PANTAGRUEL

Pantagruel anarchist review, 1981 - Editorial

2011-07-28T10:19:00.000-07:00

Pantagruel, anarchist review of social, economic, philosophical and methodological analysis, 3 issues from January - October 1981

An anarchist review of social, economic, philosophical and methodological analysis. The problems which interest us most must not be closed within the narrow field of specialists, but brought to light through reading and debate among comrades. Even if this costs an effort, especially at first, it is something that requires to be done. Theory is not something that is different to practice; this desired difference originates in a misunderstanding. When we think of theory we imagine analyses full of numbers and figures, difficult words and complex concepts; when we think of practice we imagine beautiful actions of struggle, strong and not so strong organisations, realisations and transformations.
In fact it is necessary to distinguish between theory and theory, just as it is necessary to distinguish between practice and practice. Exploitation, with its terrible repressive organisations is “practice” on a grand scale, but a practice very different to the actions and organisations of liberation put into effect by the exploited. In the same way the “theory” which serves as an ideological cover for exploitation is very different to the theory which characterises the conditions of liberation.
During its progression the whole of the revolutionary movement develops a series of actions which constitute a practice, which is at the same time theory. One could say that the revolutionary movement is its own theory. In turn this movement, as a minoritarian component of a wider class front, constitutes a part of the wider practice realised by the exploited as a whole. The latter is also its own theory, therefore the revolutionary movement is a part of the theory and practice of the general class movement of the exploited.
The imbalance between those two practices (which are also theory) is demonstrated by their different positions concerning the self-organisation of struggles. The revolutionary movement in general possesses a greater awareness of the need for the selforganisation of the struggles than does the whole front of exploited or the class front at the moment. In turn, within the revolutionary movement itself, the anarchist movement possesses a still more acute consciousness of self-organisation, and comes to find itself in an even wider situation of imbalance with the class front as a whole.
It is precisely from this greater imbalance that there emerges a more pressing need for anarchists to widen their theory. This, as we have said, they do through being such, that is in their actions as anarchists, and in this - as part of the revolutionary movement - are their own theory. But it is precisely their actions that show how the self-organisational struggle project is far from being realised in the way outlined by anarchists : the class front is more fractured and contradictory than ever. It is necessary to go into the reasons for this lack of balance more deeply than the action in course is able to do. In saying this we do not mean that it is necessary to stop and reflect, (in which case we would be denying the range of theory resulting from action), but that it is necessary to integrate this with detailed and deepened analyses which consent us to modify our action at the opportune moment in order to better attain the desired results.
Once again, analyses for action: theory which finds its justification in the practice of attack against the exploiters and, becoming comprehensible in this key, becomes action itself.
No indulgence towards superficial and approximate attempts concealing themselves behind simplistic analyses which then translate themselves into brief catechisms placed into the hands of comrades with the badly concealed aim of indoctrinating them from above. What we will publish - within the limits of our possibilities - will seek to have its own depth of research and thought, its own wealth of particulars and instruments, its own difficulty of problem and theories. We shall not try to deceive comrades by making things out to be easier than they are concerning the analyses we manage to elaborate in the various fields we explore. Certainly no unnecessary recourse will be made to linguistic technicalities when that can be done without altering the depth of the research and the completeness of the analysis; we shall also include brief explanatory notes when we need to have recourse to rather difficult concepts not considered to be of common usage.
Comrades will not find a review which serves up their meal already chewed and ready to be swallowed. The reading of Pantagruel will sometimes be an effort, but we consider that the time has come to go beyond the commonplaces of lack of engagement and superficiality.
Let us perfect the instruments of our revolutionary struggle together. Pantagruel has no other aim.

FICTITIOUS MOVEMENT AND REAL MOVEMENT

2011-06-18T12:29:00.000-07:00

Original title:
Movimento fittizio e movimento reale,
published in the volume Movimento e progetto rivoluzionario,
Edizioni di “Anarchismo”, June 1977.
translated by Jean Weir
Elephant Editions / London / 2011

FICTITIOUS MOVEMENT AND REAL MOVEMENT

The evolving of social struggles leads to profound changes in the structure of the movement of the exploited. Capital’s attitude to the class struggle changes according to time and place, leading to diverse reactions and organizational forms.
We are going to look at some of the more obvious of these forms, see where they belong in the social clash and point to their real or apparent revolutionary essence in the anarchist sense.

The movement of the exploited
It is not easy to identify the social composition of this movement for the same reasons that make any analysis that claims to fix the essence of a class of exploited here and now unreliable. The great mass of disinherited (those who have been deprived of the means of production) is divided into many non-communicating areas. The technique of ‘divide and rule’ applied by capital at world level has transformed the classic workers’ movement into a confused conglommeration of stimuli towards careerism and abuse of power, developing that capitalist individualism which, born elsewhere, has nothing to do with the miserable situation of the workers.
The decision to give producers access to consumer goods allowed capital both to overcome its crisis for about thirty years and to transform the movement of exploited profoundly. The unions and democratic parties were then called upon to complete the task. Traditionally suspicious of the union, the worker is less so of the party, which he considers something detached from the reality of work and concerned with ‘political affairs’ that have little to do with him.
Basically, the worker would rather be exploited by a member of the bourgeoisie than by someone of his own class (or social status). For this he became suspicious of the union in stituations where it was becoming a bureaucracy (or he was at first, when the union was produced by the working class), but was far less so of the political party, traditionally in the hands of lawyers, professors and other such despicable people.
However, although this distinction between party and union still exists, both of these institutions are now manouvred by capital for its projects of integration.
Nevertheless, this integration can never be complete, and this applies to traditional capitalism, advanced capitalism, and State capitalism alike. It cannot become total because, in order to ensure the persistance of exploitation, a net class differentiation is required both at national and international level. This differentiation leads to the possibility of integration (consumerism and welfare state), on the backs of minorities that are still living in absolute poverty. Precise areas of the globe are deliberately left in this condition because they must produce raw materials at low costs and import finished products at high prices. When some of these areas change route, i.e. change their model of production, adjusting it to that of countries in economically advanced areas (such as happened in Chile), the correction of this tendency comes about through recourse to any means whatsoever, including genocide.
The same phenomenon occurs on a reduced scale within individual countries. The poorer strata subsist and are becoming more and more ghettoised in order to guarantee the inclusion of the part of the exploited that has been given access to expensive consumer goods.
There is no need to cry scandal, one shouldn’t confuse traitor and betrayed and throw everything together in the dark night of a society that is making classes disappear. In substance, the movement of the exploited has been betrayed; its real interests—definitive liberation from the bosses and the building of true socialism—have been betrayed. To complete this vast operation are the unions and so-called democratic parties, while the capitalists direct the queues. It goes without saying that the FIAT worker who is drawn by some occult force from the supermarket to the cinema, from the cinema to the football stadium, the stadium to filling in a football pools coupon, and fills his house with useless expensive objects, is not a traitor. He has been lent an ethical and social model that does not belong to him, a model that is guaranteed by the real traitors of the class of workers, the political parties and the unions. Think of the difficulty capitalism would have in getting its servants to troop into the police if it did not make them amazing promises (salary, professional qualification, social status, uniforms with shiny buttons, see the world, etc.). All the bodies that carry out some kind of activity related to the defence of capital enjoy some kind of concrete privilege. The judiciary, that State-commissioned band of criminals, that mafia in ermine called upon to destroy human lives with impunity, that gang of murderers in togas, enjoy a great reputation, permanence and free reign. False defamation and real privilege (very high salaries). The same can be said for army professionals, that other gang of murderers paid for with money that belongs to everybody. They are always ready to torture the proletarians that fall into their hands, suppress those who intend to make their own will prevail, contrive more or less murky conspiracies and ultimately take over power. Army professionals enjoy more than a few privileges. Warrant officers plunder the orderly office unpunished, laying in supplies for their own homes and those of the other officers. They have service personnel at their disposition and plenty of free time. They enjoy discounts and various privileges and, last but not least, can wear a uniform with lots of shiny buttons and medals to commemorate their fuckups in the service of the bosses.
Coming back to the movement of the exploited, it is easy to see how this is broken in half, thanks to the same system—they have given themselves little privileges and built an ethic that is far from the real interests of the working class.
But another part of the movement exists, one that cannot gain access to the aforementioned area. If it were possible, the ‘closed’ social State that Fichte once spoke about, unsuccessful attempts of which have been tried in New Zealand and Sweden, or the authoritarian socialist State which the USSR and China are gigantic examples of, would be realised.
But, if we look closely we see that even in the case of the closed social State a part of the exploited always escapes global control. They develop a fundamental disharmony with the ‘globally harmonious’ system. This disharmony is finding the class clash difficult at the present time and often ends up in individual refusal to accept the wellbeing that is being served down from above. Here a radical response to the State perspective of dreamed integration could constitute sparks of great interest. Not a contrast due to poverty therefore, but due to a different approach concerning individual autonomy and that of the class of ‘the controlled’.
So it is the other part of the movement that we are interested in here, the part that has been excluded from the possibility of finding a job, is ghettoised inside prisons and asylums or isolated in areas that have been deliberately built for them inside the great urban enclaves. It is the part that is pushed into individual survival in order to be more effectively struck and physically eliminated. This part that is also more directly in contact with exploitation at the workplace, i.e. produces commodities directly and struggles with every means against the work pace and fatal accidents. These are the ones that get cut to pieces by machinery and rarely have all ten fingers on their hands.
The really incisive class clash is tied to the perspective of this exploited minority. Elsewhere, at higher levels, where the relationship proletarianisation-salarisation has disintegrated or is in the process of disintegrating, the clash is attenuating to the point of reaching mere discussions on how to share out the spoils of the ghettoised.
So, to conclude, we can see a clear disparity within the movement of the exploited. On the one hand there are those who have been seduced by capital’s game and who, although they still have the outward aspects of wage-earners, have lost their proletarian characteristics. On the other hand there are those who have become estranged from this process, either because they have undergone intensive exploitation at the level of production, or because they have been cut out of work temporarily (unemployed) or once and for all (prisoners, alienated). Class unity can only be rebuilt by unmasking the traitors (parties and unions) and upturning the clash that has been determined by the authoritarian organisation of work, in other words, through a revolutionary process. What we need to do at the present time, therefore, is to identify both the fictitious movement and the real movement of the exploited and turn our revolutionary attention to the latter.

The anarchist movement
The anarchist movement is based on pluralism. Real pluralism, not the banality that this has been reduced to by the democratic parties that only refer to the term so as to mask their political agreements for power-sharing. For anarchists pluralism means the presence of different methods that are continually being confronted frankly and clearly. It also means the existence of different, constantly verifiable tendencies, all of which are based on antiauthoritarianism, i.e. freedom and equality, the substitution of the State with free agreement, self-management, federation, direct action, the integration of manual and intellectual work and solidarity.
We still haven’t said much, however. The anarchist movement, as an historic movement existing in a precise moment in time and in precise social situations, never tallies with the fundamental principles of anarchism in absolute. And the differences cannot all be due to pluralism in the way that the word is used by political parties. At certain moments in history the anarchist movement has shown and still shows considerable divergences from the fundamental principles of anarchism. These approximations are often a consequence of the social clash that allows the use of certain means and excludes others. But they are often a result of precise choices operated by regroupings of tendencies influenced, in turn, by a small cohort of leaders. While in the first case approximation in the anarchist strategy of the struggle is due to the objective conditions of the class clash, in the second one it is possible speak of a totally negative influence.
Given the complexity of the problem, let us try to be more clear, even at the risk of repeating ourselves.
The social clash does not consent an anarchist strategy in absolute, just as it does not consent the realisation of an anarchist revolution in absolute. The problem is to carry anarchist aspirations to within the mass in order to allow the coming about of a revolutionary process that has as wide an anarchist presence as possible. The problem immediately rebounds: what means should we choose in view of the ends we want to obtain. Given that we are talking of anarchist aims, otherwise we would be outside the problem altogether, it is a question of how to choose from the various means that we have at our disposition. We maintain that the choice of one set of means rather than another is never an objective fact. The analysis that preceeds the choice, no matter how much it contains points of fact, cannot fail to include important subjective elements. In our opinion, the choice of means alone (adhering perfectly to the anarchist perspective) is no guarantee that anarchist aims will be attained. Power has the capacity to put obstacles in motion that get in the way between the movement and its aims. One could even end up with an irreproachable choice of anarchist means becoming counterproductive to attaining anarchist ends. Power has known how to modify contrasts and structures pertaining to the clash in such a way that those who put such choices into effect can find themselves on the wrong side, black and red stripes and all.
What we are saying is not as crazy as it seems, just as any attempt to look at the anarchist movement in relation to the movement of the exploited should not seem strange. Unfortunately the problem is complex and needs to be gone into further.
This discourse would obviously be absurd if the anarchist movement were to correspond to the ideal of comrades divided into affinity groups and, regrouped in federations or not, all working to bring about the conditions for a revolution with as great a libertarian presence as possible. In fact, none of this is actually happening. The anarchist movement harbours tiny power centres that develop, work, judge, condemn, absolve, programme, decide, make mistakes or get it right, just like any power centre the world over. I was about to add that the anarchist movement even has its heretics, but that obviously goes without saying.
The tendency of the small power centre is to put everything together, as far as possible, under one flag or acronym. In this case power is measured according to the number of militants or, better still, the number of groups (which makes more of an impression as one doesn’t know whether a group consists of two or two hundred people). Bakunin himself averted that the absence of retribution was in no way a guarantee against the formation of power centres. Man is a strange animal. If money attracts, power for power’s sake attracts just as much, even when it is so rarified as to seem impossible. This also occurs in the anarchist movement. Many comrades pay more attention to congresses and conferences than to the struggle. They elaborate philosophical articles for reviews that want to publish them rather than engaging themselves in first person. Rather than attack power they think of how they can disturb it as little as possible in order to cultivate the tiny space they find themselves acting in or believe they are acting in.
The truth is that in Italy the movement is to a great extent a ‘fictitious’ movement. Apart from a few rare cases, it is outside the struggles, at least as far as the task of intervention within the mass that many groups and federations consider this to be goes. Outside the struggles, but still with some residual capacity to elaborate decent analyses, have debates with some decorum, construct interesting theoretical interventions. A few groups are moving forward a little and take great delight in making known their experiences inside some factory committee or residents’group.
What we have said should not imply that everything is fine elsewhere, that the autonomous groups are quite beyond criticism. Confusion and rough measure reign everywhere. It is sufficient to think of the French and English phenomenon of the ORA and the Italian one of the Archinovists to get an idea. Reacting to the inefficiency and humanitarianism of some of the tendencies in the movement, these people have gone to the other extreme of claiming to have found the solution in a specific organisation, the class memory. We have already developed our critique of this tendency of contemporary anarchism that sees therapeutic values in Archinov’s Platform that would be capable of curing the great invalid, just like the Russian comrades who survived the disaster of the revolution.
What we want to point out here is that it is often possible to distinguish a few stronger personalities behind each of the tendencies, who build real (tiny) power centres, managing them in perfect harmony with the universal rules of power.
There is a tendency to overestimate the importance of the specific anarchist movement as a component of the libertarian revolution, and this is particularly evident in the Italian movement. While it is agreed that it is unthinkable that a revolution will be influenced by anarchists alone, it is believed that in the future revolution the wider the specific anarchist presence, the more likely it is that this will be useful to the masses. The concept is nothing special in itself, but what seems mistaken to us is how both the anarchist movement and the mass are considered, and the very meaning given to the term ‘mass’. Once again it is this mania for quantitative growth, numerical strength, that becomes all the more pressing and disturbing the fewer we are and the further we are from the conditions that make growth itself possible.
To sum up, we have a movement that sees itself historically in a precise way. It has inherited ideas, analyses and very specific experiences, but it does not have any direct relationship with the struggles in course as it lacks the presence within the mass that is considered the ‘sole’ condition of its being able to call oneself an anarchist movement. Not all of the comrades that consider themselves part of the anarchist movement share the above ideas however. Not all of them abandon themselves to waiting for a quantitative growth in the movement as the essential element for any action to be carried out ‘within’ the mass. Some see the problem the other way around. This different analysis usually emerges from the so-called autonomous groups, although this is in no way consistent or universally accepted.

Fictitious movement and real movement
We see the fictitious anarchist movement as the whole of the comrades that hold positions of power within the movement. They do not make any effort to contribute to the growth of revolutionary anarchist consciousness within the mass, but limit themselves to meetings, conferences and congresses, trying to address the younger and less prepared comrades towards what they consider to be the indiscutable tenets of anarchism. These comrades—even those in good faith—are betraying the anarchist ideals of life and action. Then there are the other comrades, those who, due to weakness or aquiescence, end up complying with resolutions that are always drawn up by the same people. Even if they are involved in ongoing struggles, they distort the very meaning of struggle as soon as they succumb to the need to delegate it to others, taking no steps to inform themselves in order to be able to validly oppose themselves to the ‘tyranny’of the more competent or influencial comrades.
The rest of the movement includes two precise tendencies. The Archinovists, now in decline, who theorise the need for a specific minority with well-defined tasks, but confuse this with the real movement. If it were possible to realise this in libertarian and not leninist terms, it would simply be another form of fictitious movement as it would not emerge directly from the concrete struggles of the exploited but would superimpose itself on them, a vanguard destined to defend the sacred principles of anarchism (or anarcho-leninism). The autonomists, who are torn between the original goal of quantitative growth and a new vision of the movement in the real sense. When these groups think that they hold the truth and, as such, are destined to reap the patrimony of sacred anarchist virtues of the past, their future is mapped out in advance. Very soon they too will find their leader (if they have not already done so) and will march within the ranks of the fictitious movement. Were they to look beyond organisation to the concrete reality of the struggles then, perhaps, they might be the comrades best indicated to give us a new analysis of the essence and possibility of a real anarchist movement.
The forces of capital that we have seen at work lacerating the movement of the exploited, producing the emargination of a minority and the access of the rest into consumerism, also act indirectly upon the anarchist movement, determining what we have just defined as the repartition between fictitious movement and real movement. Just as there is a fictitious movement of the exploited, there is also a fictitious anarchist movement; just as there is a real movement of exploited, there is also a real anarchist movement. The democratic illusion takes the place of the pitfall of inclusion into consumersim; cohabitation with power, its immediate corollary, does the rest. Anarchists only scare in operettas. Power has learned how to use the scarecrow of anarchy to instill fear in the well-fed bourgeois (when useful), but basically it knows very well that it is able to keep a good part of the movement under control at all times. Of course, it can still be useful to power to kill the odd anarchist, but that happens when the clash becomes more acute and they need to offer a victim to the god of public opinion (Pinelli), or when things reach the point of clashes in the streets (Serantini). But normally the anarchist movement does not disturb power very much and is left to doze in peace. The democratic illusion opens up imaginary spaces for action in the eyes of many comrades and leads them astray. It is the same kind of error as parliamentary entrism. But, although we are very good at criticising parliamentarianism (which doesn’t cost us anything apart from not going to vote), we do not always see that any concession to power at all should be seen for what it is: a compromise.
We are not condemning partial struggles or struggles for claiming better conditions here. What we are saying does not mean that we think we should abstain from participating in the forms that the exploited in general invent beyond party and union models, just because these forms have limited objectives. It simply means that everything should not be confused with anarchism as such but be seen in the right dimension, in the perspective of approaching the mass and a growth in the autonomous libertarian movement in the wider sense of the term. Unfortunately, it is our own class position, our awareness, that pushes us to find a process of substitution at any cost. To false consciousness corresponds false revolutionary activity, and the cleverer we are at putting words and concepts together the easier it is to influence those around us, addressing them in the direction of fictitious and distorted activity.
The contemporary transformations of capital are rendering such a vegetation possible within the anarchist movement. Freedom of expression (up to a certain point) guarantees the right to call oneself anarchist without running too many risks. The problems start when somebody starts to cause trouble. Then there is the risk of waking the sleeping dogs that destroy indiscriminately, including the fictitious part of the movement that the compromise with power had made possible.
We should also point out that the tiny power groups that can be seen within the anarchist movement run roughly parallel to the large power groups of the movement of the exploited (unions and parties), having the function of connecting the requirements of capital with the pressures of the class clash. The rest of the movement, at least the part that revolves around these tiny vacuous power centres, corresponds to that part of the movement of exploited that has been absorbed into consumerism through the formation of ‘intermediate classes’ where wage-earning no longer leads to consciousness of being exploited. Then there is the movement of the excluded, the ghettoised part, the excluded minority that does not find citizenship in the new capitalist perspectives and is persecuted by both the State police and the police of the parties and unions. There is nothing in the anarchist movement that corresponds to this part.
This lack of correspondence might seem strange or contradictory. Having developed a critique of the anarchist movement in these pages, and in particular having attacked the components that have recourse to quantitative growth through more or less complex mechanisms, it would seem logical that quite a positive evaluation would emerge concerning the autonomous groups. But no. And it is here that we reach the most complex point of the whole analysis.

The real anarchist movement
The considerable part of the international anarchist movement that, as we have mentioned, is constituted of autonomous groups, does not have any more right than the others to declare that it belongs to—or constitutes—the real anarchist movement. Here too the phenomena of elitism, stubborn elephantism, backwardness in analysis and strategy are to be found.
On the contrary, it seems to us that the best place to look for the real anarchist movement is beyond all the schema and churches. It is to be found in the mass that are realising the self-organisation of the struggle concretely with all their confusion and afterthoughts, mistakes and hesitancy, but also with considerable effort, in an anarchist strategy of moving towards social revolution. But this research inside the mass cannot be made in a sullenly spontaneous way, i.e. the number of autonomous actions (or those considered such) contain the highest coefficient of anarchism. This is not an accurate procedure. In the exploited mass which, as we have seen, are not the mass in general but a precise bunch of them, they are identifiable with fair approximation through analytical processes that must constantly be verified. The organisation of attack on associated power (bosses, unions, parties) is a spontaneous fact that emerges from the process of exploitation directly. This undergoes modifications according to the changing conditions of a real movement that is not quantifiable. The anarchist presence is indispensable here and could be useful to a maximum degree. Here is where the latter fuses indissolubly with the mass and the conditions for the growth of a real movement start to appear. This is not quantifiable in terms of groups or federations, but turns out to be measurable indirectly on the basis of the number of certain kinds of action realised, the circulation of certain ideas, and the correlation that these ideas find in certain milieux of the exploited.
The starting point for the ‘decisive test’ of the anarchist movement is precisely here, far from the stagnant atmosphere of traditional groups, lapidary decisions at congresses and conferences and more or less doctrinal or populist publications. They are the starting point for ‘verification’, not ‘constitution’. In fact, by reasoning in this way the whole movement reassesses itself in what it still has that is alive and valid and has managed to keep integral throughout the years in spite of the onslaught of muddle-headed little leaders of various extractions. And in this perspective such a patrimony could give better and better fruit.
We do not agree with the comrades that make the same critique of the fictitious anarchist movement and come to the conclusion that the whole anarchist movement is an absolute nullity. We consider that, upturning the perspective and forgetting the logic of arithmetic or of seeing quantitative growth as a sign of strength, and ignoring the management of the small power centres, the movement could contribute a lot to the struggle of the exploited by identifying with it.
Two immediate results would emerge from this upturning of perspective: a) analyses would not necessarily be made by specialised persons or groups; b) specific autonomous organisation that does not come into contrast with the libertarian principles of self-determination might take form.
The analytical part of anarchism is influenced by certain ‘doctrines’. These doctrines do not bear equal weight today in the face of the development of the struggle, but there can be no doubt that some of them persist in influencing the movement in its fictitious aspect. Personally, we believe that the real movement of the exploited should not be seen as something separate from the theoretical development of anarchism, but that its realisations should be followed and enlivened in order to sustain the revolutionary component that can become a point of reference for everybody. Here the anarchist negation of eternal principles must express itself in order to allow a continual theoretical foundation for struggles coming from particular conditions of exploitation in the real movement of the exploited. Here the old anarchist texts cannot be dully accepted as gospel, but need to be reread in the light of the present day as models of action and not mummified stereotypes. Only then will it be possible to have an anarchist movement that does not turn out to be backward when faced with theoretical stimuli from situations presented by the real movement of exploited.
Finally, let us examine the other point: the structure of an autonomous organisation that is very different from that envisaged by the Archinovist comrades. When the struggle radicalises, the movement of the exploited resists further exploitation and ghettoization. The latter resist physical elimination in the prisons and mental asylums, refusing to play the role assigned to them by power, and develop autonomous organisational forms that can reach precise levels of articulation, not excluding armed organisation. What we said earlier concerning theoretical development is also valid in this case. The real anarchist movement cannot stay outside this spontaneous organisational fecundity. It must become a part of it, trying as far as possible to guarantee the libertarian essence of the movement of the base in contrast against all kinds of power.
But this specific organisation must not adopt forms that resemble those of the mass organisations that characterise the movement of the exploited. Class memory belongs to the exploited themselves and cannot be managed by enlightened specialists capable of keeping it alive even in moments of slack. The essential point to bear in mind is that the famous moments of reflux are such for the fictitious movement of the exploited, not for the real movement who suffer the relentless pressure of exploitation and genocide all the time. The attack on that part of the movement can also come about as a result of radical modifications in the economic structure, or it can happen with an accentuation of repression. In that case one is assisting in a radicalisation of the struggle, a phenomenon that must attract anarchists’ attention to the maximum degree.
The real anarchist movement must therefore be found within the mass after having examined the latter’s composition attentively and individuated a real movement within the movement of exploited as a whole. But that does not mean to deny the validity of the traditional anarchist movement with all its sins and limitations, its pathetic power centres and obtuseness. These hindrances automatically disappear by upturning the point of reference. The real movement of the exploited thus comes to be seen as an integral part of the theoretical development of anarchism, whereas anarchist doctrines, relived in the critical light that eliminates the danger of sacralisation, contribute to enriching the continual realisation of the movement in question. By the same token, a specific organisation can emerge from the real movement of the exploited and integrate with the real anarchist movement without becoming an ‘institution’ or the memory of the proletariat, but remain a spontaneous germination of the exploited strengthened in light of the experience of anarchist struggles of the past.
Fictitious movement and the dominion of the apparent
We are partisans of organisation. There is no life possible beyond organisation. Chaos and brutal spontaneity cannot produce the elements that are indispensible for liberation, which consists of a long and difficult process where a strategic project can turn out to be out of date and must be superceded.
But organisation cannot be a thing in itself, isolated from the struggle, an obstacle to be overcome before gaining access to the area of the class clash. On the contrary, it must model and condition itself on the actual situation of struggle, emerge as a homogenising fact, not set itself up ‘a priori’ to explain the contradictions of the social impact. When it is separate from reality, organisation descends into the realm of the apparent, becomes a cathedral in the desert. It takes on a living semblance, precise details and contours. Battles quite similar to real clashes take place within it, strategies and tactics that have nothing to envy of real ones rival each other. Only all this takes place in the world of the fictitious.
This situation usually has a precise class connotation. Manual workers, labourers and peasants are not inclined to give life to organisational forms that do not come from the class clash itself. Their lives (up to a point), take place within the nevralgic points of this clash and the intellectual hypothesis, even if not unknown to them, is at least not very familiar. On the contrary, intellectuals coming from within the context of dominion are afflicted with more or less severe crises of consciousness and want to reach theoretical clarity before passing to the resolutive action of the abstract moment. They find themselves up to the neck in endless contradictions, constantly building and undoing organisational models which, according to them, should serve to give life to action.
Of course, this repartition between intellectuals and manual workers is also arbitrary and approximative, which is why we should approach the subject with caution. However, we suggest that comrades reflect upon it. At the present time the anarchist movement is composed massively of students and intellectuals and is mainly a fictitious movement: is it impossible to get a relation between the two?
We are going to report a few statements made by various representatives of the fictitious anarchist movement that clearly show how these comrades are completely immersed in the ‘domain of the apparent’. The need to do something to come out of the imaginary and go towards reality is evident.
‘Let’s be honest, the organisation is kept afloat by the resolve of a few comrades! We should be able to say such things between ourselves, shouldn’t we? We must remind ourselves that when we each go our own way after a conference it is up to us, not Tom, Dick and Harry, but each one of us. There is a lot of activity and work that each one of us must do, must carry out endlessly, yet we will always and only be a movement that spreads and defends beautiful ideas.’
And elsewhere: ‘Our Movement is mainly composed of students. And that is all very well, but the worker element is lacking and should be there.’ We are obviously not the only ones to be concerned about a situation of deficiency and crisis that is threatening to lose the sense of the relationship between anarchist theory and practice. But the comrades pointing out the danger are the same ones that are completely immersed in fictitious reality. We ask ourselves why it is that, once they see the danger, these comrades continue to flee their responsibilities and do nothing to remove the obstacle and start moving in the right direction?
The reason for this is to be found in the existence of little power centres that many comrades rotate around, while the few who manage these centres in the same logic as any organisation of power can do nothing other than continue to do so. It seems to us that, even if they are in good faith, comrades who do nothing to break up these power centres and turn the active potential of the movement towards the struggle even at the cost of denting the ideological heritage, bear some responsibility. The care with which certain mummies, which by their own definition should be against any kind of conservatism, are embalmed is really extraordinary.
Basically, it is the illusion produced by appearances that pushes these comrades to get involved in something that does not make sense if seen as an end in itself. Hence the great fatigue in sustaining organisations whose only aim is to perpetuate themselves in view of the day when it will be possible to put this or that libertarian strategy into effect. We don’t want to accuse anyone in particular, we just want to point out a danger, that’s all.
But there are those who have taken a significant step forward in the critique. Those who, declaring that they agree with us (largely speaking) as far as the basic analysis is concerned, have suggested that when it comes to it, we are no exception as far as this critique is concerned. And who has ever said anything to the contrary? We are developing a critique that is at the same time, and in the first place, self-criticism. But as soon as we see the danger the critique, precisely because it is self-criticism, loses its value because at least there is the will on our part to put the problem on the carpet and examine it with courage, without false modesty, whereas it seems useful to address the analyses towards those who insist on keeping their heads under the sand.
Of course we do not succeed in coming out of the reign of the fictitious decisively either. Many analyses are too vague and try to face too many problems all at once, there is no actual connection between ourselves and the real revolutionary movement. But we can say one thing net and clear: we do not try to build fantastic castles in the air, phantom organisations with bombastic acronyms. We do not dedicate ourselves to amassing converts. Our work is aimed towards the real movement, tries to contribute, as best it can, to the evolution of struggles in situations that we think are most significant: prisons, mental asylums, armed struggle organisations, autonomous workers’ struggles. Any step in the direction of a clear libertarian organisation of these struggles is a step that is also taken with our contribution. We do not see how we can enter the heart of the class clash directly at the present time, perhaps due to particular short-sightedness linked to our own class situation, our analytical defects or for other reasons that we don’t know. However, albeit with great timidity we are sure that we are moving in the direction of the place of the struggle and away from the dominion of the apparent.

