico did not begin with the hurricane. The current cycle of devastation has been going on since at least 2009, when the Puerto Rican economy shrank by 14 percent, setting in motion a cascade of austerity and insolvency. Hurricane Maria arrived after years of rapidly increasing out-migration and economic stagnation. When the US economy declines, it leaves so much fallow — empty lots and storefronts checker the towns and cities — yet the absence of growth does not lead to a subsequent fertility. When the hurricane came and destroyed basic infrastructure and most public services disappeared overnight, that was more than many people could take. The local government reported a sudden 16 percent increase in suicides. Since then, someone has taken their life in Puerto Rico every day.

There was hope amidst the hopelessness. All the mutual aid projects I saw were inspiring, but what I keep coming back to in my mind are the nighttime corner stores turned into clubs that I encountered. Patrons would carry plastic chairs outside. The cashier would turn up the volume on the stereo. People returning from work would stop by to sing, dance, and gossip. The songs weren’t protest music, and the corner stores weren’t set up as community centers. Dance hall, as a general movement, happens in hard places, but as the not-hard part of those places, like my Dad’s Guitar Center blues, ringing out an implicit protest against everything that seeks to chase us away from one another, to destroy us in isolation.

A feature of the rise of social inequality in America has been the evaporation of public life, the decline in social experiences not organized around pay or profit. Networks of organizations, from trade unions to church groups to volunteer organizations to parent–teacher associations, have disappeared. Without these places, we all too often retreat into our respective corners, either to make plays at getting ahead, or to nurse our wounds when such risk-taking fails to yield results. People are tired of it all but find that they have no one to turn to: they are too suspicious of each other, too cynical about the motives lurking behind every attempt at fellow feeling and human connection. To get to the future we need, we are going to have to generate new collective lives out of the wreckage of neoliberal atomization. The easy part here is knowing why we need to fight; the hard part will be figuring out a way to come together.

One of the many trials involved in losing a loved one is sorting through their possessions in the days and years that follow their parting. Combing through Rodney’s coat closet, looking for something warm, I pulled out an extra-large, black windbreaker. On its back, in big block letters, it said: THE STORM WILL PASS. I laughed as if Rodney were there and said out loud to him, “Will it now?” Even though I had grimaced at the windbreaker’s optimism, I didn’t take it off for weeks.

It is not inevitable that we will weather this storm. We have to find each other inside the storm and fight our way out of it, somehow. An early participant in New York’s ACT UP chapter, Gregg Bordowitz, once said, “An army of the sick cannot be defeated.” In order to defeat the sicknesses that have been imposed on us, we, the sick, will have to be the ones who fight. We must go to war against our own decline. No one else will do it for us. We have to carve out the spaces of a fuller human flourishing, which the cold-hearted society of the cash nexus will never provide. Trust me when I say that the other option is much worse.

______________

written by Chloe Watlington – Associate Editor at Commune Magazine. Other writing can be found in The Baffler and Teen Vogue.

The post Who Owns Tomorrow? For a life worth living appeared first on Void Network.

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.

________________

AK Press (AKP): Let’s start by having you explain the title of the book, Premonitions. You’ve chosen it in relation to the titles of the two classic collections of Walter Benjamin’s essays, Illuminations and Reflections. How do you see your work in relation to Benjamin’s and what analytical premises are implied by “premonitions”?

AK Thompson (AKT): Walter Benjamin’s contributions have always struck me as being a powerful corrective to those Marxisms that were more narrowly focused on political economy. In Capital, Marx showed us how getting below the level of bourgeois commonsense, which takes the market to be self-evident, made it possible to uncover the “hidden abode” of production where capitalism’s truth was revealed. Benjamin went one further by proposing that this “hidden abode” could be found everywhere. He showed that it was possible to describe capitalism by teasing out the tensions that shot through its culture. In this way, he sought to “grasp an economic process as perceptible.”

Early in his intellectual career, Benjamin observed that the German Romantics had viewed criticism less as an act of disavowal than as one of completion. Although our experience of the world was one of discontinuous fragments, it was possible – through reflection – to reveal these fragments’ “absolute” character. The implication is that the work of analysis can start from anywhere. If you know how to look for it, even the “hidden abode” can be found reflected in the culture. Sometimes, however, we encounter events, experiences, and images that are especially revelatory. The shock of recognition prompts us to reevaluate the world and the struggles that define it. In his essay on surrealism (1929), Benjamin described these experiences as ones of “profane illumination.”

Given the central role that illumination and reflection played in his thought, it was felicitous that these concepts were given as titles to the volumes that made Benjamin a familiar name in the English-speaking world. In assembling my own collection, I felt obliged to signal my debt by following suit. Premonitions are similar to illuminations and reflections in that, as forms of extrapolative reasoning, they reveal how a thing or event can be made to alert us to the broader social process from which it derives. The major difference is that, whereas Benjamin’s concepts placed emphasis on the resolution of accumulated tensions, “premonitions” direct our attention toward the future that will obtain should present dynamics be left undisturbed.

Because of his misgivings with “progress,” which he took to be both a central conceit of capitalist culture and an idea that had blunted class hatred among social democrats, Benjamin urged movements to turn their back on the future and focus more on “the image of enslaved ancestors … than that of happy grandchildren.” Even so, his work discloses a strong premonitory orientation. The concluding line to “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century” (1935), for instance, recounts how “in the convulsions of the commodity economy we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.”

This is seductive, but we must resist the temptation to view ruins – even capitalist ruins – as somehow signaling redemption. Premonitory thinking reveals that capitalist ruins point just as logically to barbarism as they do to emancipation. For this reason, premonitions eject us from the continuum of history and deposit us before the moment of decision demanded by politics.

AKP: A crucial premise of the book – building, again, upon Benjamin – is that one can find, through a deep analysis of any particular element of a culture, a microcosm or reflection of (among other things) its social and economic relations. The general contained within the particular. You see one clear antecedent in Marx’s famous examination of the commodity at the beginning of Capital, and also in Henri Lefebvre’s claim that, through an analysis of a small event, one might grasp “the sum total of capitalist society, the nation and its history.” Could you elaborate on how this idea works throughout your book, and maybe give an example?

AKT: For me, revolutionary politics really begins with the realization that everything is about everything. Because we recognize that incremental tinkering will never change the system, we demand a total revolution in all areas of social life; but what does that mean? How do we get a hold of the whole? As an object of analysis, and much more so as one of intervention, “society” is pretty cumbersome. For this reason, it becomes necessary to grasp it through its fragmentary expression. In the end, Benjamin maintained that this method could reveal “in the lifework, the era; and in the era the entire course of history.”

I first began experimenting with this method in Black Bloc, White Riot, where what had seemed like a series of finite debates regarding tactics ended by disclosing a much broader set of concerns regarding the meaning of politics as such. The same idea is at work in Keywords for Radicals, where the dynamics of late capitalism are discovered through the contests over word usage and meaning that arise within radical scenes. In Premonitions, this method is directed primarily toward the cultural artifacts that emerge from radical movements.

This emphasis arose in part from my desire to understand the bond that sometimes develops between activists and particular movement-based artists. I recall, for instance, being struck by the nearly reverential use of images by Eric Drooker in the propaganda of the global justice era. What could this affinity tell us about the struggle? As an object of analysis, the work of art can be grasped more easily than “the movement.” By considering the bases of its resonance, it becomes possible to detect movement dynamics that might otherwise remain invisible.

Let me give you an example. The following image was used by the Direct Action Network to promote actions against the IMF and World Bank in DC on April 16, 2000.

For those with a background in art history, Drooker’s citation of Goya’s Massacre of the Third of May is fairly clear. Overlapping this citation, however, is a more oblique reference to Joshua’s assault on Jericho. The Goya reference is accusatory but foregrounds defeat; the Joshua reference testifies to the power of faith. By collapsing them into a single image, Drooker suggests how the movement, through faith, might triumph over the massacre that seems immanent to the confrontation they’ve initiated. It’s a seductive proposition, and it’s easy to see why it resonated with a political generation rediscovering the promise and perils of direct action.

It’s important to recall, however, that most activists are not art historians. For this reason, the image’s appeal must arise from something other than the conscious recognition of its animating citations. Why did nineteenth-century Romantic motifs resonate so strongly with a movement that took “Another World Is Possible” to be its profession of faith? In the end, my analysis suggested that the movement was stuck in an unconscious repetition of the dynamics that had plagued its predecessor. It reiterated the ambivalence of Romanticism’s anti-capitalism, which tended to function as a kind of loyal opposition within the horizon of bourgeois thought. Assembling this constellation gave me a better grasp on the movement’s shortcomings, and it helped me to envision concrete strategies for moving forward.

AKP: Such an analysis reminds me of another thing I liked about your book. Because you encourage it in your Introduction, I often found myself reading the word “analysis” in its Freudian sense. Throughout the book you use terms like neurosis, drives, wish images, repression, and trauma. It’s as if you put the whole culture on the analyst’s couch. Can you talk a little about how psychoanalysis fits into your framework?

AKT: Benjamin drew on psychoanalytic insights without feeling terribly beholden to the tradition, which was still very much in formation at the time. He was hostile to Jung for his reliance on archetypes, but his thinking often ran parallel to that of Freud who, especially in later works like The Future of an Illusion and Civilization and its Discontents, had become preoccupied with broader social and historical concerns. As an intellectual tradition, psychoanalysis is torn between radical and conservative poles. Freud’s unsparing critique of bourgeois morals coexists with the reality principle’s implicit demand for accommodation. Similarly, one can detect a tension between the tradition’s analytic dimension (which tends to unsettle normative presumptions regarding social dynamics) and its therapeutic one (which emphasizes work at the level of the individual psyche).

My own use of psychoanalytic concepts is largely in keeping with Benjamin’s, and with that of the Frankfurt School more generally. Benjamin’s main contention was that people collectively (and not solely as individuals) are driven by a search for resolution that leads both to wishful thinking and to historical recollection – though the latter most often gets refracted through myth. As with Freud, who thought that dreams arose from our practical inability to obtain a desired object (or even to acknowledge our desire for it), Benjamin perceived material culture to be a kind of ongoing dream work in which the social desire for absolution found expression in distorted form.

The task therefore becomes one of bringing the desires that animate existing forms into consciousness so that the struggle can begin to find its concrete referent. For Marx (and Benjamin was fond of this quote), “our motto must be: reform of consciousness not through dogma, but by analyzing the mystical consciousness that is unintelligible to itself… It will then become clear that the world has long dreamed of possessing something of which it only has to be conscious in order to possess it in reality… It is not a question of drawing a great mental dividing line between past and future, but of realizing the thoughts [desires] of the past.”

AKP: How about Romanticism, which is a much more explicit thread that runs through the essays? How does it help us understand where we are politically, or equip us for the struggles ahead?

AKT: Ever since their mutual inception at the end of the eighteenth century, social movements and Romanticism have been difficult to disentangle. Both traditions emerged in relation to the bourgeois revolutions of that time, and both flourished within the public sphere. From its hatred of dark satanic mills to its celebration of the heart that watches and receives, Romanticism generated an impressive catalogue of wish images that continue to resonate today. But Romanticism’s anti-capitalism was always ambivalent. Not only did it tend to fall into the role of loyal opposition by siding with the “ought” of bourgeois idealism, which (despite standing in opposition to the “is” of capitalism’s dominant empiricism) could never attain a synthesis of the kind called for by Marx in his Theses on Feuerbach, it also swung pendulously between the utopian and the imperious. Many scholars have identified a Romantic kernel at the heart of fascism.

Given these dynamics, I think the challenge for anarchists and communists today is to acknowledge Romanticism’s enduring resonance as a mode of anti-capitalist critique while recognizing that (in and of itself) this critique is not enough and that (when left unchecked) the desires it unleashes can be dangerous and unpredictable.

AKP: Having published a number of books on fascism in recent years, I couldn’t help but notice how certain Benjamin-inflected phrases call to mind contemporary definitions of fascism. For instance, you say that Benjamin “proposed that resonant images enabled people to anticipate the future by recalling traces of a mythical past whose promise had yet to be fulfilled” or, to consider a simpler take, “the present dreams the future by way of a detour through the mythic past.” This seems almost perfectly to describe what drives fascism, so how do you respond to its recent resurgence?

AKT: Benjamin was keenly aware of both fascism and its allure. In his famous “work of art” essay (1936), he began by dispensing with notions of genius and creativity, which he claimed led to a “processing of data in the Fascist [and, we might add, Romantic] sense.” Instead, he sought to focus on the contradictions inherent in the developmental tendencies of art as expressed under definite conditions. These tendencies were contradictory, and he took those contradictions and their manifest form in the culture to be reflective of contradictions in the base. For this reason, Benjamin urged us to read his theses not merely as descriptions but as weapons in the struggle against fascism. This struggle, he maintained, would proceed through the politicization of aesthetics, which he contrasted to fascism’s aestheticization of politics and the cult of death to which it gave birth.