What movement?
A clear sign of the incapacity to come out of the fictitious movement is shown in the confusion that reigns among comrades when one tries to define what one means by anarchist movement.
Tendencies are emerging from within one of the biggest federated organisations that is supporting an opening towards the whole ‘movement’ in order ‘to bring about a restoration of the movement on proper bases: the recomposition of tendencies that compare and contrast each other and work together as far as possible, without any claims to predominate or any desire to prevaricate’. In this way they want to struggle against tendencies that—more or less openly—see a pre-eminence of the organised movement over the rest of the movement. But on the whole this organisation remains nebulous and has no clear ideas.
The problem becomes tragic when it is a case of a specific instrument, such as a paper produced by one organisation. In this case it is stated that the paper ‘must above all be the expression of the whole Movement.’ An absolutely impossible and mythical affirmation, clear indicating the great confusion on the subject. The same comrade then states: ‘It must be the paper of the anarchist movement, a paper that belongs to the (specific federated organisation) and remains so (of this organisation) but opens up to the problems of the Movement.’ How a paper of the specific federated organisation that must remain such can become the expression of the whole movement is not explained. And that, in our opinion, is a clear sign yet again of not knowing what the movement as a whole is.
Then there are the pathetic calls to action. ‘I am not a fan of acronyms and would like all acronyms to disappear to move to one name alone, that of the Italian anarchist movement. But unfortunately fractionalism exists and is a sore, a cancer that we carry within us. Do we want to go on like this? I don’t think so. Let’s say the names, let’s try to see if the defects that we have encountered can be corrected and we are here to correct them.’ This is an indication of the role that appearance plays in the absence of concrete social struggles. The ghost’s decomposition and recomposition pushes comrades to see a hallucinatory phenomenon as something real and to struggle, often with disgusting means, to address it towards this or that objective, not realising that its essential appearance transforms any objective, even a theoretically more solid one, into appearance.
Of considerable importance concerning this problem, it seems, is the way in which the management of money coming from the sale of a property asset belonging to the whole anarchist movement has been carried out. To decide the fate of this asset a commission was made up of three comrades belonging to the organisation we will call A and three comrades of the organisation we will call B. The sale was decided and a number of million (lire) were realised and put ‘at the disposition of the whole Movement’. Thus a comrade belonging to the so-called commission continues: ‘There is the problem of using this sum in such a way that it benefits the Movement as a whole, or to establish a repartition among the organised components of the Movement... The money has been put in a bank and is at the disposition of the Movement and therefore of organisation B and organisation A. As far as organisation C is concerned this is still to be decided.’ Another comrade, one of the nominees of the asset we are talking about, says, ‘It has been decided to print ... (a certain work). In the name of the Italian Anarchist Movement of course, because the funds (coming from the sale of the asset) are funds of the Italian Anarchist Movement and do not belong to organisation A, B, or C, or to any other particular group that claims it.’ Well, as we can see, ideas are not very clear, they are even in contrast. This blessed Movement (with so many capital letters), good ghost that it is, is made to enter and leave the stage whenever it suits them, without too much concern as to what it will actually say or do, so great is its acquiescence seen to be.
But let us take another very instructive argument. The defence of comrades in prison. We will take part in a debate on the question, limiting ourselves to the point where there is a discussion as to whether to allow autonomous groups to participate in a forthcoming conference or to limit it to the organised parts. ‘... Will this Conference only be open to the three federations or also to the autonomous groups?’
- It must be a Conference of the militants of the three federations.
- We have not discussed that much. There was talk of a conference of the Movement without specification or preclusion. It seems to me that the autonomous groups are also interested in the problem.
- Even if it is true that the autonomous groups have worked and are interested in the problem, this question must not include them as it only concerns the three federations (...) and must be resolved by them alone.
- I’d like to point out that many comrades of the autonomous groups are interested in knowing who has the task of defending the arrested comrades, who should manage the funds and how. Some of them have turned to us to find out what is happening. I think it is right to let them know the situation and to allow them to participate. To exclude them from the conference would not simply create even more chaos, but might also look like a political manouvre.
- But I wouldn’t like to give the comrades that walked out through the door the possibility of coming back in through the window in this way.
- These groups are outside the Movement. We could invite the groups that are forming or have already formed, but which we can guarantee, not those that have already compromised themselves by taking certain positions’...
It should be remembered that they are talking about how to defend comrades in prison here.
No comment. Basically there is no such thing as an exact idea of what is meant by anarchist movement. Most of the time reference is made to it in order to cook up an alibi so as to be able to do certain things, not because this is really meant as a force.
But when all is said and done, what do we mean by anarchist movement? We believe that the anarchist movement should be seen in the widest sense of the term as all the forces that are struggling for the realisation of a libertarian social revolution. But we also believe that the crystalisation of certain parts of the movement that are wallowing in academic themes, closed up in cliques that play the wiseguy with sentences of absolution or condemnation, have ended up transforming the greater part of this movement into an awkward and useless ideological bureaucratic monster. Yet, beyond the structure that is killing everything, there are comrades, individuals, that mean to struggle for their ideal, who clearly see how this constantly comes up against the structure that ends up oppressing them when they should be enhancing it and making it feasable. These are the comrades that we are talking to here. Work together, not to establish who is closer to the real movement if the demarcation line also involves those pointing towards it, if the critique is also criticism of the critique, but to move in the right direction, that of the exploited masses struggling for their liberation.
Along these lines there are also some comrades that, although they are still tied to the perspective of a federated organisation, are getting tired of it. ‘We keep bringing out beautiful analyses without putting ourselves in the optic of the concrete, in fact it is pointless to carry on ruminating old positions such as abstentionism, now a common patrimony of the Movement, without linking this to what there is that is new happening in society... In our opinion, it is no longer the moment for long discussions but for starting to work to find a strategy; in fact, until we find a strategy the Movement will go on making ideological statements that lead to paralysis on the one hand, and to throwing oneself into all the struggles that are going on without carrying out the necessary analyses on the other.’
As one can imagine, the other side of the coin is just as backward. In discussing a pamphlet illustrating the federated anarchist organisation, a comrade stresses, ‘It is to be a propaganda pamphlet, so all the arguments that have taken place, etc., should not be put in it. It must be done for propaganda, so be something very simple.. a few deadlines and events to explain to those that don’t know where (organisation A) comes from, when it was founded, what happened at the beginning...’
Anyone who, like this comrade, raises the problem of bringing out a pamphlet to make one’s organisation known, but ‘without the internal disputes’, is so steeped in the ‘fictitious movement’ in our opinion that there is little to be said. On the contrary, the comrade mentioned earlier, while remaining—like most of us—in a fictitious situation, tends towards reality, faces the context that hosts him critically and tries to push it and bring it out into the open, with all the consequences that ensue but also with all the useful results that it is logical to expect.

Towards reality
If nobody can say in absolute that they are part of the real anarchist movement, that is due to the impossibility of pointing to legitimate situations of struggle or methodologies that are valid for everyone at all times. Even the thesis of armed insurrection that we are so often accused of, nevralgic point of any discussion on anarchist methodology, cannot be considered a winning horse at any cost. There can be no doubt that the clash with capital—as we have said many times—will not be pacific. Violence will be the midwife of the new society, it is necessary to be genuinely active against the organised terrorism of the State, trying in every possible way to denounce and contrast it; but all that cannot be considered a simple sacralization of the machine gun. Changing our tune, we have merely said that when such organisations emerge from popular struggles as a result of a process of radicalisation that has isolated them, making the struggles they produced regress, only then, and only on condition that the umbilical cord uniting them with the mass has not been cut, can these organisations be considered to belong to the real movement.
We have said more than once, in contrast with many comrades who considered our opinions to be unfounded, that an armed strategy is not only possible but necessary in Italy today at the present level of capitalist contradictions, so long as it comes from the mass and never ceases to maintain a reciprocal relation with it. If we must be blamed for this then we are ready to discuss all the criticism against us, so long as it is clear and detailed and not concealed in a cowardly way behind mumbling and half sentences as has happened until now. But, let me make it quite clear, we have never said that it is enough to pick up a machine gun to find oneself in the real movement all of a sudden. The problem is far more serious and complex.
At this phase in the struggle the only possible methodology is that of verification. In taking residence within the movement one must proceed to verify one’s theoretical content in order to present a strategy that is not up in the clouds. In taking residence within the mass one must proceed to identify the class clash, discerning the ‘territory’ where this is still acute, i.e. where capitalism has not yet succeeded in completely solving its contradictions.
Once this double verification has taken place one must move towards the movement of the exploited, without claiming to impose any ideological direction or claiming that ‘the exploited come to us’ as so often happens in the discourses of anarchist comrades. Of course, the anarchist movement is precise enough—even though internal verification should take place at all costs—so is still something that opposes itself to the workers’ movement, if nothing other than as an organisational reality that considers itself carrier of a certain revolutionary consciousness. But that is no guarantee as to why one must try to bring about a process that transfers this revolutionary consciousness, a process that allows the charge of the particular consciousness to the total one (that of the mass, or the movement of the exploited). As a revolutionary minority, anarchists must not impose their ideas on the exploited, even though—objectively speaking—they are the bearers of a precise revolutionary consciousness. To act in this way would be to involuntarily perpetrate leninist violence without the aim of the conquest of power, something that is totally contradictory.
On the contrary, by participating in the process of mass self-organisation, working within it, not as theoreticians, politicians or military specialists, but as mass, it is possible to avoid the obstacle of the separate minority that wants to ‘move’ towards totality, but does not know how to decide upon what methodology to use. It is necessary to start from the actual level of the struggle, from the concrete, material level of the class clash, building small autonomous base organisms that are capable of placing themselves at the point of concurrence between the total vision of liberation and the partial strategic vision that revolutionary collaboration renders indispensible. It is therefore not a question of propaganda, of ‘making oneself known’ to the mass, it is not a question of reaching the media, it is not a question of speaking on television to millions of viewers. It is a question of realising the revolutionary awareness of the minority in single episodes of mass struggle, making concrete the consciousness that remained abstract when closed up in minoritarian cliques, doing so in such a way that the need for communism felt by the mass is realised little by little, daily, in the material organisation of life.
That is why we do not want to teach anyone anything. The point we are making belongs to the ambit of the theoretical pointer that we are proposing as an indispensible starting point in the road towards the real movement. We do not consider ourselves to be holders of the truth or revolutionary consciousness, and we do not want to close ourselves up in sterile arguments that are only good for rendering the present divisions of the revolutionary movement insurmountable. We are not carrying out this struggle in our own name in order to get stronger, quantitatively, or to build another organisational model that is destined to abort prematurely. We are struggling to denounce a grave situation of crisis within the revolutionary movement as a whole and the anarchist movement in particular. Those who don’t see these crises, refuse to look at them, are either in bad faith or are so used to exchanging fictition for reality that they no longer even notice it.

Organisation
But we also support the need for organisation. If we put ourselves in the direction of the real movement and look at the concrete possibilities of the anarchist movement critically (not triumphalistically), we realise that these are far more beyond its traditional components—permeated with that episcopal hue that characterises cliques in the phase of reflux—and that is why we are taking up the problem of how to face organisational relations with the mass of exploited rather than with the anarchist movement in the traditional case in point. Today, the areas suffering the contradictory dominion of capital, the ones excluded from the area that has resolved a few fundamental contradictions, are understanding the great alliance of traitors, parties, unions and hangers on, very quickly. They also understand the need for selforganisation, autonomy and the elimination of separate organisms.
Our task is to avoid isolation and extensive theoretical disputes that will never move mountains. We must appear with a series of actions within the mass—along the lines of self-organisation—that are capable of defining our position clearly and unequivocally, making real what up till now—in the mass—is only a spontaneous refusal of the parties, unions and collateral clowns.
If we were to carry out these actions successfully this could open up a road that even the best of us believed unthinkable until now and bring an exasperating situation to a head. We must undermine the socialdemocratic principles that have infiltrated us through bourgeois hypocrysy or the threat of reprisals from within.
If the prisons enter the struggle, we must struggle with the prisoners, because we too are in prison. We must put an end to making hypocritical distinctions between prisoners that are innocent because they are political and prisoners that are guilty because they are social prisoners. As we are all prisoners, we are all innocent and all guilty. Our struggle, which seemingly takes place outside the prison walls, actually comes about within the great prison which is the present society. Democratic freedoms are puppets that populate the world of the fictitious.
If we dismantle the defensive possibilities of the boss structure, contradictions emerge that the State must face and overcome in first person. Our task is to propose ever new, ever more acute contradictions in order to make the divisions that the State creates between each social group in struggle explode and make the unthinkable thinkable and the impossible possible. This is the self-negation of the vanguard.
In this way a specific mass organisation can arise within the mass, produced by a selforganisational phenomenon. This can extend during the course of the clash and the development of the contradictions to the point of becoming an armed organisation, but without losing its spontaneous self-regulating function. That guarantees, among other things, the persistence of a horizontal structure, the only safeguard for the continuation of the struggle under the present levels of militarisation of States. Isolation leads to revolutionary defeat, not just on a military level but even more so at the political one. That is impossible when the active organism is not the product of dualism (mass organisms versus specific organisation), but it is the mass itself that extends its activity, structuring itself autonomously to face the social clash, also at a military level.
Everything remains to be done in that direction. Every day the mass are developing and incrementing their need for communism, elaborating their theory, recognising their enemies. We stay closed up in our groups, meditating upon analyses and proposing strategies for action as products of an organism that considers itself the interlocutor, even a privileged one, of the mass. We must upturn the reasoning, stop counting ourselves and start counting the exploited and ghettoised. Then we would realise that we are far more than we thought to have clear ideas, to be better organised, have a precise military defence structure, to be on the right road for attacking power, for building the real revolutionary movement for the elimination of exploitation, for laying the foundations of the future society than cannot fail to be anarchist.

The dangers of the primacy of doing
In their attempt to break the barrier of fictitiousness that they are all too aware of, many comrades end up favouring an activist conception of the movement, one that privileges ‘doing’ above everything else. Identifying a particular ‘field’of intervention that usually coincides with the area they live in, they begin personal ‘work’. Preferred areas tend to be factories, housing estates and schools, the countryside being very dispersive and the other places based on total institutions (prisons, asylums, barracks, etc.) very difficult to penetrate.
However, this—very interesting—perspective has one great limitation if it is not inserted into a wider revolutionary project which, although it emerges from the microscopic fact of the unicellular life of the ‘area’, does not necessarily do so spontaneously. Moreover, it should be said that in fleeing from a situation of apparent lack of involvement, comrades can end up exaltating ‘work for the sake of it’, in a ‘pre-eminence of doing’.
Inserting oneself into a minimal field of intervention, they take all the decisions from the base, all the initiatives that have something in common with the anarchist methodology of revolutionary ‘work’. But they cannot stop there. In fact, these initiatives are always ‘responses’ to power’s project of exploitation, i.e. they are subordinate to a precise strategy that comes from the power centres, while very little can be done to prevent this strategy and reach its source directly. To face this part of the problem it is necessary, while insisting on intervention in the ‘territory’, to develop a wider analysis allowing for the individuation of the real objectives of the struggle, the central nucleus of the system of exploitation, at the same time. We can say that any intervention in the peripheral ‘territory’ must be carried out as though it is attacking reality as a whole, because the small situation contains all the problems of the large. On the contrary, in giving greater scope to the primacy of doing many comrades end up getting involved in a myriad of sectorial struggles that all add up to maximum involvement (seen as number of hours and personal availability). At first this might satisfy the just aspirations of the individual militant—who must recognise himself in what he does in first person—but soon ends up entering the monotony of habit and repetitivity.
Not just that. As our intervention is, by definition, against an immediately quantitative perspective, militants have no control over the amount of involvement in the ‘territory’of their intervention. It thus often turns out that one lives periods of flux and reflux as moments of enthusiasm or apathy. On the other hand the revolutionary project is more far-reaching, it presents more complex nuances and interlacing, and if it lives fluxes and refluxes it does so on an international, not a peripheral, level. When one severs the links with the general framework of the revolutionary project (which is both analysis and action), one inevitably see one’s own ‘work’ enclosed within a specific dimension and ends up suffering the consequences.

The false dilemma between theory and practice
The current distinction between theory and practice is based on a misunderstanding. The term theory is seen as something autonomous, worse still, as separate from practice. Speaking of theory one thinks of books, academia, universities, intellectuals, things written and said in a very difficult way. Viceversa, speaking of practice one thinks of actions, organisations, realisations, transformations of the concrete structure of things. Now this polarisation is false.
Another current thesis among revolutionaries is that ‘ideas derive from events and not the contrary’. Absolutely correct, only it leaves standing a polarity between ideas and facts that does not exist. If Pisacane, to whom this phrase is attributed, were alive today, he would not be able to do other than agree with this.
Just as there is theory and theory, there is also practice and practice. In abstract terms, theory is that of the bourgeois philosopher that speaks to us of his ontological dreams, and practice is that of the boss that exploits the worker. Only this theory and practice, which correspond and cooperate at the level of the system as a whole, do not constitute the theory and practice that we consider to be the indispensible elements of the revolutionary project.
In the latter sense we have the movement of the exploited which, in its progressive disposition towards self organisation of the struggles develops a theory, is its own theory. But this theory is also the practice of the movement. From this point of view there is no difference between theory and practice. It is just that the whole movement is not capable of selfmanaging its own struggles at the present time. On the contrary, a large sector find themselves at the mercy of the reformist lie and substantially favour the game of boss exploitation. In this sense there is a sliding, an imbalance, in the theory of the movement of the exploited. It is here that the intervention of the anarchist minority that is developing its own practice, soliciting the ‘rectification’ of the positions of the movement and developing the project of generalised selfmanagement of struggles, fits in. In this tendency towards the elimination of the above-mentioned imbalance, the anarchist minority realises both practice and theory. It is its own theory and its own practice.
To be more specific, analysis has two functions: a) it leads to knowledge of the nature and composition of the struggles of the exploited; b) it serves as a point of reference for the latter to see the contradiction between the perspective of self-managing one’s own struggle and the reality of the instruments of compromise (unions, parties).
Obviously, by underestimating the importance of analysis or sticking to events inside one ‘area’ seen as a microcosm that is complete in itself, one ends up evaluating the latter at the cost of the former. The movement of the exploited cannot see its position in the face of a series of interventions, events, experiences without the intimate link of the anarchist revolutionary project as a whole.

The first contact with the reality of the struggle
It is necessary to start off by relating to the reality of the struggle as a whole as the exploited have only one point of contact: that which power makes with them in order to exploit them more effectively. Here there could be an impasse or critical intolerence. The essential reason for this situation is society’s division into classes and the permanent war that derives from this.
The only way to get round this difficulty is to see it for what it is, i.e. a serious obstacle, and not close one’s eyes to it or illude oneself that, because we are the bearers of a ‘thesis’ of self-organisation and ultimate liberation, the exploited will immediately throw their arms around us.
Another necessary step is to outline the social components of the relation. We think that these components are three and not two as is usually maintained. We have the active minority, the reality of the struggles, and power, which makes that contact possible within a precise institutional framework.
Let us examine these elements. The active minority can only be isolated from a wider context by means of abstraction. In substance, it has its own class composition and acts consequently in some way. Only, at the same time, it is an anarchist minority (because that is what we are talking about), i.e. it has become aware of a method of intervention, an ethical evaluation of life, an aim to be reached and a clear discrimination in the choice of the methods to be used. They do not draw all this from an abstract theoretical code, a philosophical tradition or the illumination of some ‘thinking hero’. They find it in a tradition of struggle and specific analyses of course, but mainly in a praxis of struggle that they verify as they go along. We can therefore say that the further this minority is from the ‘theory’ of the movement of the exploited, the further it is from understanding its own struggles. In this case, a perfect observance of abstract principles drawn from anarchist philosophy does not help.
Second element: the reality of the struggle. We cannot ‘know it’, i.e. set about describing it, just as we cannot measure or classify it. We can propose approximate models, but as long as we are operating as a detached entity these remain very far from it. But if on the one hand the reality of the struggle cannot ‘accept’ the minority as its own without unleashing a series of contradictions within itself, it is able to indicate its own state of dissociation with some clarity. In fact, the reality of the struggle is not uniform, and it is precisely this fact that allows for the existence of the active minority as an entity that is getting ready to belong to this reality but does not yet do so. We are thus facing two fluxes and tendencies: a) the tendency of struggles to move towards their own selfmanagement (in contrast with the persistence of the unions and parties); b) the tendency of the active anarchist minority to become part of the reality of the struggles (in contrast with the persistent illusion of the minority that it takes the truth to the masses and considers itself the custodian of this truth).
The third element is power and its institutional framework. This is the class enemy and is the point of theoretical consolidation of the struggle. Only, in advanced socialdemocratic situations the institutional framework is irregular, complex and often succeeds in breaking up the unity of the struggle by proposing models of collaboration with power. These models, in themselves ‘theory’, are the theory of power even if they are proposed by trades union or party structures, just as the theory of the movement of the exploited lies in the selforganisation of its struggles.
The first contact with the reality of a struggle is also always a three-way relationship, as it is senseless to assume that a ‘certain kind of undertaking’ will be tolerated by power. When this moves in the direction of the theory and practice of the real movement, it is immediately singled out and opposed by power.

More on the misconception of the quantitative growth of the minority
A fictitious residuum can appear in this opening towards the reality of the struggle. The old quantitative ideology can pass through an objectification of the minority. The struggle then address itself towards a growth in the specific movement. Given that the work of spreading ideas is possible in any situation, at least theoretically, it is not very difficult to find a target to turn one’s attention to. Of course, there are always specific sectors such as immigration, unemployment, ghettos, criminality, as well as the various sectors of production; but the importance of isolating a point of encounter decreases. Anything will do in view of a growth in the minority. For example, there is discontent in a particular area due to a lack of something (water, lighting, services, transport, etc.). It is not important if alongside this discontent there are hints of selforganisation or not. What counts is being there with one’s own organisation; an occasion is awaited to start the game all over again. The results demonstrate one’s capabilities and how much more they might be if one were to find oneself greater in number. If nothing is obtained, one waits for another occasion. The problem of why, once the water, electricity or other has been obtained the movement calms down, or why it quietens down all the same even if nothing has been obtained, is not questioned. The prioritising of doing and the quantitative illusion prevent many comrades from thinking about such things and elaborating a different strategy of intervention.
It seems to us that the contact should not be made on the basis of one’s own perspectives and interests (those of the minority), using the occasional demands of the movement of the exploited as detonator of a process of development and growth, but, on the contrary, the starting point must be the transformation of reality itself, i.e. the transformation of the relationship that exists between selforganisation and the delegation of struggles. The ‘field’ one involves oneself in cannot therefore be that of stimuli from reality, as we know that these stimuli are torn between selfmanagement and delegating. That is, not all the stimuli that come from the reality of the struggle can be taken in absolute. It is necessary to insert oneself within them in order to transform the situation that led to them, and so transform the relationship between selforganisation and delegating the struggle.
If an area shows stimuli of discontent due to certain defects in power that lead to lack of services (increase in exploitation), that does not necessarily mean that those involved are prepared to organise the struggle to solve this problem themselves, reduce the exploitation that is striking them and move on to developing the struggle with other more general and specifically revolutionary aims. Often all they are interested in is waiting to see which road is more effective for getting what they need. For this simple reason, unions and parties can at any time force power to solve the contradictions and, in so doing, extinguish the struggle. So our task cannot simply be that of turning up, but is also that of placing the struggle in a wider framework, within a more complex revolutionary project that can move the relationship between self-organisation-delegating in the direction of selforganisation. And that is impossible if one becomes immersed in the event itself, where action is an end in itself or even worse, by using it to increase the numbers of the minority.
The need to fully understand this relation has become pressing in recent times. We could say that dissent has become institutionalised. Contestation, unorthodox demands, a certain animosity of the base, everything that until recently caused a certain panic in the unions and parties, can be drawn back into the institutions today. By democratising these institutions, power, (which is itself an institution), has lain the foundations for absorbing dissent. It has blunted the more dangerous edges by throwing divergences into the quicksands of assemblies. In fact, if by institution we mean repeatable forms of activity, social behaviour and structures that acquire a capacity for social control, we can deduce that no political instrument controls better than democratic centralism, the one that uses debate, assembly, dialogue, to impose what the centre wants in a clean form without any residue. Power has programmed a modification of society. To do that it will support the cost, make concessions, determine the genocide (ghettoisation, criminalisation) of one part of society; but it will succeed in convincing the other part that it is choosing its own destiny. In other words, power has also realised that the struggle takes place at the demarcation line between selforganisation and delegation of the struggle, and wants the delegate (which it can always control) to predominate, even when this is camouflaged as selforganisation.
Power would even allow us to grow quantitatively, as long as this takes place within the institutional framework. In the same way, it allows us to ‘work’ politically so long as we remain one of the forces of democratic opposition. On the other hand, if we intend to enter the social fabric as an external force in order to push the base to make the contradictions more acute, we must grow in number. And that is precisely what power fears least. So, the objective of the intervention cannot be qualified in advance but needs to work itself out during the course of the intervention itself on the basis of the modifications that it causes within the struggles themselves. It cannot, that is, qualify itself on the basis of immediate results to be reached, as the unions and parties can do the same. Nor can it qualify itself on the basis of an ideology that ends up becoming a maximalist and often contradictory stand in the face of a reality that is structuring itself on a contradiction: that between selforganisation and delegate of the struggle.
It is during the course of the intervention itself that its aims are developed, the separation between the minority and the movement of the workers is overcome and an awareness of new problems and stimuli is gained.

Contact with reality and the consequences
The real objective of the intervention is something that can only emerge during the course of the intervention itself. This is not clear at first, but grows and gradually becomes identifiable as the intervention develops and relations between the minority and the reality of the struggle pushes, with greater emphasis, between self-organisation and delegation of the struggles.
First one tends to overestimate the specific conditions of the reality we are facing. If it is the question of prison, we tend to exaggerate prison as a physical place of ghettoisation. We concentrate on conditions of detention, possible improvements, torture, the mechanism of trials and sentences. Then, the unravelling of the intervention puts us in a different relationship with the reality of the struggle, we change and, in doing so, change our relationship with reality. It is precisely at this point that the ‘work’ that we are doing becomes productive.
If we were to limit ourselves to shouting to improve prisoners’ conditions, against torture or trials in special tribunals, we would still undoubtedly be useful to the comrades who are suffering repression at that moment—and this is work that needs to be done because it carries out its basic task of preparation and defence at the same time. But, if we stop there we will be condemning our intervention to remain such, i.e. the intervention of a minority that approaches reality and evaluates it, struggles for it, even does something to change it for the better. But this ‘changing for the better’ is also useful to power in that, sooner or later, it must somehow decide to adopt more refined and social democratic systems of repression, systems that are just as effective, if not more. And we should also follow it in these modifications, keep on its heels and force it to unmask itself, but always as work of defence and preparation. Another task exists alongside this work, and this is what signs the demarcation between waiting, the vision, the interpretation of the struggles, and action within struggles themselves; it is this other that breaks the barriers and allows one to enhance the experiences of the minority.
The action of the minority within actual struggles is therefore to develop the tendency to strengthen self-organisation, breaking the conspiracy of the delegate and the leader, also when camouflaged by the leninist type of revolutionary project.
To bring this about it is necessary to see the situation that one is acting in in all its details, including the intervention of the minority itself. In fact, the more this presence is a source of contrast, the more it raises doubts and contradictions, the more fruitful the modification of the situation in all its parts and the deeper the insertion within the struggles will be.
It is only at this point that what we mean by ‘it is necessary to insert ourselves within struggles’ becomes clear. What emerges is the absence of a stable, clearly defined schema. Everything is problematic, the intervention in the first place. This appears more as a tension than as being comfortably ‘inside’ something. That explains why we cannot accept the idea that the initial situation, where we accentuated the importance of certain conditions, can transform itself into an optimal situation. The consequences of such interventions should be borne in mind because they always create problems and transformation, they always put the objective conditions of the situation one started off from in question.

The fragmentary nature of the reality of the struggles
The surest sign of the fragmentary nature of the struggle is the existence of power and exploitation. If the struggle were to succeed in fusing uniform action, i.e. were to succeed in making the tendency to selforganisation predominate, power would be swept away. The latter, being perfectly aware of this danger, organises accordingly, its most effective allies being the parties and the unions.
This fragmentariness cannot be catalogued in horizontal lines, that is, it cannot be seen as a distinction at different levels, according to the reformist, technocratic, authoritarian revolutionary, or other presence. It descends vertically, in depth. A place of struggle, let’s say a factory, a living area, a ghetto, a school, an asylum, etc., can never be qualified in absolute as reformist, technocratic, revolutionary, etc.. It is always characterised by a complexity of problems and stimuli, a complexity of tendencies and prejudices, distancing and involvement, compromise and awakening of consciousness. All that must be approached with conoscitive instruments, that is, one must ‘document’ oneself on this reality, dismantling the mechanisms as far as possible. All these technical aspects, however, cannot fail to be seen as something separate from the constitution of the minority, its conditions as an element of insertion within a reality which up until then was foreign to it. And this constitution often presents problems and tendencies that are not unlike those of the reality we are going towards. It is an illusion to say that the minority is by definition immovable because it has gained consciousness, whereas reality is fragmentary because it must still do so. In truth things are very different, the process for both elements of this relation is still a tendency and constant modification.
To clearly see the relations that reality has with the basic coordinates of the system, with exploitation and social control, produces an immediate questioning of the relations that the minority also has with these coordinates, i.e. with exploitation and social control.
The distinction proposed earlier between fictitious movement and real movement of the exploited (concerning the anarchist movement), should not be seen in the sense that the bad are all on one side and the good on the other. The forces that push the movement of the exploited towards the selforganisation of struggles constitute a tendency that is acting within the same fragmentary reality, proposing a need to go beyond it.
In this way, even in the most advanced and selforganised struggles it is only possible to see a tendency and never ‘reality in every detail’; the most intimate point of contact is precisely this fragmentary aspect. The minority is also fragmentary and problematic, does not hold the truth, does not intend to impose an illuminated dogma, guide, or leader.

The revolutionary anarchist project
Having spoken of the tendency of struggles to self-organisation, of tensions that come about at the point of contact between the minority and actual struggles and of the series of contradictions that emerge as a result of that contact, we gain a more detailed idea of the revolutionary project.
Above all this cannot be the product of the minority. It is not elaborated by the latter inside their theoretical edifice, then exported to the movement in one block or in pieces. Neither is the revolutionary project a ‘complete’ realisation in all its parts. It comes from all the problematics that emerge from the tensions that have become more acute following the relation anarchist minority / movement of the exploited. It is therefore itself tension and development, the negation of everything defined and immutable.
It starts from the specific context of actual struggles, underlines their selforganisational component and develops consequences and relations with the adversary forces, with power, within the general context of the movement.
It uses the specific elements of struggles that make them significant. When seen in the light of the strategy of selforganisation, these elements place themselves within a wider perspective, connecting to other elements that are just as important, though normally less visible.
The anarchist revolutionary project is the bridge that is thrown in the direction of specific reality, uniting experiences of selforganisation that are often singularly isolated. It is also, however, the indication of overcoming the distinction between anarchist minority and movement of the exploited where, from the moment that the project is in course, all barriers start to fall and one finds oneself struggling for a common goal.

LET'S DESTROY WORK. New introduction

2011-01-23T04:13:00.001-08:00

To understand doing means to understand hope.

Doing is hoping for completion.

The typical image is that of the collectionist.

Atrocious, but true.

In the world I am doing, I project myself and see myself as doing.

I live life and don't want it to be anything other than doing, otherwise I would be afraid I wasn't living it, that I was letting it escape me.

Wanting, which dominates me, is nothing other than doing; wanting to do is a reflex form of doing that is also doing.

Work is a particularly acute form of doing, the obligatory form par excellence.

I do not have certainty of the doing that I am undertaking, but it is completion that I am aiming for.

I well know that this tranquillizing perspective is not really attainable, but I hold on to it.

I hope it is not so, even although I know that it is, that death will come and end the game for itself and not for me.

Completion is elusive and far away, it resides in the extraordinary rarefaction of quality and fascinates me with its fullness, that I can only reach with enthralling and dangerous intuition, however not lasting, but with the guile of desire, empty imagination that necessity fills with contents that are quickly assimilated into the productive process.

Destroying the work that oppresses me, sabotaging the administration of the world, I am going to pass beyond to look at what there is beyond the hedge that blocks the perspective of the horizon.

The project that comes forth beyond habit and conditioning can seem destined to have little future, sometimes even ridiculous, but it is a proud project all the same.

Ridiculous due to its vacuity and inconsistency, measured on the world and its coordinations, proud because it scales the heavens, lauches a challenge, risks and renounces accommodating pleasure for a different momentum, an impassioned destructive gesture.

I abandon pacts and rules and, out of the blue, risk strikes me.

My body reacts, defends itself, then attacks in order to better defend itself.

It is necessary that all this courage be subtracted by me from the rule of the will, otherwise it would be no more than a banal muscular demonstration.

I attack without wanting to demonstrate anything to myself, I want to attack like I breathe, refuse this world and the forced doing that holds it together, aspire to quality without wanting to want to do all this, without goals to reach or explanations to give to somebody, even an improbable revolutionary privileged referent and its (presumed) capacity to understand.

It is not a question of reflex or involuntary actions, but of actions with which I don't want to demonstrate anything, which I carry out simply because I am putting them into act.

The inescapable fact that I want to realise them is not my will controlling me, this only happens through that which I realize, that is: make a project, demonstrate, indicate, reassure and reassure myself.

This will needs to be put aside, circumvented.

I mustn't let myself be enchanted by words, they are not the only door to knowledge.

Pain can be told, but living it is something else.

Research costs fatigue and suffering, does not supply guarantees, does not accept pauses and does not consent one to rest one's head.

I do it once and I am a Sunday researcher, then I return to the weekdays that take me to appeasement and accumulation.

Possession comes to pay me a visit and inflicts its lessons on me, with which my anatomy breathes badly.

Ingenuous rebelliousness does nothing other than repaint the chains.