But while fascism has actively exploited wish images, they are by no means unique in sensing their allure. Indeed, it is precisely because wish images are so pervasive that fascism is capable of gaining ground. Because a mythic resolution is always easier to attain than a profane, material one, fascism can provide pathways to fulfillment that are for the most part unavailable to communists, anarchists, and those we would seek to recruit. Since this is the case, it might seem prudent to disavow wish images and focus instead on concrete conditions and concrete demands. I’m sympathetic to this conclusion; however, I think it’s dangerous to cede the field.

Wish images give form to the longing for resolution, but they do so in a refracted, mythical way. Following Benjamin (and echoing Marx), I believe our aim must therefore be to make the animating desire clear to itself so that it can be decoupled from the inadequacy of its posited resolution. From there, this same desire might find fulfillment through the profane demands of revolutionary politics. Left to their own devices, wish images are just as likely to fall into fascism’s orbit as they are to yield radical anti-capitalist conclusions. In contrast, when we commit to prying the animating desire from its wish-image cathexis, the effect can be like splitting the atom.

Concretely speaking, I think this means that communists and anarchists need to get better at developing modes of critique that don’t estrange us from the desires that animate mainstream culture. I understand the subcultural reflex, but the solace it affords must be measured against the social disconnect that arises when the critique is understood (correctly, I think) as a repudiation – rather than a suggestion regarding the realization – of the wish. Such repudiations leave people more open to fascism, which tends to affirm ordinary desires (e.g. for security) before binding them to dangerous, mythic resolutions.

I also think we need to get better at describing what a resolution to the historical accumulation of unrealized desires might look like in concrete terms. The challenge is that, while fascists can point to mythic futures and mythic pasts, the only things that communists and anarchists can responsibly point to are the tasks that accumulate whenever a decision is made. Still, people are more likely to assume such responsibilities when the desire that drives them has been affirmed and when the posited resolution seems more compelling than the myth to which it had previously adhered. •

First published on the AK Press website.

The post Premonitions: Fragments of a Culture of Revolt- an interview with AK Thompson appeared first on Void Network.

Guy Debord, Attila Kotányi & Raoul Vaneigem, Theses on the Paris Commune

The principle of authority is so built in to every aspect of our society that it is only in revolutions, emergencies and “happenings” that the principle of spontaneous order emerges. But it does provide a glimpse of the kind of human behaviour that the anarchist regards as “normal” and the authoritarian sees as unusual. … It could be seen in spite of commercial exploitation in the pop festivals of the late 1960s, in a way which is not apparent to the reader of newspaper headlines. From “A cross-section of informed opinion” in an appendix to a report to the government, a local authority representative mentions “an atmosphere of peace and contentment which seems to be dominant amongst the participants” and a church representative mentions “a general atmosphere of considerable relaxation, friendliness and a great willingness to share”. The same kind of comments were made about the instant city of the Woodstock Festival in the United States: “Woodstock, if permanent, would have become one of America’s major cities in size alone, and certainly a unique one in the principles by which its citizens conducted themselves.”

Colin Ward, Anarchy in Action

In 1970, Anarchy magazine (nº 116, October), published three short essays under the theme of “Instant Anarchy”. The first of the three was a piece by Graham Whiteman entitled the “Festival Moment”, in which we are offered an anarchist reading of the woodstock music festival (and of festivals in general).

As this week marks the 50th anniversary of Woodstock, we thought that there could be no better way to celebrate the occasion than to recall the anarchy of the event and to shake up its current status as a “historical monument” a little.

Instant Anarchy

1: Festival moment

Graham Whiteman

THE MAIN ARGUMENT OF ANARCHISM is concerned with the question of authority. Anarchists believe that a viable social organisation is possible without the assistance of a cruel, unjust and inherently evil coercive authority—and that mankind would be a happier, healthier and infinitely better species if it existed in a condition of freedom. Given this belief, all libertarian thinkers have attempted to construct theories of social organisation based on freedom and co-operation. But, from the earliest anarchist writings, down to those of the present day (see ANARCHY 62), the approach has been an intellectual one.

In the last few years, however, some most notable ad hoc experiments in this field have been made by people uncommitted to any political creed. It is possible that, through the medium of the open-air “pop” (the most convenient, if misleading word) festival, we are witnessing the beginnings of an “instant anarchy”.

At first sight, the linking of a large-scale music festival with the idea of social freedom may seem a paradox: they are mostly designed by profit hungry promoters (see Financial Times, 6.7.70), in order to squeeze as much money as possible from their long-haired patrons. The audience is dependent—for their food, drink and general comfort—upon the facilities provided. These provisions are likely to be expensive, as are the fees charged for admission to the site. It lies with the nature of those attending a festival to transform what is basically an economic exercise, into an experiment in non-authoritarian (if temporary) community living. Without attempting any snapshot sociology, it is clear that participants in the sub-culture of youth are anarchic in their life-style: they have rejected the handed-down values of the parent, the teacher, the politician. To put it simply, the “heads” can manage very well without the heavy hand of authority, even if their ideas of useful living conflict with those of the well-read anarchist.

The concept of open-air music festivals is not new. Pop festivals, however, with their drugs, nudity and general freedom, have only been with us since 1967, and, since that time, some thirty festivals—involving a rough total audience of three million—have occurred in the US alone. Britain was rather late in following the fashion, but has since produced quite a few (Bath, Isle of Wight, Plumpton, etc.). To date, the most widely reported and discussed festival took place in New York State, in August of last year; because of the film illustrating it, those who were not present are able to see that this event—Woodstock—was notable in many ways. It has perhaps, a special relevance to the anarchist.

Woodstock lasted over three days, and the audience has been estimated as consisting of “half a million freaks”, coming, ostensibly, to see some of the major pop musicians. The site was labelled, among other things, as the “10th largest city in the US”. If it was a city, then it was certainly an unusual one. During the three days, there were no murders, thefts, fights, race-riots or any of the worse things that modern urban man accepts as “normal”. Despite some of those problems that daily occur in cities (traffic jams, the disposal of rubbish, overcrowding, the straining of basic amenities), the film is able to show us people smiling, laughing, just enjoying themselves and their freedom; the interviews emphasise the important place that freedom has in the lives of these people. They regard it as a basic right, to be jealously guarded from the encroachment of the policeman and the parent; Woodstock was a massive affirmation of this right.

The Village Voice (21.8.69) confirmed this view. According to their reporter, the most amazing aspect of the festival was, again, not the music, but “the physical stamina, tolerance and good nature of a basically indoor, urban group of people caught in wretched outdoor conditions. It showed more dramatically than any planned demonstration could have that hip kids are fundamentally different from the beer-drinking, fist-fighting Fort Lauderdale crowds of yesteryear” … “people shared what they had, overlooked their differences, kept their cool, and generally smiled all weekend”.

Unfortunately, not everyone realised the significance of Woodstock. The film shows us local traders, who are delighted at the crowds—and the money they have brought with them. It also shows us local residents who are anything but delighted, not only because their lawns are being trampled and defaced with rubbish, but because they have been confronted by a huge mass of people who are patently disinterested in tight suburban conformity—people who have long hair! people who go naked in public! people who use drugs! and people who do not have the slave mentality. These are the same residents who were pleased, when, after the festival, the Chief of Police was deprived of his job. He had offended his superiors by not arresting people inside the festival-grounds. It seems that part of a policeman’s duties is to stop citizens enjoying themselves.

The Establishment Press too, where it is not being outrightly hostile, is generally bewildered by such manifestations of co-operation and fraternity as can be seen in Woodstock (a pleasing exception was Barry Norman, in the Daily Mail of 25.6.70). Having a direct interest in the maintenance of exploitation and conformity, the large dailies concentrate on the more superficial, sensational facets of the pop festivals, and ignore their true significance—just as, with a political demonstration, they deal almost exclusively with the demonstration itself, and not the issue that promoted it. So, we read headlines, such as “Nude Girl Dances” or “New Drug Worry At Festival”. As might be expected, they hardly believe that large groups of people can gather and live together, without going dangerously berserk, especially when those groups are made up of people who find no attraction in the life of the obedient cog in the great economic machine.

Accepting that “Woodstock” reinforces Kropotkin’s optimism in the basic sociability of human-beings, it remains for us to ask certain questions. The crowd at Woodstock was continually urged, throughout the course of the festival. to remain calm; they were constantly congratulated on their behaviour. Would this behaviour have been any different if a Hitler or a Stalin had taken over the stage and made a speech? To answer this, we must return to the “freaks” themselves. Much of the music they favour has a strong element of violence—complete with guitar-smashing and screamed vocals; it might appear that this would be reflected amongst the audience. But no, the music seems to be a form of catharsis; the audience apparently grow more pacific as the noise-level increases. One remembers a heartwarming scene in the film, where people gaily trample down fences, and one is forced to doubt the willingness of the festival crowd to be led, or manipulated. As long as the harassment is verbal, they just ignore it, or employ that terrible weapon, the laugh.

Food, drink, sanitation and provisions for shelter are usually provided at the larger weekend festivals (though they tend to be badly organised). At Woodstock, these were indeed provided (and mismanaged) and they had only to last for three days. Could the audience itself have organised these things and kept them going for a week, or a month? It is probable that necessity would have forced them to: there was much voluntary sharing of food at the festival, and this gives the impression that co-operation might have overcome any attempt at exploitation. Lastly, the members of the audience, in co-operating, were “looking after their own”, drawing on the common strength of their own alternative culture. What if a group of middle-aged Americans had arrived, complete with prejudice and sons in the National Guard? The crowd at Woodstock had to pass through just such people to reach the site, and what happened on that site was an example to the latter. Admittedly, one must be a little cautious with one’s enthusiasm, when one examines the composition of the pop festival audience. As the director of the Woodstock film (Michael Wadleigh) put it. “If you put 400,000 adults together in a field for three days, would they have produced a better record?” One naturally doubts if they would—through no real fault of their own.

In a society that deliberately sponsors alienation and a blind obedience to all authority, it is much safer to live and react in a manner pleasing to those in control. The main example provided by festivals is that it is possible to live without the ministrations of an authority, once an instilled prejudice towards that authority is forgotten. The slave has to deny the validity of the slave-master.

There is an element of romance in some anarchist literature, a nostalgia for a golden past, a desire to return to innocence and simplicity of living (e.g. Tolstoy). From this view, there often follows a wish to retire into the countryside, and build a community based on mutual aid, free from those evils which appear to be inherent in city-living. The modern commune movement is an extension of this concept. Rock festivals provide a temporary illustration of this desire. One of those with experience of a large outdoor festival agreed. “You’re ‘escaping’ from the city, you know? You can smoke, fuck, whatever, and mostly they are going to leave you alone” (Rolling Stone, 6.8.70).

One wonders if a temporary experience like this can have a more permanent significance. Woodstock, if permanent, would have become one of America’s major cities in size alone, and certainly a unique one in the principles by which its citizens conducted themselves. Something lasting could well have come from a display of pop music—and pop music is basically a transitory experience, as is the whole spectrum of pop-culture.

A community functioning on the principles of harmony and freedom might have a better chance of survival if, initially, it was a smaller unit than that which forms the audience of a festival like Woodstock. However well-intentioned a group of people are, the common problems of living inevitably provide opportunities that could be exploited by the self-seeking; these opportunities would be magnified, where those to be led are great in number (sheer density of population, is, of course, an argument against democracy). So, until the organisation of a community is functioning, it might be advisable to limit the number of individuals concerned. Naturally, it would be of the utmost importance for those individuals to keep a jealous guard on their freedom; it would rest with them to collectively resist the encroachments of the potential boss or policeman.

Any community has to work to survive. Without entering into the common anarchist theories of industry and agriculture, it is possible to say that the means of production can be held in common and used in such a way that fair and plentiful distribution of basic necessities is maintained. Anyway, one feels that the “heads” would find the rigours of competition just too much of a “hassle” to be worth bothering with. Those who also find working too much of an inconvenience would either have to live off the charity of those who are willing to support them, or leave the community and re-enter “straight” society. It is probable that most would find that working for themselves under a mutually organised system of industry and in support of a non-capitalist idea is not too taxing, either spiritually or physically.

Those things that provide for the actual mechanics of living (e.g. housing, schools, hospitals, etc.) could be easily and cheaply provided—perhaps with the “Drop-City” structures in mind. All extra services would grow organically. Basically, housing itself, for instance, is expensive only when the price of the necessary land is itself exorbitant; one would assume that the land for our community is already available—the crowds at a pop-festival do not have to leave. They would merely be making use of what is already theirs! The ever-attentive policeman would have a difficult task in evicting several hundred thousand people, and would even the elusive conscience of society sanction the forcible removal of a group of people who just want to build their own homes, make their community, and start living in freedom?

The children born and brought up in such a city, under such a libertarian ethos, would be an added guarantee of the success and viability of the anarchist community. They would learn from their parents’ errors, come to maturity and found their own communities, and, in turn, a new generation of children would inherit the example. Co-operative communities would mushroom until their very number made it impossible for them to be ignored. One then pictures an unemployed government, sitting in the midst of its redundant army and police-force, realising at last that the master is neither necessary or wanted.