The theory of the destruction of work is based on the perfect intuition of the quality that I possess, in any case, to immediate consciousness and the world of forced doing.

All the same it is contradictory and tiring, it cannot boast privileges or purity, cannot put itself under the protection of the absolutely other.

It comes out immediately from this protection it entered abstractly and renounces abandon for the uneasy certainty of doing and calculating.

Coming out it does not accept not doing that would then be a not even very subtle form of doing.

Abandon must be conquered, laziness as a perspective is not enough.

Love of knowledge makes one stay with one's feet on the ground, more than knowledge and my love of it is required.

Whoever loves knowledge can simply be a collectionist.

Destruction is other.

It does not cut out what remains, it also goes behind the incredible, pulls out my soul and takes me elsewhere.

The sand runs slowly in the hourglass and time becomes inexorable, but it doesn't scare me, I am here waiting for it and look at the way in which I can perceive the end, daughter of necessity.

Action doesn't die, it doesn't die because it doesn't live in this world, it goes beyond it.

Action is not to be found in the totality of life like in the safe of a bank.

It is inside doing and cannot be reached simply by going beyond amending distress.

The contentment of doing, of doing that surrounds itself with justification and aims, resides in this internal content not in unattainable completeness.

Excess of doing is still action, and this is not simply a quantitative increase.

It is not a search for the absoluteness of doing, but is the inadmissability of the dream that enlivens it and upsets me.

Purification does not belong to me, I do not bleach it like a kind of better doing, I say that quality is elsewhere, but it is also here, in the world of immediacy.

I do not seek conditions of privilege, I am not an artist but an artefice, I do not create works of art but the world in its simple and banal condition of being there in front of me, every day, while waiting for my measurations and controls.

In reflecting on the limits of work I do not come out from the symmetry of saying, only passion gives me access, purifies me making me come out of the seat of producing, recognising myself as he who has another aim. Access to this aim is abandon, the inexistant foundation devoid of force, it is not the limit that I consider valid but the unlimited, that has no interest at all, the ever different secret of uselessness. This lack is a different presence, in the same way in which uselessness is in usefulness, everything concatenates and supports itself. Doing and acting do not counteract each other, they are the usual and the different, but these are interpretations that I grasp while I am in the cotton wool of the world.They are linked together, translate themselves reciprocally and transmit their sense and tension without every managing to reunite them. The attention of doing and the disinterest of acting unite themselves inextricably. Yet the absolute other is beyond the destruction of work, even if this going beyond cannot be considered the attainment of an aim.

Thinking of the destruction of work I think of an archaism that has no current logic, that of before and after rings strange. I try to explain the conditions of its appearing as conditions superior to simple forced doing, but I do not succeed, continually the words enclose the concept of destruction into the area of an aim, that aim that I experiment in the world through the suffering and the occlusion of my destiny in the face of the massive attack of work against me. I undertake the destructive step, propose a now immediately that zeroises my being in time, a rarefaction that I have no deductive cognition of, that I am unable to describe the movement of realisation, even if I work hard to describe it, to localise it in order to have a point of reference and make it known to the conspirators of the word who await the comprehensibile Green like so many sparrows, concise and clear.I know that the quality I can reach with destruction, of work in the first place, also participates in the knowledge of detail but I can't assault by it widening the explanation and interpretation of the latter. In the destructive adventure there is not a beginning on which to stand my feet, I am always with the same instruments in my hands that I had in the work fare. Action is born from doing, is decided in doing, and here embraces quantity and renders possible destruction thanks to the abandon of the accummulated fruits that it leaves to die among the rules of forced utility. The decision to destroy, if it remains only an effort of the will, even of the best revolutionary consciousness, remains unhearable in the coy daily signing in, while all around occasions for sadness are growing. Then I stop deciding to give myself strength, negation and abandon counsel me to put up my collar and face the wind. I do not suddenly stop serving the world and using its rules, I am not an angel, I only know that something is moving differently, a breathe of wind stirs the atmosphere, it is a hurricane and I don't know why. In a second I sense where to go, what to desire, what to destroy of the huge phantom of work that oppresses me, I praise myself as of a great conquest but I have nothing in my hands, emptiness and nothing, I do not recognise the usual forced connotations in what I feel, in the heart that is thumping in my chest. The world looks at me with different eyes. It is the moment of destruction.

A few notes on Sacco and Vanzetti

2010-12-02T03:23:00.000-08:00

Published in Revolutionary Solidarity, Elephant Editions

Of course we are far from the times and conditions in which the tragedy of Sacco and Vanzetti took place. But have the problems concerning the way the movement of democratic opinion all over the world reacted changed all that much? Why? Perhaps due to lack of clarity and certain misunderstandings? These are the questions that led to the notes that follow

Why these notes?

I read “Acts on the study day an Sacco and Vanzetti” held in Villafalletto an September 4 and 5 1987, and asked myself how much did the fact that these two comrades were innocent count at the time and still today concerning this affair? If the two comrades had declared themselves responsible, or had just as incontrovertibly been considered responsible for the actions attributed to them would they still have been defended by the international anarchist movement? What would the reaction of the world movement of opinion that took over the whole affair have been in that case?

Of course, history isn't built with “ifs”, I know that perfectly well. And it is not my intention to make a contribution to the “history” of Sacco and Vanzetti. I have a strong suspicion of all more or less professional historians, have more than a little suspicion of history itself, and obviously suspect all politicians old and new and their good faith in taking up historical “cases”.

On the other hand, I have no doubt about the fact that Sacco and Vanzetti were quite extraneous to the specific acts they were accused of. But this certainty is personal and quite foreign to facts that can be ascertained or obscured in the event of a trial and does not prevent me from asking myself, and 1 hope the few comrades who read me, a few disturbing questions.
To die innocent means more rage

Of course, it must be terrible to die innocent, and that is because the moral value of justice is rooted in Beach one of us. Not the sacrosanct justice of proletarian rebellion that upturns everything and settles accounts in a collective thrust of destruction but the technical, judicial, traditional one. The old justice with the blindfold eyes we unmask to discover with horror are all rotten. But although we have read about and are aware of all this, we are still convinced that justice should work! Christ! How can you send two innocent men to death! The holy indignation of so many anarchist comrades goes hand in hand with the lay indignation of the communists, democrats and possibilists of every shade. The glorious crusade of the left reassembles unequivocably each time the names of Sacco and Vanzetti are mentioned. And what links them is precisely the general and objectively justifiable question of innocence. But the rage that is at the root of this, the rage for two comrades murdered by the State, cannot let us shut our eyes to other problems.
The inopportune presence

It seems to me that the flux of democratic personalities, the artistic and literary ones even more than the judicial or academic ones, greatly contributed to spreading the Sacco and Vanzetti “case”. This led to vast propaganda at world level, but also to lowering the level of the clash that was undoubtedly taking place in America, and more specifically in Court, at the time. Too much talk, too many theatricals, too many democratic journalists, too many politicians. And this, like a continuous, perverse thread still is going on today with attempts to recuperate by the contender to the White House, Dukakis.

But how do you decide otherwise? Take the case of piazza Fontana [1967 — a bomb in the Banca D'agricoltura. Milan, kills 17 people. anarchists are accused of this State massacre which was denounced by the whole of the left] — could you have told the Communist Party to get lost and drop their support? If anarchists do everything to spread their propaganda in order to involve people and have themselves heard by the widest number possible, how can they refuse the collaboration of the political and intellectual forces even though they know perfectly well where they lead. This is not an easy problem to answer. At the time of Sacco and Vanzetti, could they have refused the support of people like Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O'Neill, Walter Lippman, John Dos Passos, not to mention the various Roman Rollands, Thomas Manns, Albert Einsteins etc., all over the world who supported the anarchists' innocence? Yes, it would have been difficult.

But I don't want to bring up the quite legitimate point of view that the comrades should only have been defended within the international anarchist movement, with propaganda limited to the latter’s motivations accepting only the outside forces who were willing to keep the question within these limits. I just want to say that the kind of collaboration imposed by the lawyer Moore necessarily had to have the stamp of approval of both the Defence Committee and the two comrades in prison. It wasn’t foreseen how much the innocence of the two comrades would be underlined and how neglected their guilt on principle due to their militancy, their belonging to a specific part of the American and international anarchist movement, would be cast into the Background. That was the price of that collaboration. After all, one could play on the doubt, and this still happens today, that it was a question of two immigrants, two honest workers, and underline the nationalist and class element which certainly produced results at the time but did not put any light on the anarchist and revolutionary personalities of Sacco and Vanzetti.

Was the presence of the forces of the international “left” useful to the aim of saving their lives? One must conclude that they were not, given that the two comrades were assassinated all the same. The fact that it reduced any possibility of their anarchist activity emerging is also negative.

What would have happened if that presence had been refused? The two comrades would have been defended in the same way as the others who ended up on the scaffold, some innocent, some guilty, were by Galleani's paper. And here we come to the question: but does this differentiation between “guilty” and “innocent” make any sense?

Frankly, I don't know. I reread the “Acts” we are talking about here, and saw that both Sacco and Vanzetti contributed to “Cronaca Sovversiva” So they must have been aware of Galleani's position on this false problem. The fact that they were “innocent” could not make them go back to a total acceptation of the innocentist road, at least in the terms developed in the trial. I agree with Pedretti therefore when he writes “Bartolomeo Vanzetti was not an acritical one-dimensional person, he denounced the mechanism that led to heroising his defeat to the bitter end: he was essentially a communist anarchist, profoundly convinced and extremely proud of his political and existential choices... in fact he never concealed his hatred of the injustice he was a victim of and his desire to be avenged”. (p. 130) In a sense, once the decision had been made it was necessary to go an to the bitter end, right to the point of making the fact (imposed by the “frightened progressives” who made up the great mass of the supporters of Sacco and Vanzetti) that they were anarchists appear between the lines.
“Innocent” or “guilty”

The fact that Sacco and Vanzetti were murdered although obviously innocent proves one thing only: that the concept of innocence and guilt is not an objective fact but is a measure imposed by the class struggle. The legal techniques and police procedures which establish whether a person is guilty or innocent are part of the culture of power.

For an anarchist revolutionary the procedures that come to be pushed as logical “evidence” are worth absolutely nothing. It is to one's revolutionary conscience that one must respond, not the evidence of a situation orchestrated by an enemy who makes and breaks the rules of the game at its pleasure. For a “democrat” on the contrary there is a net difference between being guilty and being innocent. Guilty is he who has broken the law in a precise way, in the context notified to him and for which legal proceedings are commenced. On the contrary, the innocent are those who did not do what for various reasons they have been accused of The great mass of those who still cringe in horror when they think of the end Sacco and Vanzetti came to, do so because these two comrades of ours were innocent, i.e. did not carry out the robbery or kill the people they were accused of and which they died for an the electric chair. A small minority, and among them there must have been anarchists, cringe in horror not only because of the ignominous incredible atrocious method in which the prosecution succeeded in maintaining their responsibility concerning the specific events, but because Sacco and Vanzetti were murdered by the State. Would the horror we are talking about have existed, apart from in this small minority which for one reason or another did not take any notice of the objective fact of their innocence, if the two anarchists had had a more dignified trial (from the point of view of establishing proof) and it had turned out that they had committed the robbery? We are sure things would have been quite different.

The great mass of those who are respectable by profession would all have been in favour of a sentence, and we understand this. On the other hand a small minority including anarchists would, like Galleani, have stated that there is no difference between innocence and guilt.

Had Sacco and Vanzetti really been responsible for these deeds there would only have been a modest show of defence at the level of opinion by comrades, such as that which existed some time before the tragedy of Sacco and Vanzetti, for Ravachol for example. On the other hand, comrades who put themselves in the optic of expropriation cannot believe they have a movement behind them, no matter what its objective conditions are and the level of theoretical awareness within it.

Why can we not expect such a thing? For at least two good reasons: First, because the decision to carry out particular actions, including those aimed at participating through a precise effort in increasing the availablity of certain revolutionary instruments, is always a personal decision and must be borne, in good as in evil, by the individual comrades and their matured awareness. Secondly, because a movement, even a revolutionary one, needs to develop, has divergences of opinion, certain legitimate reservations that cannot all be cast aside in one go.

Put this way, correctly as far as I can see, there is nothing strange about taking a distance in such cases, thus clearly showing one's extraneousness to the question. Whyever should one let oneself become involved a posteriori in something one does not agree with? The only criticisable position is the moralist one, which necessarily ends up in the realm of the morals of power produced and imposed by the bosses.

This brief reflection should help us to see various situations more clearly, in the first place that of Sacco and Vanzetti. If being innocent is no more than an external factor that might or might not exist — and in the case of the two comrades murdered in America, Sacco and Vanzetti, they were innocent — comrades should be defended everywhere, even if they are “guilty”. Now, if this so, we cannot constitute wide fronts when comrades are innocent, then limit ourselves to a small part of the anarchist movement when comrades are “guilty”. The thing should be approached in the same way, at least theoretically, if we admit in the first place, as should be obvious, that there cannot be “innocent” or “guilty” except in the logic of power.

How can we get out of this dilemma? Quite simply. By always starting from the fact that for us the technical aspect is secondary, and if comrades are accused, imprisoned and in some cases even killed this happens, apart from the objective event that constitutes the element of debate in court and which is of marginal interest to us, because they are anarchists. We cannot make technical points become the central elements of the defence campaign.

Many comrades, even those in good faith, think differently because they are prey to the banalities of dominant ideas. The claim to objectivity is one of the cornerstones of the philosophy of the conquerors.

It is important to understand this because it always takes us by surprise, reappearing where we least expected it. That reality is something that can be determined in a precise way is one of the many myths at the basis of the new scientific thought, just as when it emerged from the complex conditions of the Renaissance, let's say, in the ideas of Galilei: rationalism reduced to description, no longer as essence.

And contemporary law is a worthy heir of enlightenment rationalism, not having changed the certainties concerning the “way” in which things went much. One still assists today in comical “reconstructions” and other such things in court. We have become so used to this way of thinking that we do not even notice it.

When we say that Sacco and Vanzetti were not innocent but an the contrary were guilty, but only of being anarchists, we insert in the trial that claims to be objective (therefore of a quantitative nature), an element that is extraneous to the trial itself (or at least, considered so by judicial science), an element of a qualitative nature.

And yet this is not so. Reality is precisely this complex thing that cannot be reduced to the result of a legal procedure. The latter will always be arbitrary and founded not an evidence but an strength, not an logic but on power.

A difficult way of reasoning? Perhaps, yes, but if you do it once you never forget it.

STRATEGY AND METHODS

2010-12-01T01:32:00.000-08:00

First published in English in Insurrection issue 2 1984

Exploitation is the foundation of the capitalist system. Without a terroristic dictatorship based on poverty, fear and death by a few over the many, capital's dominion would come to an end.
This determines the class struggle. Although they seem to adapt and compromise, the exploited are constantly on the defensive and ready. They follow the enemy's difficulties with interest, regard their traitors (who call themselves their defenders) with suspicion, and wait for the best moment to rise up and insurge.
The social clash alternates between acute confrontation and quieter spells. New theories and practices are developed that are never a simple repetition of what has gone before. Each historic moment produces new opposing sides: new bosses, new traitors, new exploited, new strategies of attack against exploitation, new attempts at repression.
Roughly speaking, we can say capital is moving from repression through use of the economic apparatus to that using the political one. In the past, in happier times for capital, wide strata of the population were prepared to offer themselves in exchange for a wage, so everything was left to illusions of self-regulating market forces. As these strata diminished, with a consequent rise in the cost of labour, or when social pressure forced employment to grow out of all proportion, the system's automatic margins of equilibrium are reduced and it goes towards more overtly political and repressive strategies. The State intervenes massively to regulate both the economic and social process. Troubles become acute, the police becoming the cardinal element in maintaining social order, with the army waiting in the wings.
The exploited's strateqy also passes from a trade union type of organising - corresponding to the free market phase of capital - to a more disjointed procedure, apparently uncertain and contradictory, but which is lively and creative and more amenable to self-organisation. This process heightens the level of the struggle, possibly even allowing the use of armed struggle.
It should not seem contradictory that the exploited respond to the State's attempts at enforced order with creativity and self-organisation. Increasing repression triggers off many mechanisms, one of them precisely that of heightening the level of the social clash. Moreover, this comes as a result of deteriorating conditions where large wageless strata are no longer waiting patiently to enter the world of production, even at starvation wages. Hopes of better times, more consumer goods and better wages are far more effec-tive reins than police or army.

REPRESSIVE STRATEGIES AND METHODS
Strategies are the choice of certain methods that are applied in the social clash. Methods are stable and well-defined procedures, so much so that they cannot be changed, at least within the present framework of exploitation.
Whereas strategies are linked to short term conditions and must constantly be up-dated, modified, discussed and, when necessary, declared unsuitable, methods are fixed, guaranteeing a continuity that characterises the struggle on both fronts. Strategies are constantly changing in the clash between classes, but the methods used remain the same.
As we have seen, capital uses different strategies at different moments: it goes from a free market logic to nationalised production, mixes increased productivity with less military repression and vice versa. Sometimes it intensifies consumerism, at others it reduces it, using monetary mechanisms instead of taxation. At still other times it uses overt repression, establishing a closed regime using nationalistic puppet politicians and uniformed torturers to eliminate all dissent in bloodshed.
But all these strategies are based on four basic methods:
Information controlled by the power structure. This is not only the work of the media, but also of everything that appears to be based on consultation with the people: elections, choice of work, choice of culture, use of free time, consumerism, political opinions, scale of ethical values, etc.
Differentiated education of the various social classes. Not just a question of schooling, this is a continuing process. It is the method that corroborates and instills controlled information that would otherwise disappear into a void. A series of coordinated processes that produce and confirm ethical values, they are often applied at mass level, but are sometimes restricted to a minority.
Political and social reform. Any one of power's single projects must be seen as part of a constantly changing whole. Even the most tyrannical regimes of the past moved towards adjusting and compromising with the oppressed. Absolute repression is a myth, an ideal that no reigning power can maintain for long. A mixture of pure repression and reformist compromise is always preferred. Modern democracies have gone a long way in this direction.
Terroristic repression of any behaviour deviating from the established norm. This goes from social condemnation to organised terror by police, army, courts, prisons, etc., against anyone who tries to reappropriate what has been taken from him. In the latter case the State will use either specific organisations (police, secret services, army, etc); organisations designated for other activities, but which carry out terrorist duties when required (trades unions, parties, political movements, schools, hospitals, cultural structures, newspapers, television, etc.) or specifically terrorist organisations created by the State itself, drawing from the army, police, judiciary, extreme right political movements, professional killers, organised crime syndicates, etc.
It should be said here that any one of these methods does not exclude another, but that they are all applied at the same time with interesting results. Think, for example, of the effect that the development of information is having on the educational process. 'Informatics' are still very much in the air. Basically, as we have said, repression is intensified when the other two methods show signs of slowing up and becoming inefficient. The inverse process, a reduction in State terrorism, tends to be slow as the organisations and mentalities whose usual methods are those of violence, torture and murder, tend to die hard.
REVOLUTIONARY STRATEGIES AND METHODS
The difference between strategies and methods is constant, as it is a question of the forms of action man possesses. Whether policeman or revolutionary, he cannot avoid studying the strategically different application of some basic methods.
Strategies are directly related to the conditions of the social clash at a given moment, not simply a consequence of it. The revolutionary is constantly trying to act on reality, to penetrate it and change it with his actions. But these actions, if they are to go beyond the field of illusion, must take account of the level the clash is at.
When the level of the clash is low, with wide strata of the exploited excluded from wage-earning and capital abandons itself to irrational market forces, the revolutionary strategy will be that of strengthening the movement, penetrating the various sectors of the world of work and unemployment among workers, housewives, labourers and students.
At a higher level, capital begins to show signs of instability. The State intervenes heavily to rectify an intolerable situation created by the capitalists' inability to manage the economy. The State's terroristic repression increases, dually, each struggle risks becoming reabsorbed and often contributes to strengthening exploitation by rectifying some of its irrational aspects. Although it is partial and circumscribed, information and theory can be understood by the exploited during these moments. Things would remain at a purely theoretical and meaningless level otherwise. It is in the struggle itself, even the limited one in defence of rights or already existing conquests, that we prepare for a possible heightening of the clash.
Armed struggle employs the method of violent attack against the State, its organisations and structures, its men, wealth and projects. The fact that this method is often part of strategies at higher levels of the social clash does not mean that it is a 'higher', or more efficient, or more revolutionary method of struggle than others. It is a different method, with its own characteristics, limitations and qualities, but which can-not be placed in a hypothetical scale of revolutionary values. One level of consciousness pushes a proletarian to hand out a leaflet in front of a factory, another to arm himself to take back what has been taken from him, or to shoot a policeman or judge. Another again pushes him to attack a factory, sabotage its production and damage stocks. Still another will make him associate with others in the same situation, men and women conscious of the need to come together to work out an attack against the class enemy.
No one of these methods excludes the other. On the contrary, they interpenetrate and support each other. It is therefore never possible to positively identify one precise moment where a given method should be used. They are used together and bear fruit according to the limits and perspectives of the various strategies they are applied in.
THE PROBLEM OF STRATEGY
A strategy of attack is of little importance for the dreamers of revolution. There exists an illusion that truth will triumph in the end, so, like the Christian martyrs one marches onwards, holding high the torch of ideological purity, but often remaining very far from the reality of things.
In actual fact, the proletarians and exploited in general, the lumpen proletarian strata who undergo very acute levels of oppression, do not have clear ideas. The equation exploitation/clarity is not at all true. One can live one's whole life in chains, dragging them along, and still believe one has lived thanks to them rather than in spite of them. This point cannot be overstressed. Information on its own is not enough. Struggles must be developed, both in the intermediate and long term. Clear strategies are necessary to allow different methods to be used,in a coordinated and fruitful way.
As anarchists we are pursuing a qualitative growth in the movement, and support its self-organisation. We distinguish ourselves in this from the authoritarians and stalinists who support a massively quantitative growth based on total control and 'democratic' centralism. But not for this can we wait to infinity for the people to organise with their quality and creativity. We must act more directly, moving as a specific minority. This means taking on the task of carrying out actions that the exploited, at a certain level of the class struggle, cannot develop on their own. If we fail to do this we will simply end up consigning ourselves into the hands of the stalinists, and the proletariat along with us.
Let us give a few examples:
When setting out information we must adhere to reality as clearly as possible in order to avoid any ideological re-elaboration. We cannot expect the exploited to act immediately on reading our information, putting it to their own spontaneous use. We would be heading straight for failure, and end up circulating a horrible mixture of platitudes and meaningless generalisations. We should apply a revolutionary critique to contributions to our publications, so as to place them within our strategy more coherently. Our work will never be purely 'objective' without denying itself as information.
We must force ourselves to see things as they are, not how we would like them to be. Our innate love for utopia - of great nobility and sentimentality - must take second place in the face of the need for analysis based on reality. To do this, or even to simply understand it when it is done by other comrades, we must provide ourselves with some basic instruments. We might as well limit ourselves to pub talk if we don't possess some basic awareness (and perhaps a bit more than that) of economics. The point-blank refusal to widen our study of certain instruments such as economics, history, philosophy, State administration, public finance, etc., is based on a mistaken interpretation of the anarchist concept of destruction.
Anarchists are often reluctant to involve themselves in intermediate struggles. Their essential purity causes them to have nightmares. They imagine being compromised with other not always 'clean' political forces, and of not being able to compete with them at the level of intermediate claims or political sophistry. This blocks many initiatives at the simple stage of information. In so doing we are showing lack of faith in the great clarity of the anarchist discourse which demonstrates the need to refuse delegation of the struggle. Then they are surprised and almost disdainful about the fact that the exploited do not have clear ideas, fail to understand why they should not delegate their struggle to others, and continue to be conned by the professional politicians. This tragicomic situation often becomes clear in public debates, conferences and demonstrations that have been organised together with the forces of the more or less revolutionary left. The anarchists start off with great gusto, go all out to organise demonstrations, work out their own information with great precision and clarity (through leaflets, posters, talks, conferences, etc), then reach a mental block. They abandon the political management of the event to other forces. It is usually these forces that exploit the anarchists' great propagandistic energy and manipulate the media, implying they are the only ones capable of doing anything against power.
The anarchists, in the meantime, have returned to their own groups and are asking themselves how on earth, yet again, they have failed to prevent a political take-over of their initiatives. At the same time they remain prepared and available for any future requests of collaboration.
We cannot stop half way in these things. Once begun, we must continue to prevent attempts at being taken over, even using political means. After all, we too can intervene before the stalinists take over. And we too, especially when we are among the organisers of the demonstration, can get particular motions passed at the end of the conference or meeting without feeling more 'dirty' or compromised than when we set out to work with other left political groups. To brush these problems aside, considering them unimportant or pointless compromise, we risk losing the fruits of the intermediate work and of appearing to the proletariat as comrades who are there purely by accident, alongside other political factions that are far more organised than ourselves. This gives the exploited the idea that party leadership is indispensable, the stalinists are given a hand in their grim quantitative work, and what we had tried to build at the start is lost.
There is no need to be afraid of dirtying our hands by using methods of intermediate struggles, so long as the aims of anarchists remain clear throughout, showing up the tricks of the professional politicians and the risks of authoritarianism. This can be achieved to a certain extent by not backing out of arguments with the authoritarian political sharks.
IN CLANDESTINE ARMED STRUGGLE things cannot be left to improvisation or to the spontaneity of individuals or very small groups. This method is extremely articulate and lends itself to applications of great strategic importance along with the intervention of other methods. From sabotage and the actions of individuals or very small autonomous groups, quite wide levels can be reached, capable of drawing in dozens of groups and hundreds of comrades. It is important to note here that the qualititative development of armed revolutionary action comes into contrast with some of its indispensable quantitative needs. A few comrades cannot do much, but it is a mistake to think that a simple growth in numbers gives rise to a correct use of armed struggle as a method. Generally, what is being looked for at the organisational stage is the creative development of ideas, theories, analysis, interpersonal relations, actions, contacts with the outside, and a spreading of the strategic project. An increase in numbers follows afterwards, and in turn will have a considerable effect on the quality of the organisation. One should not go too far in either direction: neither thinking purely in terms of number, nor going to the other extreme, believing that quality is the only thing that counts. This apparent contradiction only exists when the method is seen as something immediate and circumscribed, instead of being seen in the long term.
Certain aspects of armed struggle can also be used in the intermediate stage, that of information. At this point it will not be likely to spread, but to accentuate the information itself. The 'angle' one gives to this is important. Not being 'mealy-mouthed', saying things clearly, and backing them up with 'harder' forms of intervention, can stimulate an awakening of consciousness and is a creative contribution to a quantitative growth in the future.
Alfredo M. Bonanno

Towards anarchist antimilitarism

2010-12-01T01:27:00.000-08:00

First published in English in Insurrection 1982

THE THEME OF WAR has been present in almost every kind of publication in recent months, including anarchist ones. War is approaching, it is about to break out, the two great international blocks are moving towards war: we must do everything we can to prevent the world from being completely annihilated through a mad impulse of those who govern us.

But as often happens when a problem sets off a complex reaction of sentiment and fear in our intimate beings, we have not been capable - or so it seems to me - of going into it deeply enough.

In fact, when we prepare to fight an enemy that is threatening us we must ask ourselves what that enemy intends to do so that a maximum amount of information allows us to retaliate, defend ourselves and go to the counter-attack. So, it seems to me, we have not asked ourselves the fundamental question: what is war? We have not done so because we all believe, one way or another, that we know perfectly well what war is, so we are quite capable of doing whatever is necessary to fight those intending to bring it about.

In actual fact our ideas are not all that clear. That even the bourgeois press does not have clear ideas on the subject matters little because it is certainly not from there that we will find what we need to produce the minimum analysis required to make our actions coherent and meaningful.

Reading most anarchist publications is like reading revised and corrected editions of the progressive bourgeois press, when not some international law review with a few alterations in the language and a little more naivety in outlook.

The vagueness of bourgeois ideas is quite understandable: for the managers of dominion war is the means of guaranteeing its continuation, at least within certain limits. But for those who oppose it, what does war mean?

For the bosses war is nothing other than the accentuated use of the means they have always used. Armies exist, there are bombs, weapons too. Wars have continually been in course and are still breaking out here and there according to a geography and logic that in some way corresponds to the rules of the development and survival of capitalism. For the bosses there is no great problem to be solved. They cannot begin to wage war for the simple reason that they have never stopped waging it. On the other hand, for those who intend to fight against it things are different in that their struggle is spread through a series of interventions and actions that are valid in relation to their understanding of the phenomenon of war.

This in turn is determined by their own class interests, their limited knowledge of social and political phenomena, ideological interpretations of reality and so on and this in a situation such as the present where one is speaking of the possibility (we do not know how near or how far) of a nuclear war that is capable of destroying everything and everyone in the space of a few seconds.

In theory everyone should be against war, especially the kind that is possible today as we would all be exposed to the prospect of annihilation. How then can it be explained that this is not so? How can it be explained that governments find supporters and executors of their so-called madness? It can be explained through the very simple and fundamental fact of class in the same way. Clearly many of those who are near the levers of power and closest to the exploitation of the bosses, if not bosses or holders of power themselves, overcome the fear of war through the prospect of increasing their own privileges.

Hence the excogitations that these people are producing in their newspapers and programmes that all reflect the desire to see war as something immediate. I am not saying that this is not possible but rather that we should not accept this conclusion ourselves but through our analyses demystify the swindles supplied by the organs of power.

So we come back to the fundamental question: what is war? The publications currently on the market on the subject, including our own papers, often turn out to be mere hangers on or amplifiers of the propaganda of the regime when they say that war is near. Then it is stated that, given that war is imminent, we must do everything we can to prevent it because anarchists have always been against war and because war is a great calamity that strikes everybody, it does not have victors but only victims, and constitutes a great crime against humanity.

Beautiful and profoundly humanitarian arguments with only one defect: they do not move the State's programmes of genocide an inch and say nothing new to anybody. Let us make an hypothesis that corresponds to what has happened in the past and which once infected some of the anarchists of the best intellectual tradition (i.e. Kropotkin and the Manifesto of the Sixteen). As we have said we are all against war (in words!). Even the most convinced supporters of the virtues of armed solutions to State conflicts never have the courage to say so openly, apart from a few delirious maniacs, immediately rebuffed by their more cautious and shrewd collaborators. Those preparing for war are always the most impassioned propagandists of peace. Moreover, they base their peace propaganda on the fact that it is necessary at all costs to do everything possible to save the values of civilization, values which systematically come to be threatened by what is happening in the field of the adversary. (The adversary, in turn, acts and operates in the same way.) We must do everything to prevent war and often people end up convinced that doing everything can even mean going to war in order to avoid a greater catastrophe. At the outbreak of the first "world" war, Kropotkin, Grave, Malato and other illustrious anarchists reached the conclusion that it was necessary to participate in the war in order to defend democracy (in the first place French) under the threat of the central empires (Germany in the first place). This tragic error was possible and always will be so, because the same mistake as that which is being made today was made: they did not develop an anarchist analysis, but had faith in an anarchist re-elaboration of the analysis supplied by the intellectuals and divulgers in the service of the bosses. From that it was easy for them to reach the conclusion that, although war was still an immense and terrible tragedy, it was preferable to the more serious damage that might result from the victory of Teutonic militarism. Certainly not all anarchists were blind to the serious deviations of Kropotkin and comrades; Malatesta reacted violently, writing from London, but the damage done caused not inconsiderable consequences in the anarchist movement all over the world.

Today, in the same way, many anarchist comrades do not stop at the unpardonable superficialities that can be read in some of our papers and reviews. But let us for a moment go back to the generalizations that abound in our analysis. It is certainly not enough to appeal to universal brotherhood, humanity, peace, the values of civilization, in order to mobilize the forces that are really prepared to fight the State.

Otherwise why, when dealing with problems relative to the social and economic clash in a specific sense (unemployment, housing, schools, hospitals, etc.) do we avoid resorting to such banalities? Now that we are concerning ourselves with war we are suddenly authorized perhaps to let ourselves fall to the level of the generalizations of the radical humanists?

The fact is that we resort to these commonplaces with fear as the common denominator because we do not know what to do or say, nor what in reality - in the present situation of power in Italy, Europe or the world - the phenomenon of war really is.

Panic-stricken by our incapacity, profoundly aware that neither our glorious anti-militarist tradition (with the above exception), or the whole just as glorious baggage of anarchist ideas, can save us, we have recourse to the analytical laboratories of power. And so we transform ourselves into dilettante scholars of international problems. Our journals fill their pages with reflections, comical to say the least, on the relationship between the US and the USSR, between the NATO and the Warsaw pact, between the Middle Eastern countries and Europe; economic problems intersect with military strategies; technical data relative to the A, H, N, bombs find their way into our pages (and heads, having the effect of psychological propaganda). Great confusion results, giving the true measure of how far we are from the reality of the struggle and how much each of our attempts to get closer takes us away from the target. So we become ostentatious. We insist on constructing our analysis with more and more data borrowed from the State-produced manuals and we explain to the people with fear as the central point of the argument. We do not realize that in so doing we are becoming functional to that part of the bosses' alignment that plays precisely on fear to obtain two fundamental results: to divert the exploited masses from the increasingly heavy exploitation that awaits them and prepare them, why not, for war. Let us not forget that the best way to push the masses towards acceptation of war is through spreading the fear of war. Tomorrow, with a few adjustments in the regime's propaganda, this fear of war will easily transform itself into the will and desire to accept a circumscribed war in order to prevent total war, and who knows whether a new Kropotkin will appear (from among the many neo-Kropotkinians who infest our pages) and support the need for the small war in the face of the total one. (After all "small is beautiful").

Of course, we anarchists are against all wars, big or small as they might be, but once we limit ourselves to basing our argument exclusively or fundamentally on fear we place ourselves at the extreme left of capital, supplying it with the opening it needs to attenuate the dissent that is automatically produced within the mass of exploited.

Moreover, once we fully develop our critique of total atomic war and show - thus becoming the mouthpieces of the extreme left of capital - how terrible the effects of every kind and level of atomic bomb are, and once we add, as a simple corollary, that we are not only against atomic war but against every kind of war between States because all war is genocide, an abominable misdeed, a crime against humanity, and so on, with similar commonplaces we become extremely contradictory and damaging. In fact, we supply well-founded, scientific and concrete elements against atomic war (because these are supplied by capital itself), but limit ourselves to the usual humanitarian commonplaces as far as non-atomic war is concerned, involuntarily pushing the people (who are rightly repelled by humanitarian commonplaces) to predisposing themselves towards a refusal of atomic war and a probable acceptation of the "small war". And who knows whether it is not precisely this that capital wants of us.

However, because our good faith certainly cannot be doubted, it only remains to go more deeply into the argument and ask ourselves whether we should not develop our anti-war propaganda better.

And here we come back to the initial problem: we do not really know what war is. Because at the moment in which we start to go into the problem we realize that war constitutes but one particular moment in the overall strategy of exploitation that is put into act by capital.

Let us explain better. For States there exist formal aspects that scan the difference between state of war and state of peace at the level of international law. It is obvious that this type of differentiation cannot be of any interest to anarchists, who to understand a real state of war must certainly not wait for State A, through its diplomacy, to consign a declaration of war to State B. The task of anarchists is principally that of breaking up, as far as possible and for as long as possible, the formal curtain that States pull over the eyes of the people in order to exploit them and lead them to the slaughter. To do that, therefore, we cannot wait for the formalities of international law to be worked out, we must be ahead of the times and denounce the real situation of war in act even when no officially declared state of war exists.

To tell the truth, the suspicion that it is not possible to establish a net frontier between war and peace exists among the theoreticians of oppression themselves. In his time even Clauswitz felt obliged to develop an analysis of war as the continuation of politics with other means. In the same way, contemporary scholars (Bouthoul, Aron, Sereni, Fornari, etc.) have become aware of the problem and have tried to put together the elements that allow an even minimal differentiation between state of war and state of peace. After the examination of the elements characterised by armed conflict, the mass phenomena and the tension used by public opinion - elements not specific to a state of war - these scholars have had to conclude that what characterizes war is its judicial character and that this judicial character comes to be atypical compared to the judicial structure that normally regulates belligerent States in "times of peace". In other words war comes to be characterized by the legitimization of^-murder by a judiciary which in times of "peace" permits neither murder nor massacre.

From this we can clearly see that the criteria that distinguish war from peace are not ones which can be considered valid by anarchists. We are not willing to accept that the state of war formally declared by State power is indispensable in order to distinguish, denounce and attack a real situation of war. And, on its side, the State well knows that the formal aspect of the "declaration" of war only supplies a simple judicial alibi for a widening of the death process which it normally carries out by the specific character of its mere existence.

The State is an instrument of exploitation and death; therefore it is an instrument of war. To say State is to say war. There is no such thing as States at war and States at peace. States that want war and States that want peace do not exist. All States, by the simple fact of their existence, are instruments of war. To convince ourselves of this and to overcome the objection of whoever accuses us of maximalism or wants to see a difference at all costs where there is nothing but uniformity, it is enough to remember the obvious fact that it will certainly not be the number of deaths, the means used, the field of combat, or the warriors' aims to mark a difference between state of war and state of peace. To systematically kill a dozen workers each day at the workplace is a phenomenon of war which as far as we are concerned differs only numerically from the deaths that amass in thousands on the battlefield. Behind this profile it is not possible to single out a real situation of peace under the capitalist regime, but only the fictitious state of peace which in practice is equal to a real situation of war.

We therefore establish that war is a State activity which does not characterize a transitory and circumscribed period of its action but has been the very essence of its structure for as long as we know during the whole course of exploitation. So the social-democratic illusions of unilateral disarmament, respectable pacifism and bourgeois nonviolence collapse. Whoever supports pacifist theories and uses them to prevent the State from waging war is substantially a warrior himself, a reactionary who supports the State's continual state of war, preferring it to another state of war which is considered different but which is substantially the same, being in practice no more than an extension of the conflict already in act.

This explains how the parties in government and those who have betrayed the workers' ideals or who nurture the humanitarian whims of the radical bourgeoisie can, with great impudence or through stupid ignorance of reality, make great speeches against war. In practice, theirs are the speeches that guarantee the constitution of real war, preparing the masses for the acceptance of a future (always possible) extension of the small war in order to avoid a larger one which is postponed to infinity while the objective state of conflict is maintained and developed.

These concepts should be - and basically they are - more or less accepted by all anarchists. But, as it seems from many articles published over the past few months in our press, it is too easy when on the subject of war to slip into a dimension that sees it as something that can be avoided or which alone can be considered a form of struggle capable of coalizing the revolutionary forces.

It has been said that suddenly, out of the blue, we have come to find ourselves faced with the danger of world conflict far greater than could have been imagined in the past. It has been said that we must do something right away to prevent the world war that is approaching, against the increase in atomic weapons by both the US and the USSR. It has been said that there are moments in the life of a people or a continent where social, economic and political problems come to be superior to far more pressing and superior needs, referring to absolute categories such as survival, frontist opposition and raving homicidal hegemony, etc...

It is all very well to fight against war, militarism, bombs, armies, generals, missile bases. But if the reason is that it is the only level of intervention that the anarchist movement possesses, and that all other interventions are impossible, we must ask ourselves what is happening. It is not enough to throw oneself headlong into the only activity that remains open to us because we have difficulty in other sectors. We should ask ourselves whether the acceptation of the theme of war and the inability to place this theme within the specific logic of the State is not perhaps a consequence of our incapacity to address ourselves towards the real struggles in act? And whether in burying our heads in the sands of our weakness and facing the problem of the struggle against war without a minimum of militant structure, we are not running the risk of becoming the fanciful carriers of a maximalist ideology that ends up being convenient to the State?

These questions may not be shared by many comrades, but they remain before us as so many points that require going into and discussing. It is not enough to deny them, shrug our shoulders and carry on.

In our opinion it is necessary to go into the general conditions of the class conflict today and re-examine the function that anarchists can develop within the conflict itself, either as a specific movement or as an organizational force capable of expressing itself within the general movement of the exploited. It is urgent that we single out our weaknesses immediately and without half measures, without the persistence of our old paranoia, the stagnant ideologizing that pollutes many sectors of our movement, the social democratic infiltration, respectability, hesitation in the face of action, the craze for a priori judgements and ecclesiastical closure, the aristocratic residual that made us consider ourselves the monotonous carriers of truth.

To analyze to the extreme consequences our effective possibility of struggle does not at all mean to take a distance from the problem of war, and we shall be able to give a far more precise and meaningful response, a far more detailed indication and project of intervention, than what is happening at the present time, which sees us only as suppliers of rehashed theories of the bourgeoisie and vulgar distributors of a huminatarian maximalism which can be shared by all and precisely for this reason no one is disposed to support.

Moreover, in addressing our efforts towards the reorganization of the movement and the realization of what is necessary to overcome this reflux, we will avoid limiting our discourse simply to that of fear of war, which by its vagueness and generality constantly runs the risk of falling into interclassism.

We should not forget that our evaluations of a problem - and war is no exception - often depend on the objective conditions in which we find ourselves personally and of those of of the movement in general.

INTERNATIONALISM

2010-12-01T01:21:00.000-08:00

First published in English in Insurrection Issue 4

The struggle alongside the exploited of the world cannot simply be reduced to collecting signatures or counterinformation, it must complete itself with an attack against those responsible - internally and externally - for exploitation.

A restricted view of the struggle is doomed to failure. If not in terms of immediate results (improved conditions, growth of revolutionary consciousness, development of the movement, etc.) at least in the long term modifying of power relations.

The revolutionary struggle is "total". It involves the possibility of life for the exploited in all the different parts of the world, hence the need for the "total" intervention of the revolutionary even when operating in a circumscribed and therefore "immediate" struggle.

But this interest cannot limit itself to simply reading the newspapers and keeping oneself informed about what is happening in the world. It must go a little (or a lot) further than that.

Proletarian internationalism is active intervention, participation in the struggles of the exploited that extends everywhere.

But there is a mistaken way of considering this basic revolutionary perspective. It was applied by the authoritarian parts of the movement in the seventies with disastrous results. This mistake has mechanical characteristics and consists of taking what one considers to be the highest point of the clash (i.e. the situation of peoples in the third world) where social and economic conflicts are more obvious, and carrying them - as a strategic and methodological proposal - to within the situation of the more advanced countries (the so-called metropolitan situations). In the past one heard of bringing

Vietnam to Berlin or London or Milan. The mistake was in sanctifying the open armed clash unreservedly and in transferring these aspects to situations which had, and still have very different characteristics.

But in practice it was not a question of real proletarian internationalism. The far-off situation was seen as an occasion for pushing the local situation. The transferal en bloc of the methods and slogans was done with a view to obtaining sympathy and propaganda on the wave of results that the struggle of those far-off peoples were achieving.

We consider that today more than ever real proletarian internationalism can go towards one of two solutions. Firstly, the classical one which is spoken about less and less now and has come to be seen only through the distorting lens of a now out-dated romanticism, is that of direct participation through internationalist groups or brigades. A lot could be said on the subject which we shall put off until some future date where it can be gone into in more detail among comrades.

Alternatively there is the other aspect, that of "support" of the internationalist struggle.

It should be said that this support cannot be reduced to a simple subscription. Even if very useful, it is certainly not the first thing that the exploited engaged in a struggle expect. There is also so-called political support, i.e. counter-infomation, demonstrations, picketing of consulates and embassies, letters of protest, all very useful things.

And then there is the attack on those responsible for exploitation. Both internally and externally. Without wanting to give this aspect privilege over all the others, we must say - very clearly - that to do the first alone means to render such activity ineffective. It means reducing the manifestation of thought and opinion to a banal exercise of democratic dissent. It means the transformation of financial support into an act of charity which is mainly an alibi for oneself. To do the two things together has a more serious significance and corresponds to what we consider to be true proletarian internationalism. a.m.b.

Introduction to Strange Victories

2010-08-26T15:44:00.000-07:00

Strange Victories: The anti-nuclear movement in the US and Europe

Elephant Editions 1985

INTRODUCTION

At a certain point in their development, capital and the State succeed in rationalising exploitation. This is happening at the present time to a certain extent: pure repression is giving way to 'being involved'.
These new forms of repression must be understood if we do not want to remain tied to out-of-date forms of revolutionary activity.
The new forms of involvement, though not entirely new, are now being developed in more original and highly dangerous ways.
The permissive State, although it still uses dissuasion (in the form of police and army), is tending towards dialogue, allowing a certain amount of freedom of movement and self-regulation so that everyone becomes controllable at all levels.
In this way the counter-revolutionary role of so-called dissent is fundamental to maintaining order and continuing exploitation. Both the bosses and their servants are depending more and more on these forms of recuperation in preference to pure repression by armed forces - although the latter continue to remain the ultimate element in convincing and repressing.
So the State is asking the revolutionary movement to collaborate in maintaining social peace. Comrades shouldn't jump back in horror at such a statement. The State can ask what it wants of us. It is up to us to understand whether we are being drawn into manoeuvred consensus, or whether our dissent still has an element of rupture. The State's projects are continually being updated. One minute they are putting up a wall of repression, the next they are softer, decodifying behaviour that was once condemned and persecuted. The State and capital have no moral code of conduct. They adapt according to the Machiavellian thesis of using the brute force of the lion one day and the cunning of the fox the next.
Today might well be the moment for the fox's velvety paw.
One extremely useful element in the present day situation, that gives capital's restructuring a seeming aspect of being a spontaneous process of adjustment, is the massive presence of 'dissent'. We must say 'no'. They are putting through anti-union laws, we must say no. They are putting missiles at Greenham Common, we must say no. They are building more and more prisons with special wings, we must say no..
This no must be shouted aloud, not be a simple whisper of platonic dissent. It mustn't pass into action, but remain simply a 'minority' demonstration of disagreement. It is then up to the governing forces to explain the practical impossibility of such a choice, which is nevertheless based on the 'highest moral values'. As good a way as any of making a fool of people, extinguishing their potential aggressiveness, directing this impetus of rebellion towards activities that are dissent in appearance alone, and in fact are counter-revolutionary in every aspect.
This is what is being asked of the peace movement, and that is what they are supplying. As an ideology pacifism lends itself to being exploited for the production of social peace. An indigestible mixture of Christian sacrifice and millenarian fideism, it is much appreciated by the State as a means of involvement. Even the peace demonstrations that comrades are so impressed by are an element that is much appreciated in the spectacular framework of exploitation. The fact that these demonstrations are innocuous has nothing to do with whether or not they clash with the police. They are recuperated on all sides because of their being sporadic and passive as far as the State is concerned, and because of their basic lack of ideology as far as the peace movement is concerned.
These new priests, clutching on to the altar of their own sacrifice, are incomprehensible to people who would like to participate in struggles, but not for that are prepared to abdicate their patrimony of violent attack against the State. This is what the State puts its trust in, their incomprehensibility, allowing the peace movement demonstrations that are forbidden to others, but intervening as soon as any signs appear of an outside presence within the pacifist organisations.
The same can be said for trade union struggles, even autonomous ones, 'self-managed' ones, or those carried out under the leadership of the few anarcho-syndicalist organisations. The State is also asking them for the maintenance of social peace. Their ineffectiveness is the guarantee of their possibility of continuing. Revolutionary ineffectiveness immediately transformable into complying with the State's counter-revolutionary requests. Their function today is that of lending credibility to the process of restructuring that is taking place, at least in the most sensitive areas, extinguishing dangerous attempts at isolated actions of attack in total disaccord with any kind of trade union representation.
We should also be more aware of the counter-revolutionary role of the new commune movement, the vegetarian and ecology movements, the anti-psychiatry movements and all the tendencies that are trying to split up the real contrast with power, or are trying to reduce it to simple, formal dissent.
We can consider all forms of strictly formal dissent and all attempts to divide the class conflict into a multitude of sectors, as being functional to power. This is exactly what the couple capital/ State want to happen.
Many comrades in good faith fall prey to this contradiction.
The best of them, those really in good faith, are only misinformed, or simply stupid due to lack of analytical clarity. They are the ones who limit themselves to great declarations of principle against nuclear weapons, or are abstentionists every time the elections come around, or hand out leaflets against special prisons, then return to their lairs to wait for the next time to repeat the sacrosanct ritual of the eternally obvious.
The worst, those in bad faith, are the skeptics who have lost their enthusiasm of the past and now understand everything about life; and the ambitious ones trying to get a little allotment of power on which to seminate their swindles. On the one hand the super-intelligent looking down on those limiting themselves to carrying on with the struggle; on the other, those advancing their careers by kissing the hands of the labour party or the arses of the dissenting church. The nausea that overcomes us on seeing the first is equal only to that which we feel on seeing the second at work. There are many ways of gazing at one's navel or furthering one's career, but these are among the worst.
We must oppose the advancing counter-revolution with all our strength. First of all with analytical clarity.
It is time to put an end to shyness. It is time to come out and say things clearly and without half measures. Beautiful declarations of principle are no longer enough, in fact they have become merchandise for trading with power. We must engage seriously in a struggle to the end, an organised and efficient struggle which has a revolutionary project and is capable of singling out its objectives and means.
The following piece of work, on the anti-nuclear movement in the US and Europe, although written in 1979, is still a valid contribution to this search for clarity as a basis for struggle. Since the time it was written the anti-nuclear/peace movement has grown and multiplied mainly due to the mining of Europe with nuclear missiles. This growth has been of massive quantity, but the logic and quality remain the same as when the following was written. All the more reason then for a critical re-reading today.

The whole and the part

2010-07-25T02:15:00.000-07:00

Published in Insurrection Issue Two, 1984

There can be no doubt about the fact that society is divided into opposing classes. The difference between those who enforce exploitation and those who suffer it is radical and irreconcilable.
Of course, there are various levels of participation in both classes. Not only the dominators, but also those faced with the perspective of exploitation are responsible to varying degrees, according to how much they consent to its continuation.
What interests us here, however, is the relationship between the exploited as a whole, and the part, or specific minority of the same.
This is not just a question of definition. Much confusion arises from misuse of the terms, or from expecting certain behaviour or events to take place that have no basis for doing so.
THE EXPLOITED AS A WHOLE do not have a precise identity. Often seen as the industrial proletariat, they also include farm labourers, and the unwaged strata known as the 'lumpen-proletariat'.
Temporary workers and those in the services sectors (transport, commerce, exchange, schools, the cultural industry) as well as low level clerical workers, also go towards making up this whole.
Its characteristics are extremely fluid and can in no way be a fixed point of reference for the aims of revolutionary action.
Nor is it possible to identify one substantial part of it, i.e. a precise class constituting a point of reference for the rest. Any attempt to do this is based on a particular political bias, usually that of the party and the quantitative illusion (i.e. industrial workers leading the proletariat, or lumpen-proletariat driving force of the revolution).
The dominant characteristic of the whole in question is its unionist consciousness. This both regulates it and limits it.
Over a long period this whole has outbursts of self-organisation which has the effect, among other things, of nullifying attempts by the various parts to take it over. Basically, the unionist consciousness is transient and limited to short-term interests.
THE SPECIFIC MINORITY is a part of the exploited, and there are various kinds within this whole. Some have an ethnic basis . For example, the blacks in America, although they have their spokesmen among the dominant classes, are largely contained within the exploited and constitute a specific minority. The same, with different characteristics, goes for the Irish, the Basques, Corsicans, Palestinians, etc.
At other times the minority has a sexual basis, as in the case of women. Other times again it corresponds to a particular attitude towards dominant moral codes, as in the case of homosexuals.These minorities define themselves through selective mechanisms that are imposed by the ruling class, and which are accepted by the rest of the exploited.
These are: a specific culture (often referred to as sub-culture); subordination to the production process; considerable presence in the lower levels of social organisations; a very limited presence in the professional sectors, the, media and higher education; ghetto sentiment, and so on.
This kind of minority has little mobility into higher or lower .social strata. It tends to remain fairly stable, or at least stable enough to maintain a certain equilibrium. Cultural osmosis is kept is kept to a minimum, just enough to guarantee control by the enemy over the behaviour of the minority, and to eliminate possible 'deviant' demands.
THE REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT - this is not a minority in the sense we have been speaking of. It is an active minority and as such is also specific. It is characterised by its level of self-awareness, which usually goes beyond unionist levels to prepare for action at two successive levels: the party (or quantitative level), and the social (or self-organisational) level.
The revolutionary movement usually contains all three of these levels (union, party and self-organising), and they are often interwoven, making clear distinctions difficult.
Even anarchists, who by definition support the third and highest level of revolutionary awareness, have not failed acknowledge unionist and party levels, although criticism has nearly always prevailed and the struggle been redressed.
The fact is that the revolutionary movement is partly a direct and indirect result of social and cultural changes that are constantly taking place within society: the forces of production, class composition, etc.
THE SPECIFIC ANARCHIST ORGANISATION - putting aside trade unions (and anarcho-syndicalism), and parties, a third specific solution remains: that of the anarchist group, or the coordination of various groups.
This becomes the basic instrument for the spreading of ideas and actions necessary for the social changes we want to bring about: the final destruction of today's order that is based on exploitation.
We can see then, that the specific organisation is part of the revolutionary movement, therefore also of the exploited as a whole. Through it and its level of consciousness, elements who had been a part of the dominant class can abandon their origins, and join in the struggle of the exploited against the class enemy.

Anarchists and action

2010-07-25T01:27:00.000-07:00

From Insurrection September 1989

Anarchists are not slaves to number but continue to act against power even when the class clash is at a low level in the mass. Anarchist action should not therefore aim at organising and defending the whole of the class of the exploited in one vast organisation to see the struggle from beginning to end, but should identify single aspects of the struggle and carry them through to their conclusion of attack.

If anarchists have one constant characteristic it is that of not letting themselves be discouraged by the adversities of the class struggle or to be enticed by the promises of power.
It will always be difficult, often impossible, to find an anarchist comrade who has given in to power. This might happen as a result of torture or physical pain, never by long spells of repression or loss of heart. There is something in anarchists that prevents them from becoming discouraged, something that makes them optimistic even in the worst moments of their history. It makes them look forward to possible future outlets in the struggle, not backwards to past mistakes.
An anarchist's revolutionary work is never exclusively aimed at mass mobilisation therefore, otherwise the use of certain methods would become subject to the conditions present within the latter at a given time. The active anarchist minority is not a mere slave to numbers but acts on reality using its own ideas and actions. There is obviously a relationship between these ideas and the growth in organisation, but the one does not come about as a direct result of the other.
The relationship with the mass cannot be structured as something that must endure the passage of time, i.e. be based on growth to infinity and resistance against the attack of the exploiters. It must have a more reduced specific dimension, one that is decidedly that of attack and not a rearguard relationship.
The organisational structures we can offer are limited in time and space. They are simple associative forms to be reached in the short term, in other words, their aim is not that of organising and defending the whole of the exploited class in one vast organisation to take them through the struggle from beginning to end. They must have a more reduced dimension, identifying one aspect of the struggle and carrying it through to its conclusion of attack. They should not be weighed down by ideology but contain basic elements that can be shared by all:
self-management of the struggle, permanent conflictuality, attack on the class enemy.
At least two factors point to this road for the relationship between anarchist minority and mass: the class sectorialism produced by capital, and the spreading feeling of impotence that the individual gets from certain forms of collective struggle.
There exists a strong desire to struggle against exploitation, and there are still spaces where this struggle can be expressed concretely. Models of action are being worked out in practice, and there is still a lot to be done in this direction.
Small actions are always criticised for being insignificant and ridiculous against such an immense structure as that of capitalist power. But it would be a mistake to attempt to remedy this by opposing them with a relationship based on quantity rather than extending these small actions, which are easy for others to repeat. The clash is significant precisely because of the enemy's great complexity which it modifies constantly in order to maintain consensus. This consensus depends on a fine network of social relations functioning at all levels. The smallest disturbance damages it far beyond the limits of the action itself. It damages its image, its programme, the mechanisms that produce social peace and the unstable equilibrium of politics.
Each tiny action that comes from even a very small number of comrades, is in fact a great act of subversion. It goes far beyond the often microscopic dimensions of what took place, becoming not so much a symbol as a point of reference.
This is the sense in which we have often spoken of insurrection. We can start building our struggle in such a way that conditions of revolt can emerge and latent conflict can develop and be brought to the fore. In this way a contact is established between the anarchist minority and the specific situation where the struggle can be developed.
We know that many comrades do not share these ideas. Some-accuse us of being analytically out of date, others of not seeing that circumscribed struggle only serve the aims of power, arguing that, especially now in the electronic era, it is no longer possible to talk of revolt.
But we are stubborn. We believe it is still possible to rebel today, even in the computer era.
It is still possible to penetrate the monster with a pinprick. But we must move away from the stereotypical images of the great mass struggles, and the concept of the infinite growth of a movement that is to dominate and control everything. We must develop a more precise and detailed way of thinking. We must consider reality for what it is, not what we imagine it to be. When faced with a situation we must have a clear idea of the reality that surrounds us, the class clash that such a reality reflects, and provide ourselves with the necessary means in order to act on it.
As anarchists we have models of intervention and ideas that are of great importance and revolutionary significance, but they do not speak for themselves. They are not immediately comprehensible, so we must put them into action, it is not enough to simply explain them.
The very effort of providing ourselves with the means required for the struggle should help to clarify our ideas, both for ourselves and for those who come in to contact with us. A reduced idea of these means, one that limits itself to simply counter-information, dissent and declarations of principle, is clearly inadequate. We must go beyond that and work in three directions: contact with the mass (with clarity and circumscribed to the precise requirements of the struggle); action within the revolutionary movement (in the subjective sense already mentioned); construction of the specific organisation (functional to both work within the mass and to action within the revolutionary movement).
And we need to work very hard in this direction.

A Critique of Syndicalist Methods

2010-07-23T04:55:00.000-07:00

Original title: Critica del sindacalismo, "Anarchismo" n. 2, 1975, pp. 65-96.
Elephant Editions Work in Progress / 2

INTRODUCTION
Seen at a distance of more than twenty years this work contains some interesting forecasts. Nothing exceptional, but on this subject the capacity to foresee is essential to the notion of seeing.
Half way through the Seventies the world was still tied to rigid forms of productivity. Castled in its new fortresses, capital defended itself by having recourse to the final returns of the old Taylorism. It tried to rationalise production in every possible way by applying new complicated techniques of control at the workplace, drastically reducing the mechanisms of defence that the working class had cut out for themselves during a century and a half of exploitation on the line.
In actual fact the results were not exactly brilliant. Capital's difficulties increased and continued to grow until half way through the Eighties. Then the organisational upheaval resulting from the introduction of information technology into the classical factory system led to theories of political economy based on flexibility and the breaking up of the big production units. The spreading of the latter throughout the country, along with a growth in the market due to advances in the tertiary sector and the continuing effects of the preceding petrol crisis, were to make quite a different set up possible.
Half way through the Seventies the working class, still a monolithic mass in their buttress the factory, considered Capital's manoeuvres (based on theories fifty years old) with suspicion, and began to prepare massive resistance at the workplace.
In these far off days that have now disappeared completely the unions based their strength and their very possibility of survival on this. The fact that they represented the most advanced class in the struggle against the owners of the means of production within the framework of the European left (a different discourse is necessary as far as the USSR and the US are concerned), gave the
unions undeserved theoretical weight. That was the situation. The extreme rigidity of production costs (in the first place that of labour) facing Capital gave union representatives an air of rebelliousness which they exploited to the best of their ability.
Anarchists, (not understanding what they had inherited) did not go beyond a few bland discourses concerning claims for better conditions. All the members of the European organisations of synthesis accepted the idea of union representation more or less unanimously, looking on their Swedish comrades, architects of the success of the SAC and its almost a million members, with admiration. The Spanish comrades in exile in France pointed out the tragic mistakes of the Spanish civil war at CNT meetings, but did not have enough critical guts to put them on the carpet in no uncertain terms.
Things couldn't have been otherwise. To given conditions of the distribution of the means of production, corresponds a given capacity of the forces of resistance against exploitation to organise.
Determinist thinking? Not at all. If you go into a sewer you do not smell the stink, that is the nature of things.
It was necessary to escape the overbearing workerist, resistential mentality that prevailed half way through the Seventies in order to elaborate a critical analysis of syndicalism, and in so doing not deceive oneself that one could affect things from the outside simply by virtue of the validity of one's argument. Basically, at that now far off time the trades union discourse was what people wanted to hear. They wanted representatives in the factories capable of defending their struggles and able to guarantee results, even though in the best of cases everything concluded in a deal perked up with a few mere trifles and concessions that soon disappeared through increases in consumer prices.
Basically the Fordist (and Taylorist) ideologies were a last attempt to connect Capital and the State organically in such a way as to produce planning for centralised development capable of controlling market fluctuations. It was thought at the time, and still is, that any acceptation of Capital's proposals by the State could lead to the proletariat strengthening themselves, so this was considered an indispensable prelude to the successive jump to the great adventure of revolution. This reinforcing came first in the form of social security then, in exchange, worker mobility and the guarantee that there would be no extreme turbulence as workers' function became that of a shuttle to keep up adequate productivity levels.
Great compromises occurred in the Seventies, although they were not easily perceived, and the present pamphlet is an attempt to demonstrate this fact. The role of garantor and collaborator which the unions have always held on to like the dirty soul of the traitor came to the fore again as they supported the disbanding of the preceding model of participation, themselves becoming the producers of social peace. Aware of the limitations of seeing economic development as determinstic certainty the next step for the unions, incapable of putting a brake on the process in course (what sense would there be in putting a halt to history) but also with a real interest in letting things develop to the extreme, accepted the job of breaking up the workers' front. Here the tragic implications of the marxist thesis that no social movement can free itself from its destiny until it realises itself to the full, is laid bare. In the end nothing remains but the ashes of domesticated bad intentions under the ostentation of a revolutionary language with no concrete reference to the struggle itself.
Excluded, fragmented, emarginated, precarious, broken up into a thousand perspectives, the proletariat as a figure of antagonism (if there ever was a time when this figure really had a precise role in the tremendous clash to free themselves from exploitation) is disappearing from the scene completely, leaving behind all the lost illusions, the dead comrades, the betrayed ideals, the flags in the mud.
The new conditions of production present a heterogeneity that would have been unthinkable a few decades ago. Active participants in this situation, the unions have lost no time in complying with it. In fact they have become its architects and advocates, accepting low intensity work in exchange for representation which is now no more than a cog in the wheels, and not even the main ones, of the capitalist mechanism. The work cycle is emerging at world level, beyond confines and borders, as the revolution from below is surpassed by restructuring from above.
I wrote the pamphlet that I am presenting again now in a climate that was anything but receptive to the argument and published it in "Anarchismo", in issue 2 to be exact, a review that came out shortly before in 1975. It was received like a punch in the eye by the Italian anarchist movement. The following year the first English translation did not get a better reception.
The time was not ripe. Well, and now?
Now the time is ripe. So ripe that some of the ideas might seem quite obvious. But they are not. It is important to point out some of the reasons why a critique of syndicalism, necessarily brought up to date by the present conditions of the clash between included and excluded, is still valid today.
Perhaps the trade unions are more important today than ever before, not for the reasons that held them together in 1975 (and continued to support them until half way through the 'Eighties}, but for quite opposite ones. If they once supported the working class in their resistance, while diverting revolutionary impulse down the road of dialogue and contractual recuperation, they now support Capital in order to guarantee production in a situation of generalised mobility of the workforce. The trade union's function today is to ensure that the mass of producers are mobile, by participating in producers' movements in each sector in order to supply labour on the basis of demand. That means trade union interference uphill and down dale. Uphill, in the agreements with Capital and the State, both for contracts and for keeping unemployment below danger level; down dale, in the organisation of claims, desires, dreams and even needs of those still tied to a living wage (it makes no difference whether this wage corresponds to actual productivity in the traditional sense).
So, almost imperceptibly (and anarchists, as always, have done their best not to see the phenomenon except in its marginal aspects) this has led to a more advanced concept of resistance at the base, that of the Cobas. My goodness, nothing exceptional, but it was still an indication. The aim was still that of claiming better conditions but here attention was put on methods, that is it emphasized the importance of the means used to reach certain aims. I don't know if the word "sabotage" has ever been pronounced at these good people's meetings, but certainly the distance that separates these base structures from the unions was marked precisely by this problem: attack Capital in order to rouse it to a better understanding, or simply mark the difference with more advanced bargaining?
There can be no doubt, as I have had said on more than one occasion, that the radical difference is always marked by the abandoning of methods of resistance and moving to methods of attack.
The first condition is necessary to put these methods of attack into effect (apart from claims, which can still be for improvements) is not delegating the decision-making of the struggle to trade union or syndicalist representatives. Conflict must be permanent. No base organisation (Cobas or other) fully accepts this thesis, which is essential to any real change in methods.
But the problem does not end there. Contrary to what happened half way through the Seventies, it is clear today that Capital has set out on the road of no return. Information technology has led to the final breaking up of the working class. This is also visible with the disappearance of the great industrial complexes which were often strategically located in underdeveloped areas (the cathedrals in the desert). These are now in the course of being broken down and spread over the whole country as the fragmentation has become even more profound, I would say more intimate. It has penetrated proletarian consciousness to the point of making the latter well disposed, maleable and open to all the perspectives suggested by the unions to the benefit of Capital.
The new producer to have emerged from this upheaval in the traditional capitalist set up is left to himself. He no longer has any class consciousness, does not see around the corner and is incited to participate in a false conflictuality within the various stages of production. He is offered incentives to push him to act the cop or the spy concerning any unproductive behaviour by his ex-workmates. He no longer has any hold on the tools of work which have never belonged to him and which he once wanted to take over (now nearly all virtualised by computer technology). He no longer dreams of a world freed from forced labour, a world where the means of production, finally expropriated from the boss, would create the base for a happy life in common, collective wellbeing. He gets by, taking care not to be thrown out of the round of flexibility: today solderer, tomorrow gardener, then gravedigger, baker, and finally, janitor. He gets by, hoping for nothing better than a wage, any wage whatsoever, for his offspring, in a perspective of cultural degeneration he is not even aware of. The dreams of yesteryear, the dreams of revolution, the final destruction of all exploitation and power, have ended. Death has now reached the heart, death and survival.
Today, if we want to move ahead at a time when nearly everything that needs to be done will have to be changed from top to bottom as the invisible mist of the technological swindle settles on humanity, it is indispensable to get rid of the obstacle of the trade union or syndicalist mentality. And so this text, that marked throwing suspicion on the unions, all unions including the so-called anarchist ones, has become topical once again.
Catania, 6 January 1998