Those who think that this is but an idealistic dream are the same people who thought that it was impossible for people to gather en masse in a peaceful fashion—a terrible pessimism. The anarchist vision might, in the end, be realised as an off-shoot of something unconnected with social change: the gathering of people to enjoy themselves. Thus, Malatesta’s definition of revolution as being “the creation of new living institutions”, the example provided by those institutions and an educative programme arising from them, might all arise from the much-maligned pop-festival: a process of “instant anarchy”, feeling its way and being shaped by necessity, rather than a programme taken from the text-books.

Graham Whiteman

…

Ultimately cities will exist only as joyous tribal gatherings and fairs, to dissolve after a few weeks. Investigating new lifestyles is our work, as is the exploration of Ways to explore our inner realms—with the known dangers of crashing that go with such. We should work with political-minded people where it helps, hoping to enlarge their vision, and with people of all varieties of politics or thought at whatever point they become aware of environmental urgencies. Master the archaic and the primitive as models of basic nature-related cultures—as well as the most imaginative extensions of science—and build a community where these two vectors cross. —MILES in International Times 78 ( April 24-May 7, 1970)

…

Woodstock opened on Friday, August 15th, with Richie Havens, and closed on Sunday, with Jimi Hendrix … words here are unnecessary …

_____________________________________

text source: https://autonomies.org/

The post 50 years anniversary: The Anarchy of WOODSTOCK (+rare photos) appeared first on Void Network.

NIGHTS OF MYSTERIES 
Fr. 21/12 & Sat. 22/12/2018
2 days psychedelic art festival

Ελεύθερο Θέατρο ΕΜΠΡΟΣ
Free Self-Organized Theater EMBROS

Riga Palamidi 2 – Psiris

FRIDAY 21 DECEMBER 2018
Mind Expanding Cinema Night

Starts at 20.00

5 Short Experimental Psychedelic Films
1. Chas Wyndham, Airborn, 1968; 3 min.
The soundtrack is instrumental psychedelic rock.
2. Jerry Abrams, Eyetoon, 1968; 8 min.
The soundtrack is avant garde electronics.
3. Stan VanDerBeek, Film Form No. 1, 1970; 10 min.
the soundtrack is sitar music.
4. Hy Hirsh, La Couleur de la Forme, 1960, 6min.
the soundtrack is Jazz.
5. Dan Agnew, Doppler Effect Version II, 1969, 4.5 min.
The soundtrack is avant garde electronics.

20.30
The Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome – Kenneth Anger (1954)

A sensuous, colorful epic that is intensely complex, peopled with such mythic figures as Shiva, Kali, Pan and Bacchus.
“The film is derived from one of Aleister Crowley’s dramatic rituals where people in the cult assume the identity of a god or a goddess. I wanted to create a feeling of being carried into a world of wonder, and the use of color and fantasy is progressive. In other words, it expands, it becomes completely subjective — like when people take communion and one sees it through their eyes. The orgy ensues a magick masquerade at which Pan is the prize.” Kenneth Anger

21.15
Seconds – John Frankenheimer (1966)

An unhappy middle-aged banker agrees to a procedure that will fake his death and give him a completely new look and identity – one that comes with its own price. What Are Seconds?… The Answer May Be Too Terrifying For Words! Who are SECONDS? The answer is almost too terrifying for words. From the bold, bizarre best-seller. The story of a man who buys for himself a totally new life. A man who lives the age-old dream… If only I could live my life all over again.

23.00
Punishment Park – Peter Watkins (1971)

In this fictional documentary, U.S. prisons are at capacity, and President Nixon declares a state of emergency. All new prisoners, most of whom are connected to the antiwar movement, are now given the choice of jail time or spending three days in Punishment Park, where they will be hunted for sport by federal authorities. The prisoners invariably choose the latter option, but learn that, between the desert heat and the brutal police officers, their chances of survival are slim. Although the film itself is fictional, many of the elements found within are metaphors of social and political events of the time, such as the trial of the Chicago Seven, the Kent State shootings, police brutality, and political polarisation.

12.30
Riot on Sunset Strip – Arthur Dreifuss (1967)

“Riot on Sunset Strip” is a 1967 counterculture-era movie, filmed and released within four months of the real events late-1966 Sunset Strip curfew. These real events, also known as the “hippie riots”, were a series of early clashes that took place between police and young people on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood, California in 1966. In the film a crowd of undisciplined young people freaks gather on the Sunset Strip- Los Angeles. A police lieutenant who is sympathetic to the kids but is pressured by businessmen to clear them out has his work cut out. The cop also thinks the kids have a right to be there, until his estranged daughter joins the counter-culture crowd.

SATURDAY 22/12
PSYCHEDELIC TRANCE EXPERIENCE

starts at 23.00

23.00-01.00 VERTIGO
01.00-02.00 KOSTAS SPIRAL
02.00-03.30 IRAKLIS MINDPHASER
03.30-04.30 JUNIOR X
04.30-05.30 CRYSTAL ZERO
05.30-06.30 WAR

visual art by
Void Optical Art Laboratory
and Merlinite HappyGlow (UK Void Network)

Διδαχτήκαμε την αλφάβητο της μιζέριας, τη γραμματική της υποταγής. Από πολύ μικροί, μάθαμε να βλέπουμε τον κόσμο με φόβο, να ζούμε υποταγμένοι, να υπακούμε στις εντολές, να μολύνουμε τις ελπίδες και την ψυχή μας, να γινόμαστε ανταγωνιστικοί και απάνθρωποι. Δεχτήκαμε αδιαμαρτύρητα ότι ο χρόνος μας είναι κάτι που μπορεί να πουληθεί και να αγοραστεί. Ότι το ίδιο ισχύει για τη δημιουργία μας, για τη σκέψη μας, για το ίδιο μας το σώμα. Πιστέψαμε κάθε λέξη από τα γαμημένα ψέματά τους και σκύψαμε παθητικά το κεφάλι, παραδίνοντας τις ζωές μας στο φάντασμα της δουλειάς. Κι αυτό σιγά σιγά κατάπιε κάθε συστατικό της ζωής & των ονείρων μας, μέχρι που δεν έμεινε τίποτα για εμάς τους ίδιους. Η μηχανή που σκοτώνει τον πλανήτη κινείται με καύσιμο το δικό μας αίμα, τα τείχη που μας κρατούν φυλακισμένους είναι χτισμένα με τα δικά μας κορμιά, οι εφιάλτες που υποβιβάζουν τη ζωή μας σε επιβίωση είναι κατασκευασμένοι από τα δικά μας όνειρα. Αν αυτό είναι η πραγματικότητα, τότε ας χαθούμε στην φαντασία. Αν αυτό είναι το σωστό, τότε ας κάνουμε το λάθος. Να σκεφτούμε, να μιλήσουμε και να πράξουμε ενάντια στον τρόπο σκέψης και τις πράξεις των κυρίαρχων αυτού του κόσμου. ΝΑ ΚΑΤΑΣΤΡΕΨΟΥΜΕ ΤΟ ΣΥΣΤΗΜΑ ΠΡΙΝ ΚΑΤΑΣΤΡΕΨΕΙ ΤΟΝ ΠΛΑΝΗΤΗ! Να φωτίσουμε το μέλλον μας με τις φωτιές της κόλασής τους, να αγαπήσουμε την ΖΩΗ, να μοιραστούμε την ΕΛΕΥΘΕΡΙΑ.