A CRITIQUE OF SYNDICALIST METHODS
Workers are disillusioned with trade union organisations, yet a curious residual of what we might call a trade union or syndicalist ideology still persists today.
The roots of this mistrust are to be found in events themselves. The abandonment of the strike, the development of a corporative mentality and the renunciation of the struggle have turned the unions into a malleable instrument in the hands of the bosses. On the contrary, defect in perspective, lack of analysis and a workerist attitude have been the cause of the persistence of the trade union or syndicalist ideology among many comrades.
In our opinion it is time we made every effort to clarify a few essential points so that anarchist comrades understand that it is not enough to declare oneself "anarcho-syndicalist" to be "within the reality of the workers' struggle". We must know and understand what is really revolutionary not only in trade unionism, but also in revolutionary and anarcho-syndicalism. In this way we will be able to see that formulae now devoid of any meaning merely serve to cover up the ineptitude of certain efforts, not through lack of good will or revolutionary capacity, but due to error in perspective and ignorance of the limitations of such instruments.
We will try to demonstrate that the limitations of trade-unionism and syndicalism are not determined by a degeneration in structure alone (related to increase in tasks and number of adherents), but are a consequence of the way the latter relate to capitalism. We will look at this problem in the light of the unions' objectives today, in relation to traditional criticisms of trade-unionism and the different ways the problem is presented in relation to the changes in capitalist administration. We will then look at the limitations of revolutionary and anarcho-syndicalism and point out some of the defects that are inherent in this kind of solution.
We will end up with a critique which we consider to be destructive of syndicalism as it is today, a critique aimed at showing that the use of direct action by grass roots nuclei at the level of production is impossible within the dimension of trades union or syndical organisations. Not only will the consequences of such an impossibility be very serious at a time of revolution, they also have serious aspects in the pre-revolutionary phase.
We maintain that the workers' fundamental task is to destroy the system of exploitation and create the foundations for an organisation of production that starts from man. Naturally, in order to do this one must survive, and to survive it is necessary to snatch what is necessary from capitalist greed. But this must not obscure or render secondary the struggle for the abolition of exploitation.
Trade-unionism today: its programmes
These could be summed up as collaboration with the structures of capitalism. We should not see anything strange in that. Given that the job of the unions is to claim better conditions, in order to do so they must first save the life and increase the efficiency of the counterpart otherwise the concrete terms of the claims would be lacking, and with them the unions' very reason to exist.
«The political proposal of the eighth congress of the C.G.LL. expresses itself in the adoption of a programme of economic and social development and political transformation to ensure the country fully employs its resources; a phase of a renewed impulse in productive and moral energy, an undertaking no longer built on the sacrifice and super-exploitation of the masses». (C.G.I.L.)
This is something the capitalists could subscribe to, of course, its only defect being that it is unrealistic. Not so much because the (bad, ugly) capitalists don't want it, but because it is impossible. Economic and social development can only come about (in a capitalist system of production) through a more intense exploitation of the worker. Any alternative to this is yet to be found by bourgeois economists, who have been doing their utmost from Keynes onwards, and the unions know that very well.
«We well know that two factors act on prices. One is of an external character, so is reflected from abroad, especially from the countries we have financial relations with. The other is composed of monetary manoeuvres and prices operated in this country by the employers and the government directly.
«We have not been able to act effectively concerning what affects us from abroad. What strikes us is the nonchalance with which employers and government are operating in a threefold sector: a) making the workers pay the consequences of the crisis through price increases and monetary devaluation; b) regaining strength, still with the preceding manoeuvre, through wage increases and pensions the workers manage to gain through hard struggle; c) then pointing to the workers and their claims as being the cause of the crisis and the increase in the cost of living.» (C.G.I.L.)
Even in this statement (seemingly so concrete) there is a shadow of something unsaid. The phenomenon of price increases is inherent in capitalist economy. It derives great benefits from it in its growing phase only to feel all the consequences later. Persistence in savings, the incapacity to select essential investments and the necessary opening to consumerism (where the unions collaborated for the workers' inclusion) - had it not been for all this the present crisis would have come about much earlier (from the end of the Fifties). Price increases are a necessary, not an accidental, phenomenon of capitalism. They are not due to bad administration or an unfavourable time (the oil crisis should be examined more closely in this sense) nor are they due to a monetary manoeuvre for the pleasure of printing banknotes. They are intrinsic to the capitalist system. The unions, being partners of capitalism, are not sorry about this but about the fact that their accomplices are blaming them for something they collaborated in determining together.
On the logical-economic level the union's proposals to achieve monetary stability are of the same value as the accusations by capital that the unions are the cause of the crisis: pure demagogy.
«In the sphere of agriculture it means radically reversing the policy followed until now that has led to the present ruinous situation in spite of the important financial measures taken.
«Absentee landlord property, unearned income and archaic contractual relations are no longer tolerable. It is inadmissible that vast expanses of land lie uncultivated in order to concentrate production in a few so-called first- rate firms, while great masses of workers are unemployed, forced to emigrate or live in misery as we spend millions on food imports and flood damage. Considerable financial resources need to be put into agriculture for:
a) investment related to land resources, water supply, tree planting, and the hydro-geological system.
b) indirect investment and credit facilities for the transformation of farming methods and crops orientation related to regional development.
c) the expansion of the zoo-technical sector, fruit and wine growing, the improvement of beet cultivation, olive and tobacco growing.
d) measures in favour of land workers' associations and cooperatives, and reforms of credit facilities.
e) State initiative in industrial elaboration and distribution of agricultural products.
f) a programme for public intervention in the field of food imports.» (C.G.LL.)
What is being requested is a compensated development scheme for industry and agriculture in order to eliminate the imbalance in the system. Pointless waste in the agricultural sector leads to an incredible increase in imports and a growth in migration from the country. Capitalism would treasure this plan of expansion if it could, its only defect being that it is utopian. It is not clear what they want to do - encourage the small proprietor (at the cost of the big landowners) or support the restructuring of the main agricultural industries through massive State intervention. The first alternative would clash with a European economic reality that has no space for marginal industries, the second would lead to an expansion in agricultural industrialisation and a consequent growth in the agricultural working class that would not be at all pleasing to the capitalists' palates. The bosses know that the creation of small farms would not solve the problem of agricultural supply, while the formation of a network of large farms in the sector would defeat the traditional possibility of control through rural patronage. The unions realise that a struggle for small property (occupation of uncultivated land) would regain the peasants' trust, but they would prefer to bid for a more homogeneous class situation such as that of an agricultural working class given the difficulty in controlling the former. Strangely, interests which appear to be in contrast become compatible: they talk of peasants' associations but have in mind the cooperatives in Emilia run by the Communist Party, they talk of expropriation of uncultivated land, but have in mind the struggle for the land occupations relaunched by the Communist Party after the war.
In effect, what the union wants in its perspective of progressive power-wielding expansion, is to direct the national economy towards some kind of centralism. Here is what the C.G.LL. say concerning their relationship with the State controlled bodies.
«We certainly do not support the idea of those who say that the unions must remain outside State administrative bodies because these only concern political forces. Anyone who thinks that does not understand the new reality of the unions. Their role cannot restrict itself to the factory but must also develop throughout society, not as the guard dog of the social and economic structure but as both a fighter and a force that is active in modifying the structure itself, for the development of social and economic progress.
«But participation in State organisms at the level of co-responsibility with no capacity for action would not be acceptable to us either». (C.G.LL.)
The power it lays claim to is clear here: act on the levers of subgovernment because indirectly, it means giving more and more space to the unions in the running of the country.
And the base? What relationship does the union develop with them? How are they involved in these decisions? How are decisions such as participation in the economic management of State-controlled bodies filtered from above, and what consequences do these decisions have on the workers?
«Union leaders must constantly be supported by the faith of those represented and must be capable of transforming this faith into a creative force).» (G. Ramal, Spanish Minister of Trade Union Relations. Declaration of 1971). As we can see, the problem is no different in the case of Spanish fascism [written in 1975]. The union leader is the mediator who must create the conditions so that capitalist administration can proceed in the best way possible.
It is in this sense that the problem the unions are most sensitive to is that of re-organisation. Inside the factories factory councils (managed by the unions of course) are taking the place of the old internal commissions, and outside there is a prospect of close links between factory and society. In this way housing associations are springing up, an experiment in structures outside the factory aimed at guaranteeing the presence of the unions in undertakings which might otherwise develop a dangerous autonomy.
Here competition between the various unions moves into second place: what counts is having power. What we find at the centre of the problem of the delegate is the preparation for tomorrow's great task of domination.
«We must courageously put forward new managerial cadres, especially workers and farm labourers».(C.G.LL.)
The figure of the delegate is essential to the union. Changing the relationship, he could be compared to the figure of the civil servant within the structure of capitalism. On the one hand the civil servant guarantees control over production, on the other he guarantees the requirements of science and the State. The delegate does something similar. On the one hand he guarantees the persistence of union management in the dimension of the shop floor, a dimension which could very well, and in many cases does, find itself to be in contrast to what the union considers necessary. On the other, he appeases the capitalists' concern about having to deal with a tumultuous and contradictory mass that is incapable of using the language of the initiated and who might easily pass to the living deed.
Here is what Professor Carerlynck (professor at the Law Faculty of Paris) writes in his introduction to Statute of Delegates and Members of the Factory Committee (1964), a fundamental text of the French union, the C.G.T : «The point of conflict the factory constitutes cannot be balanced in law through imposed, organised discussion between employees and management alone, but through a close articulation between such personnel and the unions, thus extending their right of action within the factory. There is a monopoly of the list of candidates presented by the most important union organisations, permanent control with a possibility of recall during mandate, participation of a union representative at the factory committee sessions and at the meetings of the personnels' delegates: in short, factory agreements with the union representatives and not the employees.
«The contrast in interests between employers and workers is something that cannot be masked by the creation of common organisations. Without doubt this apposition is sometimes violent but it does not exclude dialogue. On the contrary, the daily meeting place for worker and employer remains the factory, hence the absolute need for a personnel representative linked to the unions. «During strikes workers nearly always spontaneously nominate a few from among them to present their claims to the management... but the absence of a permanent mandate means that this is not considered legal worker delegation, albeit at an early stage.
«Election with permanent office is still not enough to constitute a true workers' delegation, delegates must be recognised as such by the employees within the framework of the factory».
But things are quite different in reality. Workers are suspicious of the unions. They join them because they think they will be supported if they are sacked or if they have a fight with the foreman, and because they think they are "generically" under protection. The way the unions use the strike demonstrates the absurd role they have reduced themselves to playing. The latest comedy is the one they are acting out concerning the unemployment commissions.
«The question of unemployment commissions should be completely re-examined. We failed to make the commissions function as propulsive instruments not only in the struggle for work, but also in any other aspect of the problem, such as the structure and function of agricultural labour (non existence of offices in many areas and the latter not open in the evening which would mean, if the law were observed, not only loss of time for the employer but, above all, loss of working days for the agricultural workers).
«This does not mean going back to the market place. However, we must solve the problem. We cannot take on responsibilities that are not our concern. We cannot be managers of unemployment on the one hand and the windscreen of a bureaucratic structure that does not want to reform and face the needs of the moment on the other, saving face by unloading the workers' legitimate protests on to the unions instead of those really responsible for this state of affairs». (C.G.LL.)
It is always the same tale: we must not disturb the bosses with stupid problems, but we must not act out the comedy too undisguisedly. We must not let the worker see our inefficiency and supine acquiescence to the bosses' will: that is the crux of the story of the unemployment commissions.
For their part, workers and peasants have quite clear ideas about the unions' limitations. «The indifference towards the union is such that they have difficulty in finding workers who are prepared to become candidates for delegation. Often the delegate is not elected which would give cause to believe that there must be a given number of claimants equivalent to the posts vacant because in fact a number of delegates' posts become vacant after a short time as those elected hand in their demission as soon as the elections are over». (Andrieux Lignon, L'Ouvrier d'aujourd'hui, Paris. 1960).
On the other hand the system is so integrated today that it is able to do better than the unions themselves at times.
«Often... we meet in one of the union rooms to discuss problems raised by the workers. Once I managed to fix a meeting with the management for the next day, but the problem had already been solved and the union got no credit for having ended the dispute favourably. It has become a battle between loyalties... The factory now offers the workers everything we have been fighting for. What we need is to find things the worker wants but the boss doesn't give. We are looking for them». (United Automobile Workers - U.S.A.)
And so to end this discussion on collaboration, payment as it is due: «Once again we say to the comrades of the F.O. and the C.F.T.C.: We do not find that the government gives too much to the union organisations, but too little. We insist that the State pay its obligations to the union movement correctly.» ("L'Humanite", June, I964).
Traditional criticisms of trade-unionism
These can be summed up as showing the limitations in the development of the unions. The latter were in fact born to oppose the capitalists' exploitation of the workers, i.e. were born in an objective historical situation which has evolved in time, so there has also been an evolution in the structure of their tasks.
A monopolistic concentration of capital and a union concentration of labour eventually oppose each other without either having the upper hand. The conflict has never been resolved and all delay is to the benefit of the exploiting class who are thus able to continue their exploitation even after the objective reasons for doing so no longer exist.
In itself this criticism is not mistaken. But it is generally used mistakenly, according to the political interests motivating the analyst.
By putting the critique of trade unions into relief we touch, perhaps involuntarily, on the objective differences that exist between the various confederations in Italy today. However, to go into these differences in depth would take us far from our problem. If the C.G.I.L. presented itself at the congress of July 1973 as a "demanding" union, one which puts forward claims, sometimes even presenting a challenge, during this congress they resolved to collaborate in the growth of production and full employment of available resources» (Luciano Lama, "L'Unita", 29th July, 1973). As far as the C.I.S.L. is concerned, its attitude of hanging on in its confrontations with the C.G.I.L., its links with the Christian Democrats and its collaborationism, can leave no room for doubt. Here is a criticism of the C.G.I.L. made by the C.I.S.L.: «The C.G.I.L.'s objective is not to keep claims within the limits of the economic apparatus but on the contrary, they are interested in forcing the situation beyond the point of equilibrium, with the aim of weakening it and putting the political forces in difficulty, and if possible, in crisis». (E. Parri).
In recent years [1970] a certain hardening of the C.S.I.L.'s political line can be observed to a certain extent, particularly on the question of a possible fusion between the three big federations, hence the dispute with the Right of the C.I.S.L.
Less important from the contractual aspect is the U.I.L. which considers itself the third force between the authoritarianism of the C.G.I.L. and the pro-government C.I.S.L. No mention need be made here of the declaredly fascist union, the (CISNAL).
As we can see considerable differences exist in the perspectives and levels of intervention within the union ranks but in the light of events they all share the same logic: collaborationism. Be it in the haze of Marxist authoritarianism or Christian possibilism, the unions cannot escape their true vocation, that of an increasingly active role in the running of the State and the exploitation of the workers. Let us take Gramsci for example. He writes: «History has demonstrated that purely corporative resistance can be, and in fact is, the most useful platform for the organisation of the great masses. This, at a given moment, when it pleases capitalism, (which possesses in the State and the White Guard a very strong instrument of industrial coercion) can also appear as an inconsistent ghost. The organisation subsists, the proletariat do not lose their class spirit, but organisation and class spirit express themselves in a multiplicity of forms around the political party which the workers recognise as their own. Pure corporative resistance becomes pure political resistance.»
The conclusion to Gramsci's critique is the workers' party, i.e. the Communist Party. The struggle cannot be continued at a structural level, leading to a transposition to the superstructural one. A marxist project like any other, which does not interest us here. What matters is that this critique of trade unionism is an authoritarian critique which supports the ideology of the guiding party.
One criticism of trades union structures today is that made by the revolutionary syndicalists. The union is accused of becoming bureaucratic and power-hungry. «In the International there can be no problem of venal corruption because the Association is too poor... But there is another kind of corruption which unfortunately the International Association cannot escape from: that of vanity and ambition.» (Bakunin)
In fact quantitative growth in the union structure opens up horizons for power (or vanity as Bakunin mentioned) that were unthinkable at the dawn of union struggles, but which, as we shall see further on, were perhaps credible even then. The theory that takes the place of Sorel's myth is that expressed by Maurice Jouhaux (French Anarchist Federation): «Revolutionary action consists of realising the maximum number of achievements, not reform but social transformation... Not just because this means an immediate improvement in the workers' conditions, but also because such achievements contain the possibility of social progress, education and intellectual elevation, because they are a step towards the revolution, a victory over the forces of the past.»
If the Gramscian critique led to the Party as a solution, the revolutionary syndicalist critique, heir of Pelloutier and Delesalle, ends up in syndicalism itself. The presumption of efficiency falls and only the syndicalist ideology remains: the embryo of a State within the bourgeois State. They will not understand that the syndicalist organisation, like the political party, cannot lead to social revolution although it may determine revolutionary conditions (parallel to the development of other conditions) just as capitalism does (through its very process of exploitation). On the morrow of the revolution if we really want it to be such, there can be no such thing as party or syndicalist organisation, just as there can be no capitalism. The structures of the future will be simply economic, not political, federations of base organisations otherwise the work will have to begin all over again.
Here another criticism (indirectly contained in that of bureaucratisation) falls: the critique of trade union efficiency. The bureaucrats are accused of being opposed to pressure from the base because the latter move in a certain direction, generally that of using tougher forms of struggle (such as the wildcat strike) and direct action. This fact can easily be substantiated. The present writer has personally had collisions and observed others with the "union police" during demonstrations-collisions of such brutality (and dull-wittedness) as to make the most warlike (and dull-witted) riot police envious. In any case what should be noted is that the union management's inefficiency is not simply due to a mistaken outlook on their part but is one of their essential features. Even direct action, if realised within the dimension of the union to imagine in the extreme, would lose its significance and end up easy prey to the inefficiency typical of the structure in question. Let us look at a few examples:
«We quite understand the repulsion of the mass of young people avid for justice, honour and purity as a consequence of the decadence of the regime and all that it represents in scandal, sin, pornography and even criminality.
«We are witnessing a true influx of perversion, corruption and amorality. Nothing escapes it, be it the press, literature or the cinema.
«ln certain circles creative freedom comes to be confused with intellectual decadence. Perhaps we will be accused of puritanism-it matters little, but for a long time now those of us who are still attached to moral, cultural and human values have been standing up without distinction, in political opinion or religious faith, in order to maintain them.» (G. Seguy, 6th September, 1973)
We know from the writings of so many holy fathers how the acknowledged revolutionary needs of the people are deviated towards the defence of abstract moral values. We know that these arguments are all the same whether they come from the inquisition, fascism, the president of the industrial union or the most representative of the French unions today, the powerful C.G.T.
The union leaders' concern not to jeopardise relations with the counterpart is always evident. For example, we saw in the jeremiads above concerning the malfunctioning of the employment commissions that one of the points the unions complained about was that they lose time for the employers.
«The development or rather the degeneration of modern union structures all over the world have one aspect in common: their reconciliation and fusion with the State.
«This process is characteristic of all unions be they neutral, social democratic, communist, or anarchist. This alone shows that the tendency to amalgamate with the State is not inherent in one particular doctrine, but is a result of the social conditions common to all unions and syndicalist organisations.» (L. Trotsky)
This affirmation is correct, even though it sees the party as a solution. It is not a question of inefficiency, but of collaboration. The union is no more than a public service and as such can differ in efficiency according to how its bureaucracy functions, but it cannot develop any other perspectives let alone revolutionary ones. It is interesting to see how the mechanisms to put a brake on the base of the workers work. Here for example is what Daniel Mothe writes in "Socialisme ou Barbarie" (no 13) concerning the strike in the Renault factory in August 1953.
«Four months earlier the union's tactic was that of repeated strikes. This reached a peak at the time of the strike in Section 74, causing the lockout of the whole industry. The workers were prepared to act, but on condition that their action not be confined to one or two sections. They wanted a general strike or nothing. They took the initiative, believing that the other sections would follow them. It was only when they realised not only that there was no following but that the unions were doing everything in their power to isolate them, that they rejected the strike.
«For years the methods of struggle used by the unions were work suspensions limited to half a day, an hour, half an hour or even a quarter of an hour, mass petitions, or a delegation of a handful of men to go before the head of the section. In the month of August the workers realised they would have to stop everything if they wanted their wages reconsidered. But even there the unions opposed themselves, and tried to keep the strike within a legal framework.
«At a general assembly the workers voted in favour of a proposal to send a delegation to the Ministry. Once again the unions took on the task of forming the delegation, limiting it to a few workers. No mass demonstration could be
permitted by a bureaucracy with no interest whatsoever in seeing a movement go beyond the limits of its own objectives.»
This kind of operative inefficiency could be defined procrastination. It is not one of the union's aims to radicalise the struggle: the consequences (positive or negative) would be paid by the union bureaucrats in first person. Their inefficiency is a reflex, it contains an innate collaborationism, a congenital elephantiasis.
But there exists another kind of inefficiency, that of "silence", of restricting information. The rank and file being kept away from any control of information, the mechanism is quite simple. Let us return to Mothe's analysis.
«The first means of opposing workers' spontaneous action is that of not giving directions: by remaining silent. This silence is all the easier as factory publications are in the hands of the union bureaucrats. The workers have no control over them whatsoever.
«It often happens that workers who are prepared to go on strike change their minds because they realise that they will not be supported by the unions.
«If this form of passivity is not enough to dampen the workers' will, they spread defeatism or demoralise the combative ones. "The union bureaucracy's methods are not very different to those of the bosses.
«Above a11 it means dividing. Suspicion and mistrust is spread among the workers." You will go on strike but others won't follow you even if they say they will. They will desert you in the middle of it."
«They throw suspicion on the most combative among them. "You, you are for the strike because you don't have children to feed." They accuse those wanting to go on strike of not having done so in the past.
«They try to dissuade those in favour of the strike with political arguments. They give false information on the situation in other sectors and have it believed that the workers are not in agreement.»
There are many ways to qualify such behavior. We do not intend to make a list of them. We are not surprised by the methods used to put a brake on the base - on the contrary, we are surprised to find people who still believe the unions are in good faith. The problem is not so much how to make workers understand the unions' defects as that of studying means to contrast these defects with a view to creating an offensive among them. Now the problem is that of building an efficient workers' structure based on direct action, in another direction altogether, from a healthy base far from the unions and organised horizontally.
What can workers actually do within the unions? Not only are they centralised organisations, but only delegates from the shop floor have the right to move around and inform themselves, and we know that delegates represent the union structure, not the base. It is a characteristic union manoeuvre to cry their strength to the winds when they are trying to persuade workers to join but this same strength is passed off as being incapable of cohesion and fighting when the leadership turn against the base of the workers.
Another traditional criticism of the unions is one that some anarchists use against the anarcho-syndicalist tendency which unconditionally supported revolutionary syndicalism without attempting to see the limitations and dangerous contradictions of trade unionism and syndicalism in general.
Perhaps one of the clearest debates on this problem is that which took place between Monatte and Malatesta at the Amsterdam Congress in 1907. Monatte supports a program where syndicalism and anarchism would complement each other. On the daily task of claiming better conditions syndicalism coordinates the workers' strength and the growth in their wellbeing by gaining immediate improvements:.. preparing for their complete emancipation which is impossible without the expropriation of capital.» (Monatte)
Malatesta, with basic clarity on the problem, says «Syndicalism can be accepted as a means, not as an end. Even the general strike, which for syndicalism is synonymous with revolution, cannot be considered anything but a means.»
The same year he wrote in "Les Temps Nouveau",«In spite of the declarations of its most ardent partisans syndicalism contains by its very nature all the elements of degeneration that have corrupted the workers' movement in the past. In fact, being a movement which proposes to defend the workers' interests, it must necessarily adapt to the conditions of the present day.»
As we shall see further on, Malatesta's position is a radical one, but we do not agree with him completely. There can be no doubt that syndicalism is not an end in itself, but the fact that it can be considered a means must imply a means for preparing the revolution, not for continuing exploitation, or worse still, preparing the counter-revolution. That is the problem. The problem of trade unionism and syndicalism is a political problem of power the same as that concerning any other organisation that is in competition with the State. The dynamics of this organisation sometimes assume such particular characteristics as to make it difficult to see the contradictions on the surface; but that does not change its real essence.
«It is essential therefore for the worker to make conquests in society as well as in the factory, in order to bring about the social transformation that is necessary. In turn the union is obliged to accept the burden of this necessity not just for the workers, but also for the popular masses, as well as for the more general of the demands of the economic, civil, and democratic development of the whole country. »(C.G.I.L.)
For the C.G.I.L. it is not a question of discovery but is the logical development of a whole political tradition which has always seen this federation, particularly at the most difficult times, become the interpreter of national demands, making political proposals to renew work and economic and social development.
Malatesta's argument is hardly applicable, but we must not forget it concerned the turbulent atmosphere of the French syndicalists before the first world war, a time when anarchists were very active, and which also saw the work of Pelloutier, founder of the "Bourse". Perhaps today in a situation different not in substance but in the disgusting form this substance has taken, he would have changed his ideas.
Here the program is clear: the union is to look after the running of the State. In the face of the manifest incapacity (according to the union bureaucracy) of the political operators in government, they consider it indispensable - in the workers' interests -that they take over and manage exploitation themselves.
The relationship between union and political power appears in its most frightful manifestation: union and capitalism. Economic power keeps the union management conditioned within the parametres of reformism and in so doing directs its strength towards that "co-management" of power which is a future that is very close at hand.
Trade-unionism and capitalism old and new
The unions' collaboration in the difficult life of capitalism has taken various forms during the various stages of its growth. To the "old-style" manufacturing factory capitalism tied to a restricted vision of the market and no clear multinational orientation, there corresponded (and still corresponds today in the less developed areas) an "old-style" corporate kind of trade unionism with an ideology that exalts work. It aimed for wage increases but mainly concerned itself with environmental questions (the situation inside the factory, safety at work, relations with superiors). Today, to a "new-style" trade unionism there corresponds (in the most developed areas) a multinational technocratic capitalism, a capitalism we could define as "new-style" which is managed by the State indirectly through financiers doted with a quite peculiar arithmetical logic (for example in questions of profit tax), capable of weaving a thick web of international support. They are fascinated by the possibility of a confederal discourse at a European and international level, and although they are not yet fully aware of the possible power such a discourse could lead to they have nevertheless decided not to let it escape them when it comes about. Just as the technocratic capitalist has an equivalent in the technocratic trades unionist, the big international director has his in a big international trade unionist.
In Italy these two realities co-exist, and here, from the point of view of the unions, lies the problem of the South.
For the South they are asking for:
«The preparation of great infra-structural supports - irrigation, water supply, reinforcement of mountains, main communication lines (roads and ports), preparation of urban planning indispensable for political and industrial take-off:
«The consolidation and qualification of selectively orientated Southern agriculture.
«Industrialisation programs that comply with the economic and social characteristics of the South, to be inserted in an integrated plan of economic and territorial development.
«For this purpose an increase in public expenditure, investment, a policy of incentive and support, academic and professional preparation, and a program for State participation in the development of industry.
«Improvement in the work of the underclass of producers in the South: most of what they do today is humiliating either due to processes or due to unification in the country, or through the use of purely speculative outlets in the South itself.»
For the North they state: «Two essential problems are: the internal configuration of Europe, and its relations with the USA and the USSR.
«The process of European economic integration has been guided by contracting groups; political intervention, when there has been any, has always consisted of a mediation of interests, never any autonomous propositions or any incisive availability of instruments; the union's presence has been of little effect here.
«The race for efficiency has a controlling, authoritarian side to it; the modern techniques of factory programming consider the men who work in the factory to be robots who can be regulated to fixed times and rhythms. International planning projects consider wages to be a fixed price that should be regulated ex ante on the basis of industrial forecasts of productivity levels. The union can-not continue to look on passively in the face of these stabilising tendencies of industrial society.)» (F.LL.TE.A.-C.G.LL.)
Let us look at the (apparently contradictory) question of the behaviour of the various union tendencies.
Let us take the agricultural problem in the South for example. It means nothing to ask for the "consolidation and qualification of Southern agriculture". Basically we have to deal with two kinds of product in agriculture, one of elastic demand, the other rigid. The first are "poor" products, the second rich. The first have certain characteristics: prices tend to decrease and must be supported by the system (basic investments lost by the State) if production per hectare is to be increased. The industries connected with these products (e.g. the mills related to grain production) have almost stable demands. This concerns products that do not require a large work force, so unemployment is endemic in areas where there is this kind of cultivation alone.
The second kind of product, the "wealthy" ones, have diametrically different characteristics. This concerns fruit, vegetables, and citrus fruits. These products require irrigation. The question is that the production of the first kind of product is easier in the backward regions as it requires only very primitive instruments, not much irrigation and little attention. Change can come about - still from the capitalist point of view - through the creation of huge agricultural complexes capable of exploiting the rich products. None of that has been done in Sicily, apart from a few isolated cases to the exclusive benefit of the big magnates or landowners.
To propose such perspectives to the State would be like talking to the skeleton in their cupboard. They are well aware of the deficiencies of the past and the objective impossibility of any development program in the South due to the precise interests of cliques involved in local exploitation who supply large numbers of votes to the parties in power. To do today what has not been done in the past thirty years would require a change in the power structure, management through a different kind of political leadership, and this is what the Italian unions want. They want exploitation of the workers in a different perspective, new forms of economic development and structural transformations at the cost of the latter. And this time they want to hold the reins like their Swedish and German colleagues.
What have been referred to as "coherent industrialisation programs" are so vague as to be useless. The creation of new industrial complexes in the South gives precise results which are very different to those in developed areas when similar complexes are created. The cost of land to be used for factories rises, and there is speculation in the building industry. There is intermittent growth in the latter which contributes nothing to the needs of the working class. The machinery and plants arrive from the North, so there is no acceleration in that sector; the same can be said for durable consumer goods. There is growth in employment in the services sector, State bureaucracy, commerce and building. Only in the last analysis is there any growth in the industrial sector as such (the closure of the old industries and whole industrial sectors having to be compensated first). Not to mention the serious effects of the various environmental problems that would be caused by the insertion of industrial complexes in agricultural regions.
All this is part of the union's management perspective. The fundamental reality of exploitation is not taken into consideration. In the South they find
good game in ex-labourers accustomed to working fourteen hours in the fields, who consider eight hours in the factory a far lighter burden. The union uses this technique in areas rife with hunger and poverty, developing quite a different logic in the more highly developed regions.
The question of technocracy and the multinational fascinates not only trade unionists but also many comrades who end up losing sight of capitalist reality which is, and always will be, contradictory. Theses of capitalist accumulation such as those elaborated by Hilferding become of dubious value in the face of the revolts that are tainting the capitalist logic in the factories, schools and on the land, making medium and long-term forecasts impossible.
In our opinion it is important to see certain characteristics clearly: the technological level of the various industrial sectors, the internal structure of the European countries, the science politics of the militarily strong nations, new developments in energy sources, etc. Other observations emerge: notable discrepancies between the more advanced countries (hence the great number of degrees and amount of Knowhow), which are not only technological but also organisational, between the different companies; differences in the amount of industrial research financed not only by the State but also by industry itself or other bodies (universities etc); contradictions between science politics and financial politics, and so on.
All this implies important changes in the problem of management, a transformation of "the broad economy" for countries at a time such as this in order to come through the crisis. The unions know this very well, and it is in this sense that they are also preparing their structural transformation. Wage levels, conditions inside the factories, contracts, regulation of unemployment, the forms and aims of production in a multinational dimension, are all decisions that will be made by the leadership, or rather by a small number of mobile bureaucrats against whom it will not be easy to fight The workers on the other hand - according to the unions - are mature enough to manage their work and continue production (clearly in a centralised set-up, which would mean the self-management of their own misery) so we must assure them the continuation of work (read exploitation) and assure ourselves survival as an organisation (read recompensed work).
Here is what Charles Levinson, general secretary of the International Chemical Federation writes in the revue "Preuves" (September, 1972): «The unions will be making a mistake if they remain closed within the national framework negotiating in the micro-economic sphere that reflects the economic evolution all over the country. This attitude is unfavourable to the conditions of the workers today; for example, it tends to put wages in the most advanced sectors in line with those in difficulties. Claims should be organised sector by sector and at a multinational level by each company individually.
«On the other hand, in negotiations at national level the unions are at a disadvantage. They know nothing of the real financial situation of companies with world ramifications... It is at the level of the individual plant that the struggle should develop within the single multinational company, with the participation of the whole production unit spread throughout the world. This kind of union action would be more effective than that which spreads throughout the whole of industry but confines itself to the national framework. The big union confederations are often suspicious of such a prospect. But in the long run they will clearly become powerless if they refuse to attack the multinational on its own ground. If, for example, the C.G.T. and the C.F.D.T. carry out an action against the Rhone-Poulenc in France, they can certainly expect to get somewhere. But they are tied to national considerations, and during negotiations they are forced to accept wage levels that exist in the thousands of small, backward factories into account. They cannot obtain the results they would gain from a union action against all the branches of Rhone-Poulenc in one go.
« In this context of coordinating union activity at world level it is necessary to depart from the traditional schema. It is not just a question of organising international strikes. We must act on the sensitive points of the multinational company, reinforcing the movement's pressure points... We are entering a trial period in the attempt to put these structures into effect. In the chemicals industry, for example, we have begun to select the most important multinational companies and have very up-to-date information on them: systematic studies of their financial limitations, their business and production politics, their structure, directorship, links with other companies, personality of directors, etc... This data will be fed into two computers, one in the USA, and another in Germany. Thanks to this we will gradually be able to speak to branch managers as well as to the main company as equals, without them being able to "spin us tales".
It is not a question of unifying world claims yet, but of supporting the union's actions in one country, or part of it. So we must restructure the union movement by creating permanent commissions for each multinational company where the branches in each country, or at least many of them, are represented.»
Another future project, this time at an international level, is a coalition between capital and unions. It remains to be seen how all this will highlight the claim the unions are still making today of being on the workers' side, and whether they will not rather be getting closer to participating in the management of capitalism and consequent exploitation of the working class. How should this new organ which is being proposed - the permanent international company commission - be interpreted? These commissions are aimed to function by working out a plan of action based on collective international conventions with common claims. The next step will be a participation of these organs in company decision-making: a form of co-management from above. The strike, traditional arm in the struggle till now, would lose its importance in such a perspective. The idea of computers opposed to other computers is a sign of the increasingly collaborationist attitude of the unions.
The skill of the union officials lies exactly here: being capable of working in so many different perspectives, insisting on archaic forms of struggle (occupation of the land in Sicily for example) when it suits them because the thrust to rebellion from the base is almost uncontrollable; then passing to wider demands, so wide as to be absurd, in a perspective of comparative development (North-South) that suits both the industrial capitalism of the North and the agricultural version of the South. Finally, their demands become so wide as to reach the management of complex situations such as the multinational.
Let us take a look at the situation in Germany. The law on co-management came into being in 1951. In order to have it approved by the union Confederation (D.G.B.) they had to threaten a general strike (for the first time in history). Let us see what Heinz Zimmermann ("Interrogations") says: often is not difficult to see that egalitarian co-management is a question of bureaucratic apparatus - employers and union - and that the important decisions are made without consulting the wage-earners.
«In the eyes of the union officials co-management means reaching two essential objectives, in our opinion. The first reflects the concept of the whole social democratic party (allied to the unions not at a formal level but due to a symbiosis in personnel and mentality between the two organisations): it concerns reaching a "regulation" of social relations with the aim, says a union official, of attenuating the social injustices resulting from the economic process as far as possible. The second allows for the integration of a whole social class of union "officials" into the economic process. They are becoming part of the economic and social system in order not to leave this area of activity open to the "directors" from the country's managerial class.»
So, elimination of discord and conflict as far as possible, participation in economic management in first person and, finally, integration of the preceding anti-system structure into the system. It would obviously be superfluous to explain that this integration is made possible not because of the union's degeneration, but is due to their essential characteristics which have become more accentuated as capitalism has developed away from its traditional origins.
«Co-management means that the firm must answer not only to the shareholders but to the workers and the nation as a whole. True democracy does not limit itself to the political sectors, but must apply democratic principles to the economy. "Partnership" cannot replace co-management, but real partnership requires co-management. The unions do not want to reduce capital and shareholders' rights. But capital, when it invests in production, cannot decide alone. The work force are more important.» (D.G.B.)
The German unions do not need to produce smokescreens like the French and Italian ones, because they have had this door to power open to them for the last twenty-five years. Today all firms employing more than 2,000 people are co-managed with the unions in Germany. This means great power in decision-making for the organisation.
In France, on the contrary, one can still hear from the C.F.D.T., «The pyramidal concept of power structures, either in the form of workers' councils or democratic centralism, must be refused. Experience shows that this way of managing power based on the rigid and hierarchical conception of the delegate rapidly gives rise to a process of bureaucratisation and technocratisation.» But this is pure rhetoric adapted to the moment, which will shortly be substituted by quite a different form. Just imagine a union openly admitting to the need for bureaucratisation? We must have no illusions. The need to collaborate is essential for the unions: any rupture must be controlled and programmed. The strike must be a precise weapon: the more it threatens to become efficient the more it must be used in small doses. On the contrary, if its efficiency diminishes, it be used widely - as in the case of the postal strike in France which lasted for more than two months without any result at the end of 1974. Here is a passage that is characteristic of this collaboration, published in the review "Syndicalismo" (special "Self-management" n. 1415):
«No matter what the level of democratisation is within the company or the economy as a whole, trade unionism continues to have autonomy in its function as a force of impact to protect the workers against the will of the employers. The union continues to be a school for the formation of militant workers, a place for elaborating social criticism and an agent of transformation to be used and perfected. The autonomy of the union and a recognition of its modes of action including the strike are therefore both a necessity and a fundamental guarantee of self-management.
«The problem of remuneration comes last in industry, along with that of the hierarchy and the distribution of production. That is why, on the other side of the barricade, the bosses managing capital do not work from a humanitarian point of view, (the worker is alienated, we must free him) but from questions related to production (degradation, fatigue, so many working days lost, so much work badly done, so much wastage, lack of re-investment, etc.). These are the elements that the employers use to estimate the problem of the modes of production. Not only do they not give any respite, they also experiment. The first examples took place in the United States and Sweden (Saab and Volvo). Here is what resulted: intelligent work (not sectoralised), less fatigue, less deg-radation, return to a craft kind of industry, disappearance of absenteeism, fewer obligations, better quality work, elimination of non-productive sectors (small bosses and controllers), higher profits, increase in the production of capital.»
Perhaps there will never be enough said about the dangers of this perspective, which is why we consider the study of the problems of self-management to be of great importance. Perhaps we should denounce the theoreticians of the work ideology more vehemently, show up their covert collaboration in capitalist exploitation, demonstrating how even anarchists often fall into this perspective.
Here it is sufficient to see the process of transformation the unions are putting into effect concerning the changes in the economic structure they are operating on. Like every structural transformation in capitalism this is functional to certain requirements and comes to be conditioned by them. It has been the specific illness of a number of revolutionary movements to see interesting perspectives and content in this. And, starting off from syndicalism, they have lost their original libertarian matrix along various roads.
Limitations of revolutionary syndicalism
Around 1880 various currents could be seen in the syndicalist tendencies of more or less anarchist inspiration:
a) an accentuation in authoritarianism (of the Blanquist type) which reached a kind of compromise in the Boulangist experience.
b) a "reformist" tendency led by Brousse which was to decline in importance except in the Book Federation where it is still strong today.
c) the anarcho-syndicalist tendency (the most important) which created the Bourse de Travail.
d) the revolutionary syndicalist tendency which was mixed with the preceding one, perhaps more politicised, violent, aimed at insurrection.
It was Sorel who, perhaps involuntarily, theorised revolutionary syndicalism. The general strike was to be used as a myth to take the place of the myths of Progress, Equality and Freedom: a final perspective that was to coincide with revolution. On the contrary, the limited strike comes to be seen as a "revolutionary exercise". The revolutionary elite were to use this exercise to lead the masses to rebelling against the State, starting off with claims and gradually proceeding to the construction of the new society from the syndicalist model.
Let us begin with the Charter of Amiens, the constant point of reference of revolutionary syndicalism. In 1906 this was voted in with 834 votes in favour, and 8 against. This means that its principles were (and are) so vague as to be voted by revolutionaries and reformists alike. Thus Monatte says: "It was not the expression of a majority but was accepted by the whole movement".
In this paper both the principles of syndicalist apoliticism and the principles of the struggle against the bosses for the abolition of wages were established. «The Congress considers this declaration to be a statement of the struggle that workers are opposing on economic terms against all forms of exploitation and oppression, both material and moral, carried out by the capitalist class against the working class.
«The Congress states its theoretical position in the following points:
«In the daily work of claiming better conditions the union is aiming for a coordination of the work forces, a growth in the wellbeing of the workers by gaining immediate improvements such as reduction in working hours, increase in salary, etc.
«But this necessity is part of the work of syndicalism: it is a preparation for complete emancipation which can only come about through the expropriation of capital. This requires the general strike as a mode of action, and considers that the syndicalist organisation, today in the form of resistance groups, will tomorrow be groups of production and distribution, the basis of future social organisation...
«Consequently, as far as individual members are concerned the congress affirms complete freedom for anyone to participate in whatever kind of struggle corresponds to their philosophical or political ideas, asking them in return not to introduce these opinions into the syndicalist organism.
«The union aims for the complete liberation of the worker through the suppression of the exploitation of man by man, and the abolition of private ownership and the wages system.» (The Charter of Amiens, 1906).
But reality was somewhat different. Here is what Delesalle, a member of the confederal office, declared. «The Charter of Amiens represents the point of view and is the emanation of the confederal office alone. This curiously unites anarcho-syndicalists (Pouget, Griffuelhes) and reformists (Niel), against the Guesdistes.»
«This charter that we hear so much about was at best drawn up on a cafe terrace, without there having been any discussion about it within the syndicalist movement.» (Corale. Capitalisme-Syndicalisme, meme combat).
The essential element in anarchist syndicalism was the concept of direct action, a logical consequence of their being apolitical (in the party sense), and of the spontaneity of syndicalist organisation. The errors are to be found in this final part. The syndicalist organisation cannot base itself on mass spontaneity any more than. a political party can, even if it defines itself "revolutionary". In the same way the syndicalist organisation cannot remain separate from the vicissitudes of party politics and sooner or later ends up feeling their influence. Lastly, in the perspective of the syndicalist structure the problem of direct action is transformed from a means of struggle in the hands of the base to a means of instrumentalising the latter. This was the significance of the Sorellian "myth" of the general strike, an effective transposition of a political concept into the field of the workers' struggle. All that arises out of this field can be produced by the base (direct action, spontaneity, producers' organisations), or by the union (delegates, committees, official requests, bargaining, scattered strikes... up to the general strike). The difference is essential.
The fundamental error of revolutionary syndicalism is clearly visible in the words of Griffuelhes:
«Direct action is a practice that is growing daily. Consequently, at a certain stage in its development it will no longer be possible to call it direct action, it will be a widespread explosion that we will call general strike and which will conclude in social revolution.»
In the same way Aristide Briand:
«...revolution? ...alternative? ...analogy? The tendency is to identify the general strike with revolution. That is the myth of peaceful, instantaneous subversion realised through the universal, simultaneous suspension of work.»
In 1888 at the Congress of Bouscat various decisions were made concerning the strike and the passage from general strike to revolution:
«The limited strike can only be a means of local agitation and organisation. Only the general strike, that is the complete stoppage of every type of work, or the revolution, can take the workers to their emancipation.»
The passage from these old formulae to successive arguments is clear. No longer alternative, but analogy; violent rupture (in the case of the anarchists such as Griffuelhes) or peaceful passage (the reformists such as Briand), nothing changes.
In this perspective syndicalism becomes an end in itself. Many anarchist militants, capable like Pouget of making a precise distinction between anarchism and syndicalism, are no longer able to some years later when they become merely syndicalists, without either knowing or desiring it.
In our opinion anarchists must recognise that it is not necessary to call for the destruction of the trade union or syndicalist organisation, but this should not lead them to the - excessively facile - conclusion that they can work within the latter to prepare comrades for the revolution. The qualitative leap is radical and leaves no room for quantitative gradations.
In this sense the Malatesta who has lived through the experience of fascism and the unions' incapacity to confront it is better orientated:
«The union is reformist by nature... The union can emerge with a social, revolutionary or anarchist program, and that is what usually happens. But loyalty to this program only lasts as long as it is weak and impotent, a mere propaganda group. The more it attracts workers and strengthens them, the less it is able to keep to the initial program which becomes nothing but an empty formula.» (1925)
«It would be a great and fatal illusion to believe, as many do, that the workers' movement can and must in itself, by its very nature, lead to revolution. Hence the impelling need for really anarchist organisations to fight inside as well as outside the unions for the total realisation of anarchism, seeking to sterilise all the germs of degeneration and reaction.» (1927)
As we have already said, we consider it a mistake to speak of a degeneration in syndicalism. Often the criticisms of old militants contain this aspect: they remember better times when production relations gave space to revolutionary discussions within the syndicalist structure, and compare them to the present where the nature of economic power has become rationalised, putting this down to a decadence in syndicalism.
«The C.G.T. has sunk beneath reformism, it has become a cog in the wheels of the government and turned its back on the revolution. Each time workers look at the men who incarnate the capitalist regime they see their own leaders alongside them.
«What is essential for us in the Charter of Amiens is our concept of syndicalism: the great artisan of the revolution capable of doing everything and, if possible, of organising everything on the morrow of the revolution.»(Monatte)
The critique is developed but the illusion persists. It is the same as the argument that the "reformists" of the French anarchist federation are proposing today.
«For we anarchists it is not a question of compromise or political manoeuvres, or even positions to be gained. The syndicalists of the anarchist federation must simply say, even if they are the only ones to say it (and perhaps it is preferable that they be the only ones), that syndicalism is moving in a dangerous direction and that, basing themselves on the principles, history and contenporary economic evolution of the two great tendencies that exist in the labour movement today they are in favour of the revolutionary one which, as the Charter of Amiens states, aims for "the suppression of the wages system".»(M. Joyeux)
In our opinion the only way to form effective militant revolutionaries is to build methods of struggle which can develop actively starting from the base of the workers. This also means showing up the difficulties, approximations, and principally the objective limitations that "anarchist" activity meets within syndicalist organisations. It is not true that syndicalism is the great popular university that leads workers to understanding their problems or, if that is no longer the case, that all efforts should be made to make it so. This is an old illusion which may have contained a grain of truth in the past but which is quite useless as far as the problems of today are concerned.
At an operational level the reformist and revolutionary syndicalist ideologies are one and the same. They both struggle for the preservation of the syndicalist structure before anything else. In the case of the contrary the problem would not even exist. The reformists struggle for limited gains (wages and regulations) because that should lead to a progressive socialisation of the means of production, up to their complete socialisation in peaceful co-existence. The revolutionaries struggle for limited gains (wages and regulations) because this becomes a school for the revolution and because the strike is a preparation (a training) for the general suspension of work that is identified with revolution. In reality, both are struggling for limited demands and are doing so in a very precise, more or less pyramidal organisation which has its own rules, the essential one of which being its own survival as an organisation.
«The working class must look beyond capitalism, as syndicalism is quite confined to within the limits of the capitalist system.» (Pannekoek)
We shall see what this "looking beyond" consists of later. It is important to note here that the theoretician of workers' councils saw the intrinsically reformist nature of the syndicalist organisation clearly and had no illusions about revolutionary potential or any other such claims.
«Instead of leaders or all-knowing cadres we propose the concept of "political animators" capable of proposing initiatives to stimulate the development of the individual and to help coordinate these initiatives, thus putting hitherto unsuspected forces into motion».(Ouvriers face aux appareils)
But this does not emerge from the union or syndicalist organisation. This political figure is very different to that of the union agitator, now a privileged delegate or salaried bureaucrat. The change in the human or social figure is accompanied by changes in the results of the action they accomplish within the labour movement. Obviously this activist must work in the direction of the workers' needs. They cannot set themselves up as a self-determining activity, creating problems that do not exist or magnifying existing ones for the sole end of perpetrating themselves. Moreover, it is the dynamic of direct action that moves the workers' reality move in a direction that is different to the one "consecrated" by the union.
«I am an anarchist before anything else, then a syndicalist, but I think that many are syndicalists first, then anarchists. There is a great difference... The cult of syndicalism is as harmful as that of the State: it exists and threatens to grow each day. It really seems that men cannot live without divinity: no sooner do they destroy one than another comes forth.» (E Domela Nieuwenhuis)
Limitations of anarcho-syndicalism
The same argument, with specific elements, applies to anarcho-syndicalism. Here we have an anarchist solution to syndicalism, the solution that took root in the International Workingmen's Association according to the principles of Bakunin, but which still has defects that are intrinsic to all. trade union and syndicalist organisations, be they revolutionary syndicalist, authoritarian communist or the reformist ones of social democracy. Anarcho-syndicalism. if not kept within the limits of "means" as Malatesta appropriately pointed out, runs the risk (as syndicalism, not anarchism) of evolving either towards revisionism (see Sweden), or authoritarianism (see Spain).
But let us try to clarify this problem before we run into serious misunderstandings. Anarcho-syndicalism knows perfectly well that the revolution can only be brought about by the working masses organised in their economic structures to prepare the society of the future. This can only come about if these organisations are separate from the political parties, indeed «if they are not only aparliamentary, but principally anti-parliamentary» (Lehning)
«Whoever is against both private and State capitalism must oppose this with another kind of social reality and other kinds of economic organisation. And this can only be done by the producers grouped together in organisations in the workshop, industry, etc. They must organise in such a way as to own the means of production and organise the whole of economic life on an associative basis.» (Lehning)
But these producers' organisations must be in the hands of the producers themselves and organised so that their actions, which they have chosen and determined themselves, cannot be impeded. If we look carefully we will see that this cannot happen in syndicalism, even anarcho-syndicalism. It cannot happen in the so-called "degenerations" of the Swedish or (within certain lim-its) Spanish kind. It cannot happen because it is not the workers themselves who decide what their objective interests are, but the syndicalist leadership who, as we shall see, cxist and have the capacity to select aims and interests, even in anarcha-syndicalism.
We must not forget that syndicalism is a producers' organism therefore of a high economic index, but it is also an organism managed by men who are highly politicised even if only at a personal level. In the case of an anarcho-syndicaiist organisation these men would be anarchists, so would refuse their rights as syndical "leaders". Very well, in that case the organisation would either split up or die, to reappear in a series of initiatives directed by the base without necessarily having any centralised line apart from their common economic and revolutionary interests. But in that case we would no longer be within the concept of anarcho-syndicalism. The latter foresees the structure's existence independently of the economic perspective. It is aimed at defending the workers' interests (economic and non-economic) but above all it exists and is more significant the bigger it is and the more members it has. The same should be said of the men and women who work within the anarcho-syndicalist structure. Their ideas do not come from the economic and historically determined interests of the members or the whole of the working class, but exist in their own right and are in a sense much wider. They go as far as to outline a complete vision of the world (an anarchist or libertarian one) which will necessarily influence the choice of work to be done in particular questions, or political or economic alternatives, in no small way.
Let us imagine that the question of a factory occupation is being discussed. The workers' immediate interest - at least in a dimension such as that which we are living in in Italy today - is the continuation of their wages, a limited interest which in no way puts the work ethic in question. The syndicalist comrades might have their own very precise ideas about what selfmanagement of the factory should mean within the perspective of capitalist administration. That is to say it could be that they want to "demonstrate" something more, something of perhaps greater political value than the mere continuation of wages for a restricted number of people but still something which never goes "beyond" certain objective and contingent interests in our opinion. Of course, this some-thing could contribute to expanding the movement as a whole, but it must not become an alibi for smuggling the leadership's decisions beyond the shaky border of the workers' interests. In short, bearing in mind that only a restricted number of comrades have clear ideas on problems that go beyond the immediate area of the economic sector (which often require laborious analyses) and bearing in mind that these comrades (in the best of faith as anarchists and individuals) cannot but fight for the triumph of their ideas, we are certain that when this happens within a syndicalist structure it inevitably opens up the way to compromise or authoritarianism.
In the case where no structure exists, where the more prepared comrades speak in the name of a group of producers with precise interests and means of obtaining them by coordinated actions supported by the intervention of comrades from outside, anything can happen. The discourse can widen beyond measure, become social and political and draw in a total vision of the world just the same. Here no one will speak in the name of an organisation which would have to live and defend itself as such.
Let us take a look at Swedish anarcho-syndicalist revisionism. Sweden, like other Scandinavian countries (Norway, Denmark and Holland), is a State where an ideology of "guaranteed wellbeing" exists at a superficial level. There is social tutelage by the State. Something similar exists in an even more rational form in New Zealand and Australia. The anarcho-syndicalist organisation S.A.C. (Sveriges Arbetaren Centralorganisation) is quite well-spread and representative. Let us see how this change of syndicalist tactics in the direction of the stalest revisionism is justified.
«The population are aware of having created a particular situation because security from birth to death has prevented them from listening to the prophets of revolution who impart the idea of fighting on the barricades and the total destruction of the existing social system.
«The anarcho-syndicalists have lived their experiences and drawn conclusions which we consider valid only in situations such as Sweden. If the S.A.C. has abandoned insurrectional propaganda and no longer wants to conduct agitation aimed at the destruction of all the other social forces, they have done so because it is impossible to proceed any other way in this country The population think along peaceful lines and if we were to try to lead them to revolutionary action we would make ourselves ridiculous and provoke general ill-feeling. If we were to propose violent action in a peaceful society we would become the equivalent of bulls in a china shop.» (E. Arvidsson)
End of transmission! There are no alternatives. Meanwhile the base of the Swedish workers are seeking a new road aimed at the destruction of work, demanding completely free time and the destruction of a State which imposes collective wellbeing by obliging people to continue in a given way and prevents them from choosing what they want to do. While the base of the workers, in complete darkness in an anguish even more terrible than that of poverty (let us not forget the suicides and other phenomena), are looking for new methods fitting to the power structure they have to fight, the obtuse anarcho-syndicalist leaders are still talking in terms of insurrection as "bulls in a china shop".
The situation is clear: in the presence of a structure a fracture often (let us say always) appears between the workers' economic interests (which the latter are quite distinctly aware of), and the view of the workers' managers or syndicalist representatives with their own perspectives which are often not only deformed and objectively dangerous for the workers but are also ridiculously behind the times.
Let us look at the classical case of anarcho-syndicalism in Spain. Anarchists in government. The C.N.T. has four ministers out of the fifteen who make up the government. Here is what "Solidaridad Obrera" wrote in 1936:
«The entry of the C.N.T into the government of Madrid is one of the most important facts of the political history of our country. The C.N.T. has always on principal and by conviction been anti-State and the enemy of every form of government. But circumstances, nearly always superior to the human will although determined by it, have transformed the nature of government and the Spanish State. At the present time the government as a regular instrument of the State is no longer an oppressive force against the working class.»
Poor Bakunin (which is nothing), and poor working class (which is serious). These anarchists who try to hide their own personal incapacity to act behind the apparent "realism" of the anarcho-syndicalist banner can never meditate enough on this passage. With these lines not only anarchist anti-Statism, but also voluntarism, bitterly reduced to the simple jargon of a not very bright penny-a-liner, fell in Spain.
«All the most prominent men of the syndicalist and anarchist groups were present... We have joined the government, but the streets have escaped us-... .» (Federica Montseny)
«I want to point to a curious fact: the fiasco of the summit, of the directing minority, the leaders. I am not just talking about the socialist and communist politicians. I am also talking about well known anarchist militants, those who in everyday words we could call leaders.» (G. Leval)
«The truth is that the base was not consulted, only a few of the best known elements of the C.N.T. and the F.A.I. were present at meetings. That was a further swindle.» (Los Amigos de Durruti) in "Le Combat Socialist'", 1971)
The leaders on one side and the masses on the other. The result: the latter take on the great collectivist and communitarian constructions, resolve economic problems of considerable importance, fight in the streets against the fascists and against the no less dangerous "red fascists"; the leaders keep themselves apart, either in government or totally incapable of doing anything.
Certainly Leval cannot be accused of being against syndicalist organisation, either in general or in the particular case of the C.N.T., yet let us see what he writes:
«Spanish anarchism had many "leaders" who did not take on any role. They were absorbed by the official posts they had taken up from the start... That prevented them from continuing with their task as leaders. They remained outside this great undertaking of reconstruction where the proletariat were to learn precious lessons for the future... Various intellectuals on the margins of official tasks were far from the radical transformation of society.» (Leval)
As we can see Leval does not dispute the presence of a syndicalist "leader", and perhaps even less that of the political one, but he cannot but note, honest observer that he is, that events went in such a way that the masses managed themselves on the one side, the leaders on the other.
The consequences did not take long to make themselves felt. So began the contrasts, the fights, the emargination and also the repression. All over Spain numerous anarchist groups (and also those who were not declaredly anarchist, but were influenced by the latter) were for direct action, egalitarianism and the immediate organisation of the new society, so a form of struggle developed between the C.N.T and the F.A.I. on the one hand and these other groups on the other.
In March 1937 incidents broke out in Vilanese, near Valence, because of a government decree voted in by anarchist minister Lopez which was harmful to the local collectives (which had been formed by the C.N.T. and the socialist U.G.T).
In May 1937 a clash between anarchists and the C.P in Barcelona led to a series of fights which lasted over a week and extended to a number of neighbouring towns. Alongside the anarchists of the Los Amigos de Durruti groups were the groups of the P.O.U.M. (dissident communists) and the Libertarian Youth. Condemned by the C.N.T, Los Amigos de Durruti were obliged to suspend the fighting. The C.P. immediately sent out an armed column and began the repression, killing numerous comrades. The newspaper "Los Amigos de Durruti" went clandestine.
When Lister's communist division began the systematic destruction of the Aragon collective in 1937, comrades wanted to organise the resistance but were prevented by a precise order from the C.N.T. The newspaper "Espagne Nouvelle", printed clandestinely in France because it was forbidden in Spain, reads, «We should have defended our Councils with arms in spite of the defeatest attitude of the C.N.T.» (29th October 1937)
The comrades of the Corale group write: «It goes without saying that in 1936 anarcho-syndicalism in Spain found itself confronted with the same phenomenon that occured in France in 1906: the integration of the movement because of its acceptation of the claims of bourgeois society. When necessary the republican bourgeoisie accept the collectivisation of heavy industry in order to control it later as a war industry. In Catalonia, where jurisdiction was different to the rest of Spain, collectivisation was promulgated in October 1936 for the whole of industry. The collectives were only tolerated in the services sector and agriculture. Instead of bearing in mind the historic lessons of Spartakist and double-faced bourgeois power in Germany in 1919 and the Makhnovists and communists in the Ukraine in 1919, they crushed the revolutionaries, thereby eliminating the workers' conquests: the anarco-syndicalists, with the masses at their disposition, took political power for themselves.» ("Corale")
There are not many analyses of this. Sometimes particular questions are gone into (for example the military problem) and others are forgotten. Often a summary balance sheet is drawn up and the positive phenomena are brought to light while, perhaps for love of country; the negative ones are kept quiet. We think it is time, limiting ourselves to the problem of syndicalism, to put some of the negative aspects of the structure into relief.
«Fascism in the broad sense of the word does not consist of the symbols or types of regime we define as such... it is authority in all its various forms and manifestations that gives rise to fascism.
«We have built an army identical to that of the State and the classical organs of repression. As before, the police are acting against the workers who are trying to do something socially useful. The people's militias have disappeared. In a word: the Social Revolution has been strangled". (Colonna di Ferro, in "Linea de Fuego").
The conditions for military defeat were now firmly established. To this was added the defeat of morals and principles, essentially the defeat of a foreign body in the form of a directing mentality that had infiltrated the anarchist syndicalist organisation thanks to the particular composition of these organisations.
Syndicalism and the pre-revolutionary phase
Everything we have said up till now on the problem of syndicalism becomes particularly important in the pre-revolutionary phase. When the conditions for a radical transformation are ripe the masses find themselves faced with very complex problems, and the traditional workers' organisations are called upon to respond to the historical moment.
Here the discourse could be extended to the specifically political organisations such as the parties, which present similar problems, but we prefer to concern ourselves with syndicalist organisations alone for the sake of simplicity.
The Russian revolution developed on the basis of the Soviets. There is nothing to do with syndicalism in the idea of these base structures.
«The idea of the soviet is an exact expression of what we mean by social revolution; this corresponds to the constructive part of socialism. The idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat is of bourgeois origin and has nothing at all to do with socialism.» (R. Rocker)
The degenerative process they underwent is too well known to require mention here. What is important is that the role of the masses was decisive, and that that of the syndicalist organisations was not at the same level. It could be argued that this was due to an inadequate development of the instrument, or to unsuitable economic conditions, but that does not solve the problem. It was the masses who were ready for revolution and the consequent necessities. What the workers' organisations (in the first place the parties) did was to follow the evolution of the situation. Lenin's speech on his arrival at St Petersbourg is a clear example of this "readiness".
«there was not a revolution in Hungary in the true sense of the word. The State fell into the hands of the proletariat in the space of a night so to speak.» (Varga)
This explains why the Hungary of the councils saw private property pass directly from the capitalists into the hands of the State without any attempts at workers' self-management. Varga continues: «It is sufficient to give the workers the impression that they have production at their disposition and are in control of it; in truth that means little because it is we who have central control, and the net returns are determined by the prices politic.»
If the revolution was strangled in Russia, in Hungary (of the councils) it never took place.
It was different in Germany. The sailors rebelled when faced with the prospect of another futile massacre in the movement of 1918. They came ashore at Hamburg waving the red flag. Millions of workers united with them and in a few days the whole qf Germany was a network of workers' and peasants' councils. The parties and unions tried to attack this spontaneous movement and that explains why it did not progress. Exhausted by the struggle against the counter-revolution the proletariat had to surrender, thus determining the failure of the revolution itself. Similar phenomena have occurred in Italy and Spain and wherever tension between the leaders and the revolutionary mass has developed in the name of reformist farsightedness.
What we consider fundamental in the pre-revolutionary phase is the organisation of the base of the workers independently of any kind of political or syndicalist structure. The former would transfer precise class interests to a level so wide as to nullify them completely, the second would tie them to a progressive claiming of better conditions that would prevent the possibility of a radical vision of the revolution, or at least be incapable of putting it into practice.
We must understand that the labour movement in its traditional guise is a movement of workers and their leaders whose only interest is to insert themselves within the logic of capital in order to come off as well as possible. It is time we stopped creating illusions on this subject. The pre-revolutionary phase gives rise to specific situations which implicate subjective and objective maturation, but which cannot avoid what is the case: the syndicalist movement is not a revolutionary movement. When the instruments of this movement'are used, (or are claimed to be used) in a revolutionary sense, it means violation by a minority. The results are usually worse than the evil they mean to exorcise.
The atmosphere of the trades unions is permeated with a spirit of class collaboration, a corporate vision of the economy uniting bourgeoisie and proletariat with the intention of assuring the maximum wellbeing for the workers.
Capitalism has come through crises in production in the past, has matured in the modern democratic school, become agile and its own master and is animated by a strong spirit of transformation and innovation. It is incapable of conceiving nationalistic rubbish and such like, being in the course of rising to international requirements through the abandoning of the old entreprenerial class. Old-style capitalism has given way to a new managerial version. It is perfectly well aware that its best friend and ally is the trade union. By substituting the myth of the businessman with that of the technocrat the great familiarity that exists between union leader and factory manager, their common aims, the parallel direction of their efforts and the similarity of their education becomes evident. The old union representative with the callused hands he was capable of shaking violently at the boss has been replaced by the intellectual who has come through university with clean hands and a white collar. He can meet the other intellectual, who has come through the same university and taken the place of the factory boss, on equal terms. If capitalism is in the process of escaping from the hands of the old lions, trade unionism has been free of the old union leaders for some time. It has met with the requirements of the future intelligently and earlier than expected. We firmly believe that even at the time when the old union representative scared the boss with his daring, the seeds of the present situation already existed just as the seeds of the managerial evolution of capitalism existed in the old entreprenerial capitalism. Degeneration in the social body is never a "new" event as anarchism has always taught, but is always an evolution, a modification of the situation that already existed. And it is the way means are used that conditions the ends achieved. Here again the use of means such as claiming better conditions or attempts by a minority to build a monolithic structure just like the one it is opposing, have contributed to the present incapacity to see the aims of the proletariat clearly.
Of course, the reader could easily object that this is not the perspective of anarcho-syndicalism. But it is one thing to talk about death, another to die. It is one thing to build beautiful social fantasies, another to come into contact with reality. It is one thing to want to save anarchist principles even within the syndicalist organisation, another to try to make them enter the partial claims that syndicalism, knowingly or unknowingly, is tied to, by force. And there is no point in insisting upon direct action here. When a struggle organisation really does build itself an direct action, either it is not a syndicalist one (in that it lacks the structure based on territory, representation, assistance and ideology typical of the syndicalist organisation, which would reduce the question to semantics), or it is simply a travesty of direct action, i.e. actions which apparently use methods typical of direct action but which do not contain the basic element of autonomy of the base.
Let us take a radical example, that of sabotage. The worker attacks the structure of exploitation with the tools of his work (his very strength of resistance, that is) thereby destroying both the ideology of work (fruit of the regime's servants) and the production output of the class that is oppressing him. Let us imagine that this method of struggle is applied in the railway, for example. We can foresee two possibilities:
1) The union, secretly using means that it does not possess at the moment but which it could develop to this end, gives the order to sabotage all the locomotives in the railways' possession. For their part the workers, obeying union directives, put all or some of the locomotives in question out of use. In this way strong union pressure is put on the counterpart (in this case the State, but the argument would not change much if it were taken into the private sector), which accepts the demands made.
2) Workers organise at the base discussing, even in isolated groups, the possibility of struggle against capitalist exploitation and union collaboration. They decide to sabotage (still in the case of the railways) some of the locomotives, even in one single area. The other workers (hence the hypothesis of the action spreading to other sectors) realise the validity of such actions and, guaranteeing themselves with a clandestine action or whatever other instrument they may decide upon according to the place and the needs of the moment, they extend their initiative. Propositions can be made to the counterpart, but not necessarily.
The first case is not direct action. The use of sabotage is put into effect by the union organisation on the leaders' decision in view of a claim. In practice the use of such an instrument might become probable in the case of a revolutionary evolution of the unions, but always an evolution in the authoritarian sense. In the best possible case the result would be a Blanquist attempt at revo-lution with all the consequences that would ensue. Even if it were libertarian syndicalists to put such an action into effect, anarcho-syndicalists capable of silencing any tendency to authoritarianism determined by the structure of the organisation, the revolutionary tension would be something that was being imposed on the mass. Any decision to act, given the objective conditions, would not find fertile ground upon which to develop. For the sake of argument, take the case of a truly unique phenomenon such as finding syndicalist leaders of such dispassionate mental frankness and proved anarchist faith as to feel no particular attachment to their own tasks and position, the separation between these "angels" and the working masses, at times unable to understand even an angel's message, would become evident.
This would be a case of direct action. If the anarcho-syndicalist angel really is such, he will immediately abandon his own position to join the others in the concrete, specific task that began in one place and could spread to others. Of course the worker might never find the solution to the problem of the direct organisation of struggle on his own, and in the specific case he might not find the "moral" solution (not the technical one because he knows that a lot better than all the syndicalists and revolutionaries put together) of sabotaging a locomotive, and it is in this sense that the work of the revolutionary stands and is justifiable. But the worker will certainly never need someone to organise him in unions, parties, sects or anything else of the kind in order to bring about his liberation.
Events have always shown how workers need these analyses as they often want clarification concerning objectives to be reached and the means to defend themselves against the bosses and their "counsellors". And not knowing where to turn they themselves often seek a leader or party for advice and guidance, when not the return to power of the old exploiting set-up itself. The slave who has lived all his life in chains might well believe he has done so because of the latter rather than in spite of them and attack whoever tries to break them off. But this is part of the indispensable work that needs to be done now. It is not an insurmountable obstacle that leads to the inevitability of direction and command.
In the pre-revolutionary phase it must be recognised by the workers that the union is a collaborator of the employers, an intermediary that guarantees to gain certain limited rights but also fights in order continue the conditions that allow this struggle to take place. In the case of the contrary, it would be a question of an intermediary struggling for its own elimination.
Syndicalist organisations after the revolution
The ultimate proof of the limitations of the syndicalist organisation and its essential danger can be seen in the effects of its presence in the immediately post-revolutionary phase.
If the revolutionary event is steered by a party or realised by the military action of a minority capable of drawing in the mass but which stifles all their spontaneous activity, the action of the syndicalist organisation does no more than consign everything into the hands of the revolutionary party, thereby handing the workers over to the exploiting class.
If the revolution is eminently a bureaucratic event, a State crisis as in the Hungary of the councils, the syndicalist organisations become the State in first person. They guarantee the safe passage of production into the hands of the State, taking care to dampen any original, spontaneous attempts by the mass towards their ultimate liberation.
If the workers take the initiative spontaneously as they did in Russia, Germany and Italy, and form their own base organisations - their councils - and declare war on the structures of exploitation, the syndicalist bodies pass over on to the side of the State and try to negotiate (causing as little damage as possible) the passage to the subsequent phase of normalisation and centralisation. In the phase of centralisation such as that which took place in Russia at the time of the Stalinist debut, the unions lost ground before the party.
Some will say: but these are communist and social democratic unions, not anarchist ones; it would be impossible for anarchist comrades to behave that way. And we agree. It isn't possible... but it happens. It is impossible for anarchist comrades to join the government, for anarcho-syndicalists to propose becoming a part of the government, but it happens. It is impossible for anarchist newspapers to be forbidden by anarchist organisations, but it happens. It is not anarchism that makes men, but men who make anarchism.
In the case of anarcho-syndicalist organisations the most logical thing would be for them to disband in order to avoid falling into a narrow trade unionist logic, and if this were to happen our analysis would be pointless.
But it is possible for this to happen before the revolution, not just after it. On the other hand, if they continue the most logical thing for them to do will be to act like all the syndicalist organisations of this world, and the anarchist comrades who remain in them will be forced to make mortal ideological jumps to try to bring the devil and saints together.
It is certainly not possible to forecast what state the economy will be in after the revolution. Events of immense importance come into force at the moment of the decisive crisis. Events of lesser importance, but nevertheless determining ones, remain within the whole system making any analytical attempts other than those of great approximation impossible. It is not possible to draw up a detailed program but a few things can be seen clearly. The presence of State control is negative. It cannot avoid determining social conditions because it sets up the economy in a planned way. The post-revolutionary economy, on the other hand, must be a natural economy where production and distribution are assured through horizontal agreements between producers who are also consumers.
It is easy to see how the syndicalist bodies could play a very serious role once the productive phase of a post-revolutionary economy is in act. They could continue to be intermediaries with centralised power, and where this does not exist they could invent it in order to continue to develop their eternal function of transmission. The objectively counter-revolutionary role they play under a regime of capitalist economy would evolve into an active counter-revolutionary one in a communist regime.
Some comrades draw the conclusion that the syndicalist body or union should be considered a "public service": «Actually only a small part of the proletariat become conscious of the cycle "produce, consume, be alienated" imposed by capitalism, but this small part is recuperated by capitalism (with the help of the unions). This has been reconsidered by certain young people, drop-outs, communes, etc., as well as various other strata
«We cannot destroy the union, but we do not want to work within it. Rather than try to transform an organisation which has never (or hardly ever) been revolutionary, into one that is, we can only hope that the exploited will themselves work to "disorganise" the unions, then try to create an instrument fit for the task of the revolution.» ("Corale").
Conclusion
We do not agree with the Corale comrades completely. A project to disorganise the unions would require a destructive logic that is incompatible with that of the latter's perspective of minor interests and needs. It would be dispersive to put energy (which we do not possess) into such a perspective, and not the right way to look at the problem of worker organisation. Quicker and better results would be obtained by making a radical critique of the unions and extending it equally to revolutionary and anarcho-syndicalism. Workers will become more aware of the union's limitations if they are presented with a possible alternative: that of leaving this public service to its own fate and preparing to create small autonomous base organisations dedicated to the radical struggle against the present structures of production.
These groups should assume the form of production nuclei. There is no alternative to this. The worker is part of the machinery and the factory. Capitalist exploitation continues to brutally condemn him to the almost total alienation of his personality, still today in the era of advanced technology. Once outside the factory the worker is a poor tired man who can only go to bed, make love and fall asleep. His fighting potential is drained out of him. To drag him out into revolutionary "broods" would be a psychological as well as tactical error. Only a small highly sensitised minority are able to do this, and always with great limitations. That is why any organisations, even the so-called anarchist ones, that set off from a fixed point to determine a line of action has all their cards set for a speedy degeneration.
Given that the real place of revolution is the factory, the land, the school, the housing estate, etc., the general and particular conditions of exploitation must be identified at these levels of experience. All this requires periodical analyses of the relations concerning the living areas, those between different regions, within whole areas (the State) or between different States, and many other problems besides. But this alone will not lead to the workers to create alternative forms of organisation.
The worker must recognise not that this is a "revolutionary" necessity but that it is a natural one, one tied to his very possibility of survival, obliging him to work harder and even suffer a little more in order to be better off later on, not only himself but everyone else as well. The revolutionary discourse hardly ever touches the worker directly. That is why the unions are so successful: they reach the worker in his immediate interests, and above all in what concerns him most, his work. The worker is attached to the union dimension not so much because it gives him a certain amount of security within the factory, but because his union assembles all the workers of his sector, people with problems similar to his own with whom he can talk competently and among whom he can feel competent. This is not corporate pettiness but a direct consequence of the division of labour which cannot be abolished in a day. To snatch him from his environment and force him to listen to vague arguments that go on for hours and hours with people using an incomprehensible language, almost inevitably ends up making him refuse any opening towards what is new and different and prefer the noise of the workshop or the uproar of the children at home.
The worker must live revolution through the reality of the economy. The difference between a trade union or syndicalist organisation and autonomous groups at the level of the base can only be understood at the concrete level of economic relations, not through the filter of an ideological interpretation. In this sense there is an element of guarantee in the above suggestion that one should work to cut the worker off from his union, or to disorganise it, but to make him see the limits of all unions and their essence as a public service.
The economic situation could be organised without any oppressive structure controlling or directing it or deciding on the aims to be attained. This the worker understands very well. He knows exactly how the factory is structured and that, this barrier overcome, he would be able to work the economy in his own interest. He knows perfectly well that the collapse of this obstacle would mean the transformation of relationships both inside and outside the factory, the school, the land, and the whole of society. For the worker the concept of proletarian management is above all that of the management of production. Capitalist or State management on the contrary means the exploitation of production on behalf of someone else, on behalf of small groups of capitalists, party bureaucrats or managers. It is therefore control over the product which is lacking in this perspective, and with it decisions on lines of production, choices to be made, etc. Distribution is also linked to production. The worker knows it would be possible to establish a simple relationship between one's personal contribution to production and the product obtained, establish agreements between sec-tors correlating the workshops producing the same things. He also knows that this relationship could give him the right to the distribution of the products obtained. This reasoning is technically complex, but it is one which is alive in the workers' imagination. What is required is to explain to him the way this mechanism could be brought about in a communist economy, how he can come into possession of as many products as are his "real" needs and how he can participate in "useful" production according to his own potential.
In this perspective the question of an alternative form of organisation to the union or syndicalist structure becomes quite simple. In fact it is impossible to conceive of a program of direct struggle in terms of contact between the workshop and the various sectors including the conquest of technical information and the exchange and improvement of this information, except from within a dimension of workers organised autonomously at the base. To filter all this through the union, no matter how pure it had become, would result in the base receiving deformed information quite unsuitable to the aims to be achieved.
The primary necessity today is direct struggle organised by the base; small groups of workers who attack the centres of production. This would be an exercise in cohesion for further developments in the struggle which could come about following the obtaining of increasingly detailed information and the decision to pass to the final expropriation of capital, i.e. to the revolution. It would be the worker who established the terms of the relationship between labour and the product. This done he would have no other solution than to ignore any kind of organisation that asserts capitalist or any other kind of power and proceed to the construction of production nuclei, possibly making them last through the whole period of the struggle, to the final elimination of exploitation.
To put it more simply, given that the relationship between producer and product is the basis of the revolutionary project, it is clear that this must be egalitarian (to each according to his needs, from each according to his capabilities), managed by the base, and be simple and elementary (abolition of the market mechanism which not only increases needs artificially, but also the financial aspect of production).
To fight for an autonomous organisation of the struggle means to fight for the autonomous organisation of production at the same time. It is not possible to make a quantitative difference. In a sense, even a distinction in time phases is impossible. When workers organise their own autonomous production nuclei they are taking road that is quite different to that of the syndicalist organisation or the party. In so doing they have already taken a decisive step towards managing not only the struggle in the sense of the choice of instruments to be used, but also in the choice of aims to be reached, and not only the aims of the struggle, but also those of production.
During the revolutionary event the presence of a strong syndicalist organisation or party in the traditional sense has the immediate consequence of the proletariat being declared immature, and the conclusion that someone - syndicalist or party leaders - must decide for them. A structure for intervention is imposed on the base. Syndicalist or party meetings are always led by the same bureaucrats and specialists. Everything ends up passing over the heads of the workers. Any anarchist comrades who might eventually object to this should remember what happened in Spain at the time of the decision to enter the government, or of the struggle for the collectives.
The main operative elements of the base nuclei should therefore be:
1) The struggle. This is where the class spirit is born and developed. Here the real intentions of the parties and unions are also clarified. Methods of direct action are developed: sabotage, absenteeism, attempts at self-management, destruction of work, etc.
2) Organisation. This grows from the need for confrontation and verification. It differs greatly according to time and place, but is substantially unified on the basis of common interests in the production process. Nuclei grow up, each one on a different social, economic and political grounding, but all within the limits circumscribed by the reality of production. This is the essence of organisation which gives the possibility of a constant reference to something unitary.
3) Information. This must be gained through a gradual reversal of the relations of production, modifications in the division of labour and sabotage of production, with analyses of effects and limits. The gaining of information thus becomes the awakening of a political consciousness within the concrete dimension of the economy and production.
But these problems go beyond our task here and require far deeper analysis. It is to this that we recommend the reader.
ABBREVIATIONS
C.G.I.L.: Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro (General Italian Workers' Federation), left wing union, dominated by the Communist Party, with a Socialist minority.
C.I.S.L.: Confederation Italiana Sindacati Lavoratori (Italian Confederation of Workers' Trades Unions), dominated by the Democrazia Cristiana.
U.I.L.: Unione Italiana Lavoratore (Italian Workers' Union), smallest of the three largest federations, dominated by the Socialists.
C.I.S.N.A.L.: 4th confederation after the C.G.I.L., C.I.S.L. and the U.I.L. Has a publicly acclaimed affinity with the neo-fascist National right wing party, the M.S.I.
C.G.T.: Confederation Generale du Travail (General Confederation of Work), France, adherents from a broad and in some cases non-political spectrum, but in the hands of a Stalinist leadership.
D.G.B.: Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund (Confederation of German Trade Unions), grouping 16 federations. Adhesion to the union is organised according to factory as opposed to skill exercised within it. Sympathy with Christian Democrats, but call for apolitical unity.
S.A.C.: Sveriges Arbetares Centralorganisation (Swedish anarchist revolutionary tendency). Union formed in 1910.