ΚΕΝΟ ΔΙΚΤΥΟ / Void Network
https://voidnetwork.gr

The post NIGHTS of MYSTERIES- 2 days Celebration: Fr.21/12 Cinema day – Sat.22/12 PsyTrance Experience at EMBROS appeared first on Void Network.

Void Network proudly publishes the essay “Trance Dance / Ritual and Belief” by the anthropologist Phd. Panagiotis Papadimitropoulos. The essay is a part of the open dialogue “Sonic Resistance” that is taking place in the creative sphere of Void Network by Tasos Sagris, George Samantas, Panagiotis Papadimitopoulos, Yiannis Raouzeos, and others, about dance youth culture and the history of rave underground resistance in Greece and other countries.

The artwork of the post is created by Fotis Kouzinos

Trance Dance / Ritual and Belief
by Phd. Panagiotis Papadimitropoulos

Theoretical research and practical fieldwork in various traditional societies around the globe have demonstrated that dance, as a purposeful and intentionally rhythmical patterned activity that derives from music, is often related to trance, that is states of mind in which ordinary conscious awareness is usually partly and temporarily suspended.
More important is the fact that in such animistic societies as those of Western Africa trance states are institutionalized and form a part of the religious life of the people so concerned. There, it appears that trance – induced naturally or chemically with certain drugs – is related to possession by spirits and deities, and thus is an instrument of ritualistic and religious importance because it provides the basis of experiencing the ‘sacred’ or the ‘supernatural’.

In other words, through listening to music and dancing a qualitative change occurs in the minds of individuals that facilitates what they perceive as a religious or transcendental experience. In a different cultural context, that is in a modern Western one, usually (but not always) young people, members of what sociologists label countercultural groups, have for the last fifteen years used to gather in large numbers – ideally outdoors – and dance passionately for many hours under the sounds of extremely loud repetitive electronic music, often under the influence of drugs. Such musical activities are known as ‘raves’.

At first glance, what people do in raves seems to be quite unrelated to what people do in trance states in traditional societies mainly because the formers’ goal is entertainment whereas the latters’ aim is religious in character, and is guided by a structure of custom. On a closer look, however, scientific evidence suggests that certain special qualities of both the sound and the drugs can produce perceptual changes, and thus may facilitate an encounter with the transcendental.

read all essay in:
http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AU-skI5gY6flZGQ5OXAzcjVfMTVnOTY4bThjdw&hl=en

The post Trance Dance / Ritual and Belief by Phd. Panagiotis Papadimitropoulos appeared first on Void Network.

They called themselves the Motherfuckers; others called them a “street gang with an analysis.” Osha Neumann’s thoughtful, funny, and honest account of his part in ’60s counterculture is also an unflinching look at what all that rebellion of the past means today. The fast moving story follows the establishment of the Motherfuckers, who influenced the Yippies and members of SDS; makes vivid the art, music, and politics of the era; and reveals the colorful, often deeply strange, personalities that gave the movement its momentum. Abbie Hoffman said the Motherfuckers were “the middle-class nightmare . . . an antimedia media phenomenon simply because their name could not be printed.” In the few years of its existence the group forced its way into the Pentagon during a war protest, helped occupy one of the buildings in the Columbia University takeover, and cut the fences at Woodstock to allow thousands in for free, among many other feats of radical derring-do.

Progressing from a fractured family of intellectuals to rebellion in the streets of New York and on to communes in California, Newmann shows us a view of a life led in rebellion, anger, and eventually a tentative peace.
Publisher Seven Stories Press
ISBN-10 1-58322-849-7
ISBN-13 978-1-58322-849-4
Publication Date November 2008

Up Against the Wall Motherf**ker!: A Memoir of Anarchism in the ’60s
By Osha Neumann,
Seven Stories Press:

In 1967, I became a founding member of an anarchist street gang called Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers, an unexpected career move for a nice Jewish boy with an MA in history from Yale. We called ourselves the Motherfuckers. We saw ourselves as urban guerrillas swimming in the countercultural sea of freaks and dropouts (we didn’t like the media term “hippies”) who had swarmed to the cheap-rent tenements of the Lower East Side of New York. Those young dropouts were our base, and we attempted to organize them for total revolution through rallies, free feasts, raucous community meetings, and a steady stream of mimeographed flyers. Against the vapid spaciness of “flower power” we proclaimed the need for “Armed Love.” Our rhetoric was inflammatory and often violent. We gave speeches and wrote manifestos, but above all we believed in propaganda of the deed. We engaged in constant confrontations with the police. We would start riots, get arrested, start another one to protest our arrests, and get arrested again. After one of my arrests I appeared before a judge who called me “a cross between Rap Brown and Hitler.” I greeted his summation of my character with a mixture of pride and shame. I felt like a kid whose scary Halloween costume has been more successful than he intended. As a child I’d imagined I was destined to become a professor and write books. My parents were German Jewish refugees from the Nazis. My father was Franz Neumann, the author of “Behemoth”, a seminal study of fascist Germany. His best friend was Herbert Marcuse. Herbert’s most famous books, “Eros and Civilization” and “One-Dimensional Man”, are philosophical critiques of civilization and its discontents that rejected the rigid analytic framework of dogmatic Marxism. His writing and speeches provided theoretical legitimization to the unorthodox countercultural movements of the Sixties and made him something of a father figure to a generation that generally distrusted anyone over thirty. Herbert moved into our house after his wife Sophie died of cancer in 1951. While living with us he continued a secret affair with my mother that had begun sometime earlier. Inge, my mother, was a brilliant woman, who sacrificed her own ambitions in order to do what was expected at the time of a mother and faculty wife. Her marriage to Franz was not a happy one. I suspect that in her unhappiness, she vented her frustration on me.

We fought endlessly. I grew up in a Manichean world. Fascism was the expression of the irrational; reason was its opposite. The distinction was clear and unambiguous. By the time I reached junior high school I had already reached the conclusion that our home was the clean well-lighted citadel of reason and I was an irrational foul-smelling insect befouling it. I became obsessive and introverted. In becoming a Motherfucker I renounced my commitment to ordered discourse, the traffic in abstractions, respect for explanations, the demand for coherence, and the subordination of impulse and emotion — all of which I thought of as characteristic of a life committed to reason. I grew fierce in my scorn for theory. I felt most alive when running in the streets with no thoughts in my head but where the cops were and how to avoid them.

But my apostasy was never complete. As the Mafia don longs for respectability, as the dealer in prostitutes and drugs can be the staunchest proponent of family values, so I, the rebellious child of reason, longed for the respectable cloak of rationality and pledged allegiance to reason even as I plunged headlong into the irrational. I’m no longer a Motherfucker and childhood is a distant memory, but I still think of reason somewhat vaguely as a universally applicable method for determining truth and validating judgments. I have never been really sure what it is, but I appeal to it anyway. Reason or revelation. How else do we decide what’s right and wrong? Some of us appeal to the one, some of us to the other. But both have their problems. God has too many spokespeople, each certain he’s the chosen mouthpiece, none making a credible argument in the age of cell phones, black holes, concentration camps, weapons of mass destruction, mad cow disease, and reality television.

Reason has got some of the same problems God has: too many people appealing to it for too many different purposes. Far too often the powers that be who ask us to be reasonable and not rock the boat act as if they were stark raving mad, hell bent on incinerating their enemies, polluting nature, promoting inequality, and grabbing as much loot for themselves as possible. What they call progress is destruction. What they call democracy is subjugation. The tools for the alleviation of want are turned into the means for its perpetuation. “Reason has always existed, but not always in a rational form,” wrote a twenty-year-old Karl Marx. I would like to think that the Motherfuckers represented reason “but not in a rational form.” Although I have written the confession of a Motherfucker, I am the least motherfuckery of Motherfuckers. I have been quite tamed by time, and to tell the truth I was probably not much of a motherfucker even back then, though I put on a pretty good show. What I have to confess are mainly bad thoughts and crimes of the imagination. ***The Motherfuckers were active on the margins of a marginal movement. We did our work and lived our lives in the streets. We didn’t keep minutes of meetings and we didn’t own a filing cabinet. We churned out ephemeral fliers, but issued no formal press releases. We shunned publicity and our doings went generally unreported in the press. Therefore there are few records with which to correct, order and solidify failing and imperfect memories. Our battle with Bill Graham is a partial exception. Because he was rock and roll royalty, our confrontation with him was duly noted at the time and has been mentioned in various memoirs since then including Bill Graham Presents and My Life in Rock and Roll by Bill Graham and Robert Greenfield.

Two months after I returned from Chicago, we initiated a campaign to obtain a free night for the community at the Fillmore East, which Bill Graham, had recently opened on 2nd Avenue as a venue for the rock acts he was promoting. Bill had begun his career managing the San Francisco Mime Troop for almost no money, but now he had become the top rock promoter in the country and was raking in the dough. As we saw it he was making big bucks off our culture and it was time for a little payback. We had a meeting with him to present our demands. The meeting took place in his office behind the theater. It did not go well. Ben’s pitch was that suburban kids were coming to the Fillmore in droves to get in on the psychedelic experience, while the kids who lived on the streets of the Lower East Side couldn’t afford the price of a ticket. Bill wasn’t impressed. The discussion got heated. We made threats and Bill shouted at us that when he was a kid he’d crawled across Europe to escape the Nazis and if he’d survived Hitler, he’d damn well survive us. So that was it.

To Bill Graham, born Wolfgang Grajonca, a Jewish orphan born in Berlin, whose mother died in Auschwitz, I had become the equivalent of a Nazi. I tried not to let my distress show, avoided his eyes and concentrated on his watch that had two dials, one set for east coast time, one for west coast time. The meeting went on for some time. Ben recalls Bill yelling at us that we’d get our free night over his dead body, to which Ben replied with the little smile he got when he was very serious: “Well, that could be arranged.” Bill looked him in the eye, opened a drawer of his desk and took out a pair of bullets with chrome casings, which he placed on the desk in front of him. The bullets, he said, were sent to him by the Hell’s Angels, who’d once threatened to kill him. He hadn’t been scared of them, and he wasn’t scared of us. Ben replied that those guys just talked big, but if we decided to shut him down we’d shut him down. Carole remembers things somewhat differently. She says I jumped up and down and yelled, and that it was I who pulled out the bullets and they weren’t silver. I don’t remember the bullets at all, but Steve remembers it Ben’s way. Despite his angry defiance, I had the feeling as we left his office that Bill thrived on confrontation and rather liked us. That was probably wishful thinking. We continued our campaign.

Judith Malina and Julian Beck’s Living Theater was scheduled to perform Paradise Now at the Fillmore East as part of an evening of radical theater to benefit the legal defense of students arrested at the Columbia University occupation. Ben decided the Living Theater’s appearance provided the perfect opportunity to show Bill we meant business.

Paradise Now was a free form controlled improvisation involving nudity and audience participation. Ben met with Judith and Julian and together they agreed that at the end of the performance the audience would stay and hold the theater. We seeded the audience with contingents of our followers. As the play reached its conclusion, we joined the actors on stage. Richard Goldstein, writing in the Village Voice, described what happened next: Onstage, 100 people were dancing, chanting or stomping away. Many who knew this scenario by heart were stripping in anticipation … The actors too had bared their bodies; they slipped onstage, formed an even circle, and passed the pipe around. Neighborhood kids moved among the actors, whistling and shouting “Naked City.” … The performance ended in a huge swirling dance of OM … At that moment — as though timing were all that was involved — Ben Morea grabbed the microphone and announced on behalf of the Motherfuckers that the Fillmore East had been liberated.