A few notes on Sacco and Vanzetti

2010-07-23T01:49:00.000-07:00

Original title: Noterelle su Sacco e Vanzetti. In margine a un Convegno di studi. "Anarchismo" n. 63, July 1989, pp. 36-40
Published in english in Revolutionary Solidarity, Elephant Editions, 1994

Of course we are far from the times and conditions in which the tragedy of Sacco and Vanzetti took place. But have the problems concerning the way the movement of democratic opinion all over the world reacted changed all that much? Why? Perhaps due to lack of clarity and certain misunderstandings? These are the questions that led to the notes that follow.

Why these notes?
I read "Acts on the study day on Sacco and Vanzetti" held in Villafalletto on September 4 and 5 1987, and asked myself how much did the fact that these two comrades were innocent count at the time, and still today, concerning this affair? If the two comrades had declared themselves responsible, or had just as incontrovertibly been considered responsible for the actions attributed to them, would they still have been defended by the international anarchist movement? What would the reaction of the world movement of opinion that took over the whole affair have been in that case?
Of course, history isn't built with "ifs", I know that perfectly well. And it is not my intention to make a contribution to the "history" of Sacco and Vanzetti. I have a strong suspicion of all more or less professional historians, have more than a little suspicion of history itself, and obviously suspect all politicians old and new and their good faith in taking up historical "cases".
On the other hand, I have no doubt about the fact that Sacco and Vanzetti were quite extraneous to the specific acts they were accused of. But this certainty is personal and quite foreign to facts that can be ascertained or obscured in the event of a trial and does not prevent me from asking myself, and I hope the few comrades who read me, a few disturbing questions.
To die innocent means more rage
Of course, it must be terrible to die innocent, and that is because the moral value of justice is rooted in each one of us. Not the sacrosanct justice of proletarian rebellion that upturns everything and settles accounts in a collective thrust of destruction, but the technical, judicial, traditional one. The old justice with the blindfolded eyes that we unmask to discover in horror are all rotten.
But although we have read about and are aware of all this, we are still convinced that justice should work! Christ! How can you send two innocent men to death! The holy indignation of so many anarchist comrades goes hand in hand with the lay indignation of the communists, democrats and possibilists of every shade. The glorious crusade of the left reassembles unequivocally each time the names of Sacco and Vanzetti are mentioned. And what links them is precisely the general and objectively justifiable question of innocence. But the rage that is at the root of this, the rage for two comrades murdered by the State, cannot let us shut our eyes to other problems.
The inopportune presence
It seems to me that the flux of democratic personalities, the artistic and literary ones even more than the judicial or academic ones, greatly contributed to spreading the Sacco and Vanzetti "case". This led to vast propaganda at world level, but also to lowering the level of the clash that was undoubtedly taking place in America, and more specifically in court, at the time. Too much talk, too many theatricals, too many democratic journalists, too many politicians. And this, like a continuous, perverse thread, is still going on today with attempts to recuperate them by the contender to the White House, Dukakis.
But how do you decide otherwise? Take the case of piazza Fontana [1967 - a bomb in the Banca d'Agricoltura, Milan, kills 17 people. Anarchists are accused of this State massacre which was denounced by the whole of the left] - could you have told the Communist Party to get lost and drop their support? If anarchists do everything to spread their propaganda in order to involve people and have themselves heard by the widest number of people possible, how can they refuse the collaboration of the political and intellectual forces, even when they know perfectly well where they lead. This is not an easy problem to answer. At the time of Sacco and Vanzetti, could they have refused the support of people like Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O'Neill, Walter Lippman, John Dos Passos, not to mention the various Roman Rollands, Thomas Manns, Albert Einsteins etc., all over the world who supported the anarchists' innocence? Yes, it would have been difficult.
But I don't want to bring up the quite legitimate point of view that the comrades should only have been defended within the international anarchist movement, with propaganda limited to the latter's motivations, accepting only the outside forces who were willing to keep the question within these limits. I just want to say that the kind of collaboration imposed by the lawyer Moore necessarily had to have the. stamp of approval of both the Defence Committee and the two comrades in prison. It wasn't foreseen how much the innocence of the two comrades would be underlined and how neglected their guilt on principle due to their militancy, their belonging to a specific part of the American and international anarchist movement, would be cast into the background. That was the price of that collaboration. After all, one could play on the doubt, and this still happens today, that it was a question of two immigrants, two honest workers, and underline the nationalist and class element which certainly produced results at the time but did not put any light on the anarchist and revolutionary personalities of Sacca and Vanzetti.
Was the presence of the forces of the international "left" useful to the aim of saving their lives? One must conclude that it was not, given that the two comrades were assassinated all the same. The fact that it reduced any possibility of their anarchist activity emerging is also negative.
What would have happened if that presence had been refused? The two comrades would have been defended in the same way as the others who ended up on the scaffold, some innocent, some guilty, by Galleani's paper. And here we come to the question: but does this differentiation between "guilty" and "innocent" make any sense?
Frankly, I don't know. I reread the "Acts" we are talking about here, and saw that both Sacco and Vanzetti contributed to "Cronaca Sovversiva". So they must have been aware of Galleani's position on this false problem. The fact that they were "innocent" could not make them go back to a total acceptation of the innocentist road, at least in the terms developed in the trial. I agree with Pedretti therefore when he writes "Bartolomeo Vanzetti was not an acritical one-dimensional person, he denounced the mechanism that led to heroising his defeat to the bitter end: he was essentially an anarchist communist, profoundly convinced and extremely proud of his political and existential choices... in fact he never concealed his hatred of the injustice he was a victim of and his desire to be avenged". (p. 130) In a sense, once the decision had been made it was necessary to go on to the bitter end, right to the point of making the fact (imposed by the "frightened progressives" who made up the great mass of the supporters of Sacco and Vanzetti) that they were anarchists appear between the lines.
"Innocent" or "guilty"
The fact that Sacco and Vanzetti were murdered although obviously innocent proves only one thing: that the concept of innocence and guilt is not an objective fact but is a measure imposed by the class struggle. The legal techniques and police procedures that establish whether a person is guilty or innocent are part of the culture of power.
For an anarchist revolutionary the procedures that come to be pushed as logical "evidence" are worth absolutely nothing. It is to one's revolutionary conscience that one must respond, not the evidence of a situation orchestrated by an enemy who makes and breaks the rules of the game at its pleasure. For a "democrat" on the contrary there is a net difference between being guilty and being innocent. Guilty is he who has broken the law in a precise way, in the context notified to him and for which legal proceedings are commenced. On the contrary, the innocent are those who did not do what for various reasons they have been accused of. The great mass of those who still cringe in horror when they think of the fate of Sacco and Vanzetti, do so because these two comrades of ours were innocent, i.e. did not carry out the robbery or kill the people they were accused of and which they died for on the electric chair. A small minority, and among them there must have been anarchists, cringe in horror not only because of the ignominous incredible atrocious method in which the prosecution succeeded in maintaining their responsibility concerning the specific events, but because Sacco and Vanzetti were murdered by the State. Would the horror we are talking about have existed, apart from in this small minority which for one reason or another did not take any notice of the objective fact of their innocence, if the two anarchists had had a more dignified trial (from the point of view of establishing proof) and it had turned out that they had committed the robbery? We are sure things would have been quite different.
The great mass of those who are respectable by profession would all have been in favour of a sentence, and we understand that. On the other hand a small minority, including anarchists, would, like Galleani, have stated that there is no difference between innocence and guilt.
Had Sacco and Vanzetti really been responsible for these deeds there would only have been a modest show of defence at the level of opinion by comrades, such as that which existed for Ravachol for example, some time before the tragedy of Sacco and Vanzetti. On the other hand, comrades who put themselves in the optic of expropriation cannot believe that they have a movement behind them, no matter what its objective conditions are and the level of theoretical awareness within it.
Why can we not expect such a thing? For at least two good reasons: first, because the decision to carry out particular actions, including those aimed at participating through a precise effort in increasing the availablity of certain revolutionary instruments, is always a personal decision and must be borne, in good as in evil, by the individual comrades and their matured awareness. Secondly, because a movement, even a revolutionary one, needs to develop, has divergences of opinion, certain legitimate reservations that cannot all be cast aside in one go.
Put this way, correctly as far as I can see, there is nothing strange about taking a distance in such cases, thus clearly showing one's extraneousness to the question. Why ever should one let oneself become involved a posteriori in something that one does not agree with? The only criticisable position is the moralistic one, which necessarily ends up in the realm of the morals of power that are produced and imposed by the bosses.
This brief reflection should help us to see various situations more clearly, in the first place that of Sacco and Vanzetti. If being innocent is no more than an external factor that might or might not exist - and in the case of the two comrades murdered in America, Sacco and Vanzetti, they were innocent - comrades should be defended everywhere, even if they are "guilty". Now, if this so, we cannot constitute wide fronts when comrades are innocent, then limit ourselves to a small part of the anarchist movement when comrades are "guilty". The thing should be approached in the same way, at least theoretically, if we admit in the first place, as should be obvious, that there cannot be "innocent" or "guilty" except in the logic of power.
How can we get out of this dilemma? Quite simply. By always starting from the fact that, for us, the technical aspect is secondary and if comrades are accused, imprisoned and in some cases even killed this happens, apart from the objective event that constitutes the element of debate in court and which is of marginal interest to us, because they are anarchists. We cannot make technical points become the central elements of the defence campaign.
Many comrades, even those in good faith, think differently because they are prey to the banalities of dominant ideas. The claim to objectivity is one of the cornerstones of the philosophy of the conquerors.
It is important to understand this because it always takes us by surprise, reappearing where we least expected it. That reality is something that can be determined in a precise way is one of the many myths at the basis of the new scientific thought, just as when it emerged from the complex conditions of the Renaissance, let's say, in the ideas of Galilei: rationalism reduced to description, no longer as essence. And contemporary law is a worthy heir of enlightenment rational-ism, not having changed the certainties concerning the "way" in which things went much. One still assists today in comical "reconstructions" and other such things in court. We have become so used to this way of thinking that we do not even notice it.
When we say that Sacco and Vanzetti were not innocent but on the contrary were guilty, but only of being anarchists, we insert into the trial that claims to be objective (therefore of a quantitative nature), an element that is extraneous to the trial itself (or at least, considered so by judicial science), an element of a qualitative nature.
And yet this is not so. Reality is precisely this complex thing that cannot be reduced to the result of a legal procedure. The latter will always be arbitrary and founded not on evidence but on strength, not on logic but on power.
A difficult way of reasoning? Perhaps, yes, but if you do it once you never forget it.

Comiso - Organizational document of the self-managed leagues

2010-07-23T01:04:00.000-07:00

Distributed in Comiso 1982

The decision to build a base for 112 American Cruise missiles at Comiso is part of the project of political and military equilibrium between the two great superpowers. The justification given to this deadly enterprise is that it is necessary to counter pose the Russian atomic bases which are lined up against Europe with all possible means.
In fact it is not possible to put a brake on the criminal initiatives of the Soviet Union which as a superpower has betrayed the antimilitarist ideals of the international proletariat through just as criminal initiatives as those of the United States and their European servants. The increase in atomic bases does not defend from attacks from anywhere but constitutes a grave threat for the survival of the whole planet. The struggle must be directed towards preventing new bases (such as the one at Comiso) but also to destroying those already in existence, including the Russian ones and those of all the other States.
Comiso is destined to becoming the largest atomic missile base in Europe and the forerunner of other bases to be built in Spain, Germany, Great Britain and elsewhere. If we do not manage to prevent this criminal project we Sicilians shall be the first to have the responsibility of seeing in our land the largest atomic bomb plant in existence in Europe today.
This sad record will be accompanied by a series of other negative consequences which the arrival of an American army of occupation (15,000 US soldiers are expected) will cause immediately. Rise in prices, circulation of heavy drugs, increase in prostitution, militarisation of the territory, presence in our area of mafioso organizations to sell drugs to the Americans, control prostitution, and speculation on the contracts for work on the base. All this will mean an increase in violence (robberies, kidnappings, thefts) and restriction of individual freedom (controls, road blocks, militarized zones, etc).
The Socialist Party has shown itself to be a true servant of American interests, accepting the imposition of the USA and approving the order to build the base in Sicily through their defense minister LagoFio. The Christian Democrats have set to work right away to control building contracts for the hotels, apartments and restaurants which the Americans will need, and all the contracts for the construction of the base itself, through the mafia.
The Communist Party has given inefficient and discontinuous indications of struggle, showing themselves to be undecided, weak and inefficient. Marches (even composed of 100,000 people), petitions, hunger strikes, impress no one.
The struggle against the construction of the Comiso missile base requires other means and methods.
THE SELF-MANAGED LEAGUE
A) CHARACTERISTICS
- Is an autonomous organization of struggle which gathers all those who really and sincerely intend to prevent the construction of the base.
- Is not a bureaucratic organization. It has no statutes, associative rules, constitutive documents, etc. It can also have no permanent meeting place.
- The individual Leagues spread over the territory are born spontaneously and have as sole point of reference the general principles specified here.
- The League is therefore an organism of struggle which refuses to give permanent delegation to its representatives and so denies a specific professionality of this representation.
- The League is constantly engaged in the, struggle against the construction of the base.
- Each component of the League considers him/herself to be in struggle against the base and against the interests which want to realize it, recognizing that these interests are those of the exploiters and their servants.
- The League is not an organization of defense of the interests of this or that category of worker. It is therefore not a trade union or parasyndical structure.
- The propaganda activity of struggle of each individual League will preferably be co-ordinated with that of the other Leagues, while it remains that it is possible also for independent initiatives with local characteristics, but always with the objective of preventing the construction of the base and respecting the common principles.
- Adhesion to the League is the logical conclusion of whoever shares neither the ineffective initiatives of those who are looking for a fictitious counterposition.
B) GENERAL PRINCIPLES
Permanent conflictuality
- The struggle against the construction of the base will have positive results only on condition that it be constant, uninterrupted and effective. A desultory, sporadic struggle with occasional interventions will end up a losing battle.
Self-management
The Leagues are self-managed, i.e. they do not depend on any organization, party, trade union, patronage, etc. They receive no money apart from what comes from spontaneous subscriptions from the adherents to the Leagues themselves. From this autonomy derives their strength.
Attack
- The leagues refuse the road of mediation, pacification, sacrifice, accommodation, compromise. They support the need for attack against the boss interests which are realizing this criminal project.
C) METHODS
The involvement of the bosses and the American criminals is constant. They take no time off. They mean to realize their project of death within a brief period. Their action spreads against us in a thousand ways: unemployment, increase in prices, intimidation and repression. Tomorrow-should the base be built-this repression will reach the maximum of insupportability and we shall be deprived of even the freedom to think. To constant repression the Leagues reply with permanent conflictuality.
- All the work categories have an interest in preventing the base. The least wealthy categories but also those who are a little better off: even the shopkeepers who might imagine that they will cash in something extra on the arrival of the Americans must also take into account the mafia extortion rackets which will be organized to their cost in the area. The same goes for the peasants who are threatened by expropriation and have the right to put their land to really productive use. The other methods which the Leagues employ is therefore the widening of the struggle front.
- Counterinformation on the real situation in Comiso is a further method of struggle. Posters, leaflets, newspapers, radio, television, etc, all these instruments must be addressed not only to the inhabitants of the area but also to the whole of Sicily; Italy and the world. Today Comiso and the problem of the base are at the center of world attention. Through this attention it is possible to defeat the criminals and their servants with our struggle. But the management of information must be autonomous, i.e. must be against the information racket such as the local daily "La Sicilia" and the penny liners in its service.
- To reach the strata which are excluded from having knowledge of the problem: proletarian women, housewives, children, old people. All of them have the right to know the grave danger that is facing them and it is right that they be able to bring their own contribution to the social struggle which is developing against the construction of the base.
- To accept the equivocations of the chatter, putting off time, the promises made by power, means to give the criminals more time to realize their project. We must choose the immediate method of intervention and not put off to infinity what should be done right away.
- We should not forget that to be built the Comiso base requires our acceptance, the acceptance of all those who are working on it, those who allow the passage of materials with which it will be built. It is therefore necessary to widen the field of struggle, also to having the workers of these firms participate, because with their strikes and obstacles they will be able first to delay and secondly eventually prevent the construction of the base.
- The method which the Leagues consider final and adequate to really preventing the construction of the base is its occupation. But this occupation must be a conscious decision made by the Leagues and realized with all the means necessary at the opportune moment. We must reply to the foolhardiness and criminality of the American imperialists and their local servants with great responsibility and just as great decision.
- Each individual League meets as it thinks fit and the way it desires, with the frequency that it considers necessary and in the place it considers best fitted to its structure. Their initiatives are made known to the other Leagues-if this is considered necessary-through the coordinating body which, with this aim, draws up a periodical bulletin, where the decisions of the individual Leagues are published.
- Representatives of all the Leagues meet periodically at Comiso for a debate and exchange of views.
- The first duty of every League is intervention directed outwards to quantitively increase its growth.
- The League is a mass organization, therefore as such can assume the form of sectorial League, (farm labourers' League, peasants' League, shopkeepers' League, students' League, lorrydrivers' League, teachers'League, etc), or the intersectorial form of league (city League, village League, zone League, interzonal League, etc).
The choice of the struggle to be conducted is periodically decided by the individual Leagues from general meetings. The most important decisions are made at the meetings of the representatives of the leagues.
D) PERSPECTIVES
- The Leagues are not corporative organisms. They do not have the perspective of defending the interests of a category, village or social group.
- They are mass structures aimed at preventing the base.
- Any attempt from within or without to channel the Leagues towards electoral objectives, power, patronage, trade unions, simple resistance, etc, must be prevented.
- Developing the various initiatives the Leagues can make their weight felt at the level of mass organisms, imposing the decision not to build the base on the structures of power.