He proceeded to demand that Bill Graham turn the house over to “the community” once a week, gratis. Graham’s eyes did a soft role in their sockets as he walked into the spotlight to make the confrontation complete. The performance came to a halt amidst much pandemonium and shouting. Ben announced: “The show is over, life goes on. We’re not leaving till we get our one free night.” The audience stayed. We drummed and made speeches, some more coherent than others. Much the same argument we had had with Bill in his office now took place in front of an audience. He responded to our demands by saying if we wanted the theater to be free we should buy it, but if we tried to take it by force we would have to kill him first. Finally, well after midnight, Bill took a microphone and announced that if we would leave the theater he would agree to hold a town meeting on our proposal the following Wednesday. We had carried a mimeograph machine to the theater from our office. We brought it on stage and before we left the theater cranked out our cautious response to Bill’s offer:

The community needs free space. It needs to survive, grow freaky, breathe, expand, love, struggle, turn on. Bill Graham, hippie entrepreneur … may tonight have been a little liberated or he may not. Next Wednesday will tell. One Nite a Week or the Sky’s the Limit. As it turned out, Bill’s idea of what he had offered and ours were not the same. On the day of the town hall meeting we arrived at the theater and saw on the stage, a table on which sat two microphones. Behind each microphone was a folding chair, one for Bill and one for Ben. Bill wanted a structured debate. He and Ben would talk. The rest of us would listen. We made sure it wasn’t going to happen that way. A Motherfucker event had to include free food, music, spontaneous speeches, call and response. Again we brought a mimeograph machine from our storefront. We set it in the center aisle and, as the event unfolded, churned out fliers commenting on the proceedings. In the face of threats and exhortations from all sides, Bill remained adamantly opposed to giving us our free night. He’d seen what our events looked like and would have none of it. As the night wore on without any discernible progress in the negotiations, people drifted away, and we left, promising to escalate the confrontation. Behind the scenes, negotiations continued.

Other more “responsible” parties, including Wavy Gravy, intervened. Bill finally agreed to allow us to use the theater on Wednesday nights to put on free events for the community. The first one took place in late November. From our point of view it was an enormous success. The theater was packed. It felt as if 2nd Avenue had tipped on its side and deposited its entire contents — animate and inanimate — in the theater. Discarded sandwiches, cigarette butts, cans and bottles littered the carpets. Much wine was drunk, much dope was smoked. The program, such as it was, proceeded amidst a chorus of boasts, threats, brags and rambling fantasies shouted out from every corner of the auditorium. Bill Graham’s green-shirted ushers stood by, attempting to make themselves inconspicuous, utterly powerless to control the magnificent chaos of the event. The drug laws of the State of New York were flagrantly violated. There were grievous insults to property. Carpets were stained. Seats were broken. Toilets clogged and overflowed.

After four free community nights, and warnings from the police that they would yank his license, Bill Graham had enough. He circulated an open letter to the community announcing the end of the free nights and urging everyone “to accept our predicament (which is now your reality) with intelligence and grace.” We quickly cranked out a response on our church donated Gestetner: Situation: Pigs and Bill Graham stop free night. Why? They say we smoke dope, but we know it’s because they are afraid of us. Afraid that we’ll learn it’s ours. Afraid that we’ll get together there to destroy their world and create our own. The pigs threaten to close Graham down unless he stops our free night. He doesn’t have to worry about the pigs. We’ll close him down. No free night, no pay night … On a more conciliatory note we asked to use the theater on the Monday before Christmas for a community meeting to discuss the use of dope. When we showed up the doors were locked.

Electra records had rented the hall for a free concert the day after Christmas to promote their new acquisition, the MC5, a musically mediocre but politically militant rock and roll band out of Detroit. Its manager, John Sinclair, had been one of the founders of the White Panther Party, a small, Black Panther emulating, anarchist collective, whose rhetoric was a clone of ours. John’s White Panther Party Manifesto proclaimed: We are a bunch of arrogant motherfuckers and we don’t give a damn for any cop or any phony-ass authority control-addict creeps who want to put us down. For the first time in America there is a generation of visionary maniac white motherfucker country dope fiend rock and roll freaks who are ready to get down and kick out the jams — ALL THE JAMS — break everything loose and free everybody from their very real and imaginary prisons — even the chumps and punks and honkies who are always fucking with us. We demand total freedom for everybody! And we will not be stopped until we get it. We are bad. The MC5 had played at the last free community night before the shutdown. Radio stations had been giving away free tickets. We demanded 500 tickets for the community.

Fearing violence, Graham reluctantly agreed. On the evening of the concert the theater filled up quickly and when the doors closed there was still a crowd gathered outside demanding to be let in. The crowd chanted, yelled, and pushed. Bill himself stood in the doorway, blocking the entrance. Suddenly, Israel, one of the Puerto Rican street kids who hung out with us, slashed a bicycle chain across his face. Blood began pouring from his nose. Bill fell back. The concert began. TheMC5 played their big number, ‘Kick Out the Jams, Motherfuckers.” We gave speeches. The crowd jumped on the stage. Again pandemonium reigned. The band got nervous and made a speedy exit in a limousine, much to our disgust. Wayne Kramer, a member of the MC5 remembers: The stage wings were crowded with Motherfuckers waiting for us to give the word to burn the place down. Of course we weren’t about to give any such command and their anger started to turn on us … We finished our set and escaped to the dressing room while the motherfuckers and the street maniacs tried to run out the door with our gear. Our crew valiantly battled to hold on to our stuff and the greatest blunder in record business tactics imaginable happens: two limousines show up to carry the band back to the hotel. The revolutionaries saw red! “Limos!” The symbol of capitalist imperial-ism. Limos. The Motherfucker women were screaming and weeping about how we had sold the revolution out.

They were smashing our records against the Cadillac limos tail fins. Crying at the top of their lungs: “Bastards! Pigs! Phonies! Sell-outs!” After the MC 5 left, the crowd stayed. Before the night was over one person had been hospitalized after being hit over the head with a microphone stand; a Puerto Rican boy had been stabbed; and one of the ushers had his arm fractured with a metal pipe. That night marked the end of our battle with Bill Graham. Bill offered to provide some financial and other support for the community to find some other place to meet, but it never happened. Times were changing and the very brief heyday of the Motherfuckers was nearing its end. I had watched Bill get hit with the chain and felt a door open between our violent rhetoric and reality. I did not want to walk through it. The vulnerability of the flesh of my opponent gave me no pleasure.

Copyright Seven Stories Press, 2008.
Osha Neumann is an attorney, artist, and writer in Oakland, Calif.

the fragment from the book found in:
http://zephyr.cariblogger.com/2008/12/13/up-against-the-wall-motherfker-a-memoir-of-anarchism-in-the-60s/

for much more first hand information about The Motherfuckers: http://www.hipforums.com/newforums/archive/index.php/t-126390.html

for an anarchist critique to the book :
http://www.anarchistnews.org/?q=node/6242

The post Up Against the Wall Motherfucker!: A Memoir of Anarchism in the ’60s By Osha Neumann appeared first on Void Network.