E) THE CO-ORDINATING BODY
- The coordinating body of the self-managed Leagues has premises in Comiso, a technical office which serves as a point of reference for all the Leagues which have been constituted and for those in formation.
- The Coordinating body is able to give indications on the complexive situation of struggle, the interests which are developing around it, the bosses' objectives, the firms which have been given contracts, the arrival of the American contingents of occupation, the firms which are working to produce materials for the base, and the presence of the Americans in the area.
- It can also supply the instruments for widening the knowledge in Sicily, Italy and abroad on the situation in Comiso.
- It sees to bringing out a periodical bulletin with the various decisions and the various proposals of the individual Leagues, and on their formation and development.
- Organizes periodical meetings of the representatives of the various Leagues, meetings to be held at Comiso.
- It is worked on a rotation basis by the components of the various Leagues therefore is an organism formed and constituted by the League itself which needs to take charge of the costs relative to its functioning (rent, telephone, propaganda material, cost of survival of those in charge).
CONCLUSION
The self-managed League is an organism of struggle to prevent the construction of the missile base at Comiso. It is based on the principle of autonomy of the struggle and permanent conflictuality. The method it chooses is that of attack against the construction of the base and against the interests of those who are realizing it.
The decision to give precise indications of struggle to the Leagues is up to the general meeting of the Leagues' representatives, as well as the establishing of methods and whatever is necessary to prevent the construction of the missile base at Comiso.

The Cruise missile base at Comiso can be prevented!

2010-07-23T00:54:00.000-07:00

Single issue printed by Ragusa anarchist group and Rivolta e Liberta anarchist group, Catania, July 1982. Published in English in Insurrection 1982

Why Comiso and Sicily
US imperialism's decision to place Cruise missiles in Comiso, in the centre of Sicily and the Mediterranean, is of an easily comprehensible military and strategic significance. Beyond the pro-American propaganda on a purely military and technical level which explains away this criminal decision as necessary to maintain an equilibrium with the Soviet missiles located on the Eastern frontiers of Europe, there is the fact that the very decision to build the missile base places itself in the optic of "preparing for war to maintain peace", forever the battle-cry of States who see in war a solution for the difficulties of domination and the continuation of exploitation.
Why Comiso? The answer is simple. As well as the strictly military ones there are economic and political reasons. Sicily, like Friuli, Campania and Sardinia - other areas chosen for the installation of atomic arms - are underdeveloped situations where three perspectives which are extremely favourable to capitalist dominion are foreseeable: a) intensive militarization of the territory to the point of reaching the closure of vast areas and even their "desertization"; b) organization of the struggle entrusted to the parties of the so-called left, with whom it is always possible to enter into dialogue and reach compromises; c) the great need for work, especially to avoid the prospect of emigration, which constitutes the most powerful blackmail for gaining mass consensus for the construction of the base.
These are the reasons for the choice of Comiso, and therefore also constitute an outline of the difficulties which any revolutionary struggle intending to subvert and defeat imperialism's project of building the base in Comiso will encounter.
The Sicilian reality
One of the levers of consensus which American imperialism can count on in Sicily is a certain mentality of delegation and fatalism which has inserted itself within the popular strata, especially the land labourers, and which finds a response in the mafia mentality which directs a power alternative to that of the State and which is often more efficient than the latter.
Local capitalism in Sicily contains a strong mafia content and has relations of patronage both with the intermediate strata and with the poorest of the population. These relationships substantially substitute State power, often seen as something far off and attainable only through the mafia intermediary.
The Municipality, the Province, the Region and the various organisms of assistance are used in an exclusively patronal context, serving to support a capillary and efficient structure of consensus. The bureaucracy has not yet reached the technological levels which characterize it elsewhere but still has the great Bourbon tradition transplanted from Piedmont which renders indispensable the element of mafia power manoeuvres and the connection between the political and economic mafias.
The industrial centers are anomalous, the greater part of the island working class not having an industrial specification but, having foreseen with the shrewdness characteristic of the poor that these installations were essentially capitalist traps, has not lost contact with their original peasant reality and at present find themselves in a situation which is neither working class nor belonging to the strata of peasant or farmhand. The weakness of the struggle from this area is striking.
The land labourers are basically the most combatant proletarian reality because they are linked to very difficult and often minimal situations of survival. The Communist Party, the Socialist Party and even the Christian Democrats are trying to involve the latent dissent of this strata in productive organizations such as cooperatives giving a prospect of continued work and guaranteeing consensus to make it safe for them to approach moments of greater social tension where they will not be able to keep the promises they have made. In the Ragusa area the present situation presents more complex characteristics due to the greenhouse productive sector where alongside the proprietor of a particularly profitable piece of land one finds the figure of the half day labourer, at the same time wage earner and small proprietor, nominally available for the struggle but substantially tied to the profit perspective, that of small property and therefore of compromises with power capable of guaranteeing or destroying the conditions which make the small peasant greenhouse cultivation productive.
The lumpenprolatariat strata fluctuates a great deal. It grows during the phases of increased unemployment in the building industry and when the possibility of work in the industrial sector diminishes. Farmhands and day labourers who are, within certain limits, available for the struggle, also enter this undoubtedly interesting strata. The source of income for the lumpenproletariat of the Ragusa area is extremely varied: from social assistance to sweat labour, from lay off money to work on the land, from microscopic commercial activities (street selling, small transporters, middlemen in improbable real estate affairs, etc), to simply survival. This strata is accustomed to poverty and suffering. In the Ragusa area the tendency towards the organized crime typical of the Palermo and Catania areas is more restricted and this could become a considerable area of absorption when, in the perspective of the realization of the base, the large mafia organizations intervene massively in the area.
The illusion of well-being
The argument of the wellbeing the Americans would bring to the Comiso area has been put forward parallel to that of the slight or inexistent dangers the installation of the base would represent.
This is an argument which always attracts the attention of the exploited. They can understand it because for them the concept of sacrifice-of any kind-is inherent to the concept of work. The State is far away, hence if one wants to obtain anything it is always necessary to refer to local patronage, but when the State approaches to propose a grandiose project, then the old illusions are rekindled.
The poor foster a hope of solving their problem, and the rich know with certainty that, even for only a period, their wealth will increase. The army of those who are neither rich nor poor tries to obtain the maximum utility from the occasion.
In this perspective the affair is proposed by international capitalism, local forces are mobilised by national capitalism who, in agreement with the mafia structures guarantee the functioning of patronage and lay the foundations for its concrete realization. The exploited try to extract all the benefit possible. The blackmail of precarious wages, commercial affairs, increase in sales for shopkeepers, reach insupportable levels.
The consequences of this are very serious: the breaking up of the cultural homogenity which alone could have guaranteed the progressive development of the struggle and therefore also collective well-being; upheaval of the local market (rise in prices of goods of prime necessity, rents, abnormal development in circulation of money and goods); militarisation of the territory which could even go as far as the closure of wide areas and periodical or continued blanket control, to the presence of large contingents of the army and various police forces; impossibility of exploiting even the minimal advantages guaranteed by the same irrational managerial and commercial activity; rationalism of the mafioso patrons on the Palermo model; presence of serious mafia conflicts resulting in hundreds of murders; rise in criminal activity (robberies, extortions, theft, violence of every kind); rationalisation and increase in heavy drug market (in the first place heroin and cocain); diffusion and mafia control of prostitution.
Social peace
The "peace" of the bosses is built on arms, declared and potential conflicts, missile installations, armies, police, military and mafia-type cultures. It is the peace of the graveyard. Along the road of capital's transformation from formal dominion to that of real dominion the contradictions typical of competitive capital are diminishing, leaving the perspective of profit at any cost in favor of increased State intervention in the economic field. This intervention transforms the conditions of economic competition, puts the profit objective into second place, rationalizes exploitation and centralizes domination which is camouflaged by the democratic and representative charade.
The production of value is subordinated to the production of social peace. Consensus becomes the principal industry around which the whole State machinery turns, exclusively directed towards guaranteeing international capitalism exploitation on a planetary level. The local problem passes into second place in the perspective of the equilibrium and projects of the multinationals. Assistance is gradually taking over from the logic of production.
But the solving of capitalism's contradictions, especially at a regional and local level, cannot be attained unless it goes beyond the conditions of present-day capitalism which are often backward. Social conflicts are still acute and can even worsen as a consequence of the need to progressively extend the project of real dominion to all parts of the world. The difficulties in the production of social peace are therefore still great. And it is in this direction that the efforts of those struggling against domination must address their efforts, against the State and against Capital. Our class enemy has a vested interest in preparing for the final extinction of any opposition and revolutionary dissent but to do that it must improve the conditions of exploitation which at present cause, among other things, one death every hour and one wounded every five minutes in Italy alone. This improvement will rationalize exploitation and therefore the class struggle will become more complex, but time is needed to put it into effect. In the meantime it will always be necessary for the bosses to oppose each other in the international clash both on the economic and the narrow military level. This tragically leads to nuclear decisions, atomic war decisions, and decisions such as genocide (Lebanon, Afghanistan, San Salvador, etc) which lead back to the problem of the level of the class struggle.
In this way capitalism works towards war while speaking of peace. It builds, sells and uses traditional and atomic arms, but affirms that it does so because there is no other way to safeguard social peace. The exploited have no interest in this "peace" of the bosses.
Those responsible
Limiting ourselves to the construction of the missile base at Comiso it is possible to identify a few basic responsibilities.
International capitalism and its national and local equivalent have an interest in the armed defense of their projects of domination. The NATO, in as far as it is a specific organism created for this defense, is the armed gendarme who intervenes to put a brake on situations which are dangerous for capital and to prevent situations of social conflict being created in perspective. To do this both military (coordination between different armies, new armaments, common exercises, deployment of military contingents), and political means are used.
In the political perspective the Christian Democrats are the party which has revealed itself to be incapable of undertaking the task of protecting the interests of international capital. For this reason, in the orbit of government, the Italian Socialist Party has been inserted, and has increasingly become the party of the Americans and the most suitable political force at a technocratic and managerial level for doing what the Christian Democrats -too tied to mafia patronage with a backward mentality-failed to do.
But the essential cover is supplied by the Communist Party. It is this party which takes charge of putting a brake on the rebellious impulse of the exploited, organizing the recuperation of every form of dissent, breaking up the combativity of the land labourers through the formation of cooperatives and other swindles such as participation in factory profits, channeling the quite legitimate hopes of those who have never had anything to cause them to lose their conflictual content. We have seen clearly how, in the case of Comiso, the gigantic party machinery has been put into action to develop a formal and platonic dissent through marches, petitions, and hunger strikes, all to prevent a real and effective dissent taking place based on occupation, sabotage, attacks on the bosses' interests, the preparation of the means to prevent the construction of the base.
Another strata which bears a strong responsibility in the project of robbery and death which is being planned for Comiso is that of the shopkeepers. Their miserable interest in increasing sales, of seeing dollars circulating instead of the usual few lire, has been exalted as a benefit which would be enjoyed by the collectivity of the whole area, while it is dramatically obvious that their personal and circumscribed interests would be heavily paid for by the poor if not other than by an immediate and considerable rise in prices from rents to goods of primal necessity. There can be no doubt that one of the obstacles to be contended with in the struggle will be precisely the organization of the shopkeepers in the area.
Another category who bears responsibility is that of the small proprietor who conformed immediately to the indications of struggle supplied by the CP, precisely because they are convinced that this strategy does not intend to do anything of any immediate real content. In fact the small proprietors, even those directly damaged by the construction of the base, want to prevent its construction, but this is subordinated to an eventual proposal of an indemnity allowance by the organs responsible. In other words their struggle is linked to an uncertain condition: first they want to see how the State and the Region behave, only then will they really be available to struggle and could go back on this if a proposal by the responsible bodies, should become convenient again.
But there is one last category which will bear a great responsibility should it not respond coherently to the proposals of the bearers of death: the category of workers, especially the labourers in the building sector, and even more the great number of unemployed who have deliberately been thrown into the gutter during the past few months in order to create a favorable disposition towards the base (bringing work and well-being!). The swindle is not difficult to understand. The consistency and duration of the work itself is practically minimal, the benefits to be drawn from it will have the same limited duration and soon be reabsorbed by the increase in prices, hence the solution would still be that of remaining unemployed or of leaving to swell emigration. One might just as well -impose one's own conditions right away, establishing the terms of the struggle immediately, making it impossible for the bearers of death to continue their blackmail. It is necessary to be very clear on this subject. Struggling immediately and efficiently, two results could be obtained: the construction of the base would be blocked and the bosses and politicians be obliged to find a solution to the problem of unemployment with other initiatives which will be realized more quickly the more effective the struggle against the base.
An organizational proposal
Our intervention in the reality of Comiso and the whole of the Ragusa area-in the towns of Ragusa, Vittoria, Modica, Ispica, Giarratana, Monterosso and the principal villages of the coastal region-which is still in course, can be divided into three phases and culminates with a proposal of self-managed organization.
The first phase has developed and is continuing to develop a direct contact with the different situations through meetings in the town squares and leafletting. The arguments chosen for the meetings and the drawing up of leaflets have been deliberately simplified, avoiding very detailed and complicated analyses in order to center the argument on one point: the construction of the base can be prevented, on the condition that the means suitable for doing so are used; the means suggested and put into practice by the Communist Party are not suitable for preventing the construction of the base. This aim will not be reached through colossal but ineffective marches, courageous but isolated hunger strikes or the signing of petitions which will be rendered useless by the swindles of power. Such means are fictitious means which do not really intend to prevent the construction of the base. It is necessary to employ harder and more effective ones. The bosses and their servants understand one language: that of fear. It is necessary therefore to frighten them, as has been done in the past. It is enough to think of the occupation of the land which has put an end to the injustices of the large landowners. It is therefore necessary to have recourse to the means of occupation, sabotage, hard frontal attack.
The second phase in our intervention is centered on the organization of the international anarchist conference which will take place in Comiso in the municipal sports ground on July 31 and August 1. It will be a fundamental occasion for the anarchist movement, along with the most sensitive area of the proletariat and lumpenproletariat, to go into the problem of the struggle against the base. From this conference should emerge indications of method, analytical indications and more general indications of struggles as the problem of Comiso runs the very great risk of isolation, i.e. of becoming closed as a specific struggle within a precise area of Sicily and within that kind of struggle which has as its point of reference antimilitarism, the struggle against war and against nuclear power. The passage to the generalization of interventions to other sectors, and therefore the discussion and examination of methods to be used in struggle against the base in Comiso can only be realized through an analytical and creative contribution of the movement as a whole.
The third phase is predominantly organizational and does not necessarily follow the first two but can develop parallel to them. Our aim is to suggest the creation (and therefore to contribute to creating) self-managed leagues against the Comiso base in the various localities, leagues which will be able to continue the struggle in first person, determining the characteristics of the conflict, decided by the various localities, leagues which will be able to continue the struggle in first person. In our opinion, and basing this on the results of the first phase of intervention, we are reasonably certain that a strong dissent exists in the various provinces of Ragusa and particularly in Comiso itself among the base of the CP concerning the methods of struggle suggested by this party. Moreover there also exists considerable dissent within the base of the Socialist Party who do not share the positions of Craxi and Lagorio, and this component is very strong especially among the old farm hands. Moreover one can count on a non-political dissent which could, if opportunely sensitized
through a capillary intervention in the peripheries of the various towns, draw in the proletarian women in particular. In a struggle such as Comiso the function which this strata could develop should in no way be underestimated.
In conclusion, it appears that our efforts should be directed towards the birth and growth of this organizational structure with self-managed characteristics. The development of the struggle, which we foresee must necessarily address itself towards harder and more acute levels, would then have a solid base which would necessarily and autonomously be capable of operating the class selection which will make the positive result of the revolutionary engagement possible.

The struggle for self-managed social space

2010-07-23T00:38:00.001-07:00

The struggle for self-managed social space

2010-07-23T00:38:00.000-07:00

Published in Deranged Issue 0

The function of space throughout the development of capital could be described as true ‘history’. From the first enclosures of great masses of people into circumscribed spaces to the most advanced factories today, capitalism has tried to cut out portions of space to dedicate them to one specific use: the production of surplus value. Now, with the advent of the recent post-industrial development and advances in technology, the management of this space has changed profoundly. It has passed from a partial management to a total one. Here capital has had the support of power and the State. We think that it is important to reflect on the conditions of the relationship that exists today between social space and capital.

No part of physical space is free from the interference of capital. From sidereal space to the ocean depths, from the mountains to the rivers, from the seas to the deserts, from the great metropoli to the most out-of-the-way villages. A series of relations between elements that seem far apart are linked by the common matrix as objects of exploitation that intersect and overlap. Thus, we can think we are going somewhere far away, out of this world, as they say, only to discover that even there, in that place, the mechanisms of capital reach it and function perfectly. That explains why we are against ecologism just as we are against any other ‘alternative’ proposal that claims to do something against exploitation by cutting out one part of reality. Of course, we must start off from a specific part in our interventions, but we know that we cannot really attack the enemy if we stay within that ‘part’. To move on to attack we must go beyond fragmentation (single issues), a strategy that has been imposed upon us by capital.
Now, of all the misappropriation that has come about through exploitation, the most serious, because it has the worst consequences, is that of time and of space. In substance the two are linked. Capital steals our time by obliging us to work, and conditions our life, infesting it with clocks, obligations and deadlines, right down to the smallest detail. By stealing our time they prevent us from understanding ourselves, they estrange us from ourselves. They alienate us. Without time we hardly even notice the theft of space any more. We need time in order to even notice the existence of space. To think, to listen, to dream, to desire. By living space in terms of distance, as kilometres to be covered, and constantly moving from one place to another, we lose sight of our relationship with things, nature and the world.
Capital has stolen our time from us (it needed it for production) and it has stolen our space (it needed it first as place of production, then as system of control and repression, then to obtain general consensus). Now we are faced with the need to expropriate our time and space. This expropriation cannot be other than violent and traumatic. For both ourselves and our enemies. Our attack cannot fail to cause damage and ruin. It is in the logic of things, the logic of the class war. The project of power is global. It cannot allow ‘empty spaces’ to exist. For the opposite reason, our project of liberation is also global. If we allow capital to globalize power we will end up dead.
Fortunately power still has a long way to go. We are just at the beginning of a design based on the division of reality into two parts that are physically separate. Following the global misappropriation of space and time, capital is now separating the latter into two parts. It is no longer a question of the old fragmentation, but of a net division, a real WALL between the included and the excluded. The first will be guaranteed a situation of privilege, power, high level culture, projectuality and creativity; the second, a situation of survival, consensus, sub-culture, supine acceptation, lack of stimuli and perhaps even needs. In this perspective capital and the State need the whole of social space at their disposition. Nothing must escape their control.
Not only. Capital now disposes of technologies that permit not just the simple physical possession of space, but also its production. Think of the capacity to operate in ‘real time’ communication between two points, thousands of kilometres away from each other. That does not only change production (quality, variety, creativity, storage, etc), but also and principally the whole arrangement of social relations (which are also economic).
So, capital produces space on the basis of its project of exploitation and power. It transforms and destroys nature, modifies towns and countryside, destroys seas, rivers, lakes, adapts stellar distances to its militaristic logic. Then, the spaces thus produced serve to channel individuals. That is how we end up in long lines of cars on motorways or in queues in supermarkets. Thatis how we find ourselves afflicted with chaotic trajectories, appointments we can’t miss, fictitious interests that make us suffer and force us to make continual senseless deplacements. We move within spaces that have been programmed for us, that we only have the illusion of having ‘chosen’. Our houses are full of useless, harmful objects. Space has become so restricted, or rather, it has changed according to the needs of capitalist production, which must sell televisions, fridges, washing machines, bedroom furniture and kitchens.
So, almost without realizing it, our time is disappearing into nothing and our space is reducing itself to relating to objects that testify to capital’s powers of persuasion. In this way we are educated to repetitiousness. We make the same gestures, touch the same objects, push the same buttons. Repetition is, as everybody knows (but systematically forgets) the antichamber of consensus.
For its part, capital must take away our space. It is practically obliged to. And that is because it cannot leave room to our creativity, our capacity to do-it-yourself, our desire for the new (which is above all the stimulus to find solutions that reveal undreamed of gifts of spontaneity and wealth). If capital were to leave space to the forces of the individual it would not be able to maintain the pace of repetition that is indispensable to production, which, we must not forget, is only such on condition that it can also be re-produced. Think of the efforts (aided by electronic techniques) that capital is making to realize everybody’s desires with the maximum diversification possible (but all centralized and codified). The great labels of fashion items, the fast-food chains, the advertising that exalts the taste of the individual within mass production, are no more than attempts to prevent other roads that could still be tried today.
Space is therefore produced and reproduced on the basis of consensus, but also possesses considerable purely repressive aspects in the policing sense of the term. Control regulates various fluxes in the narrowest possible way. Raw materials and people, ideas and machines, money and desires. Everything is coordinated because everything has been preventively homogenized; differences have become simply that, they are no longer radical diversity. They have been reduced to the level of appearance and, in this new guise, elevated to the maximum degree, as the kingdom of freedom.
The strategy of power is therefore that of controlling ‘all’ space in the same way as it controls ‘all’ time. It is not just a question of police control but mainly control based on consensus and the acceptance of models of behaviour and scales of values that belong to the technocrats of capital.
What to do: Go in search of lost time? Of lost space?
Certainly not in the sense of a nostalgic trajectory in a backward direction. In life nothing can turn back just as nothing ever presents itself the same way a second time around (nor in one that is absolutely different).
The old relationship with space left a trace. A sign of a physical place. The sign of people and their things. A road, a town square, a country lane, a river, the sea and the sky, the woods and the mountains, had an ongoing discourse with the individual who knew how to (and wanted to) listen to them. And affinity with other individuals took people to the same places, animated feelings, pushed to them to reflect and to act. Individuals existed, whereas now one hides like a part of a whole, of a crowd. Once we were exposed, often unprepared and vulnerable. Now we go under cover of uniformity and repetitivity. We feel more secure because we belong to the flock. There are no points of reference in space or time. Everything is about to be wiped out. Sounds, smells, thoughts and dreams. Everything is being produced and reproduced. Everything is about to be reduced to merchandise.
In this perspective the struggle for social spaces becomes a struggle for the reappropriation of the whole ‘territory’ beyond and against the rules of control and consensus.
OCCUPATION AND DEFENCE OF
SELF-MANAGED SPACES
By self-managed social space we mean an urban space taken by a number of individuals with the aim of using it directly, for their own aims, beyond the logic of capitalist power and exploitation.
Compared to social spaces (schools, barracks, factories, etc.) where a specific function is imposed, aimed at guaranteeing the interests of capital, the struggle for the conquest of a self-managed social space constitutes an important and continuous attempt to practice freedom of action and expression that would be denied elsewhere.
Right from the start, therefore, this struggle is constituted of a number of anti-authoritarian actions that begin from a critical analysis of class society and its main functions. These are therefore struggles that adopt the method of self-management, they try to realise freedom and social and individual equality, so are indispensable for proceeding along the road of the abolition of power and capitalist exploitation.
The self-managed method is the only one that prevents an instrumentalisation of the struggle by political parties, unions, council representatives, etc. But for that to happen, it is necessary for the method to be employed correctly, guaranteeing freedom of decision in everything that is done during the course of the struggle.
This self-management can be distinguished in two phases:
a) self-management of the struggle for the conquest of social space through squatting; b) self-management of the struggle for the defence of social space through an opening towards the outside.
As far as the first phase is concerned it should be said that the occupation can only be realised if it has managed to constitute a mass structure based on a precise affinity between the individuals that belong to it. This is not so much an ideological affinity as a substantial one. The existence of common desires and common problems make it possible, at a given moment, for a group of people to get together to struggle against common exploitation. This is something that we need to be very clear about. The class dominion of capital is the cause of the present lack of self-managed social space and the presence of fictitious social spaces, precisely because the economic and social exploitation that serves the interests of power and capital is realised within the latter. The struggle for the ‘real’ conquest of social spaces therefore necessarily passes through the violent rupture with the dominant logic of capital. The latter cannot and will not remain passive before our concrete initiatives of liberation of social spaces, because these initiatives constitute a considerable danger for it.
The State and capital put precise limits on us which, when they are overcome, immediately put us in the condition of being ‘outlaws’. To squat means to go beyond these limits, it means to become an ‘outlaw’. That is why it is necessary make a violent break with the rules that have been imposed on us. That is why it is necessary to squat.
Coming to the second phase, it is more than obvious that we must know how to take our freedom ourselves, through our struggles. It is not written in any constitution that someone will give it to us. This includes social space: no one wants to give it to us. Whoever has it manages it according to their own interests (which are sometimes not to use them at all and simply leave them empty). When these spaces are given to us, it is because they want to control us and ghettoize us instead of putting the classic cop on our tail, which costs money, so that they know where we are and what kind of things we are talking about. That is why, sometimes, they are quite happy to give us spaces, especially after we begin actions of intervention in social reality. It is obvious that we don’t need spaces of this kind, which cannot be called self-managed, because self-management is not just a question of managing the inside of the place.
We must therefore take our spaces ourselves, i.e. squat them. But it is not just a question of taking them, we must also defend them.
This defence must not only be a question of barricading ourselves behind a wall and putting barbed wire outside. We cannot limit ourselves to simply keeping the cops out. To defend conquered social space it is necessary to grow, qualitatively and quantitively, with outside intervention and the capacity to develop a discourse that has some meaning and doesn’t simply reduce itself to the satisfaction of one’s own interests or the exercise of one’s own personal capacities. Music, poetry etc., are all very interesting but, if they remain closed within the space, even squatted, they would just become another characteristic of the ghetto.
The best way to defend the conquered space is therefore the opening towards the outside.
To conclude we can say: the conquest of space only comes about with violent occupation, in that any other road (negotiation) is not valid. After, the self-management of space comes about with defence that doesn’t only consist of the minimal aspects that we could define ‘militaristic’, but also, and mainly, in opening up to the outside, talking to people, meeting and linking one’s own situation to the situation of the area one happens to be in.

More on internationalism

2010-07-23T00:34:00.000-07:00

Published in English in Deranged Issue 0

As G8 summits have become annual appointments attended by thousands of demonstrators from all over the world, this article presents a few points of reflection on how the struggle against power can be really effective: do the protests carried out during the big events set by the leaders of the world bring any real attack on power? Do they really express solidarity to the oppressed? Do they really pose any significant obstacle to the destruction of the planet towards which we are all heading?

Capital extends over whole of the planet in its many expressions at both the socio-economic level and those of repression and control. No tiny geographical corner escapes it, no action anywhere in the world can avoid putting itself in relation with situations everywhere else.
It is not only projects of repression and control that are moving beyond State-capital borders. Specific acts of resistance and attack on the class enemy and insurrectional mass movements are also springing up all over the world.
At the same time demonstrations that put themselves in the optic of revolutionary internationalism, i.e. of struggling alongside oppressed peoples at moments when capital is celebrating its great international programmes, are developing a politically correct attitude.
These struggles get wide consensus and we have also been in favour of them, but the following notes want to be a moment of reflection about the possibilities and, why-not, the limitations of the revolutionary internationalist struggle today.
In the first place, the ‘deadline’. If you think about it, this always fixed by power. The movement runs behind it like a dog after a hot sausage. That carries a whole series of risks. First, it’s not certain that the fixed deadline is really important. It might be that at certain moments the international power of capital holds meetings, conferences, congresses or other such devilry in order to conceal more important decisional processes that are taking place elsewhere. At other times they come out with humanitarian projects that leave people amazed and unable to see why there is any dissent at all, as there is such willingness to solve the problem. Meanwhile, elsewhere, safe in the rooms where occult power meets in dialogues of one or two, traumatic decisions are made that affect millions of lives and cause millions of deaths.
In the second place, the myth of the ‘mass’. It is deemed indis-pensible to draw in the greatest number of people on these grand occasions in order to give a great show of strength. Basically, this second point is closely connected to the first. If one chooses the road of demonstrating—one way or another, we are not talking about methods here—against the great celebrations of the power of international capital, one cannot do anything else. To be seen to be few would have no effect whatsoever, so we come to the question of ‘publicising’ the event through the media, that cannot keep quiet in the face of such actions. In the optic of revolutionary internationalism, the deadlines of capital, mass participation and publicity are therefore elements that need to undergo serious critical debate by the movement.
Demonstrations could just as easily be organised against the real centres of power, and turn out to be no less (if not more) effective. First these centres need to be identified, and this information is not given to us on a plate. It must be expropriated, i.e. subtracted, stolen, taken violently from the organisms that hold and defend it ferociously, precisely because they are aware of its great importance. How much easier it is just to pick up a newspaper and learn that there will be a demonstration on such and such a day, in such and such a country. It’s quicker. One rushes to the appointment, somewhere between a day in the country and a sadomasochistic exercise for muscular boys half way between boy scouts and hooligans. In some countries—here in England for example—such moments are very much sought after in order to give vent to what could be defined the most popular national sport: coming to blows with the police. This mentality is also shared by the English cops (nearly always armed with heavy rubber truncheons) who react furiously but, basically, quite correctly. They fight the attacks carried out by the English movement body to body with typically Anglo-Saxon sportsmanship.
We’re not saying that other things don’t happen, and that another mentality doesn’t also exist in England, let’s just say that the first is decidedly prevalent. However, demonstrations against the real decision-making centres of power might not turn out to be as tempting. They might be considered too dangerous (such places are protected with far more brutal and immediate systems of protection), so one might have recourse to minoritarian actions. To consider this a move away from the mass, a classic flight forward, seems excessive in our opinion. Reality is there in front of our noses, we just need to get the proper documentation. That is certainly difficult, but not impossible. After we get this documentation we can face the problem of whether or not to decide for mass involvement in the action of disturbance, attack, destruction or simply denunciation. There is always the possibility of a minoritarian action.
In the 70s the question of solidarity between the metropolitan proletariat and the poor underdeveloped countries was faced. At that time there was the idea of bringing the ‘third world’ into the metropoli. Later it was said: what was done was in fact an illusion, it didn’t work. In fact it was one of the reasons for the failure of the great closed armed organisations, such as the RAF or the Red Brigades, which mustn’t be repeated. But what alternative has been proposed? Nothing specific. The problem of struggle in the advanced capitalist countries, and the situation of poorer, underdeveloped, third world, etc., countries is still open.
Internationalism is a good thing. But what kind? That of the old ‘brigades’ that took up arms and moved to countries where there was a more advanced level of class struggle, to give their revolutionary contribution? Or platonic support based on denunciation and dissent? Boycotts, sabotage or direct attack on the periferal interests of international capital in the forms where it is most involved in the part of the world that our attention is turned to? There is no easy answer. If nothing other than at the level of the possible effects.
Let’s take the case of Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq. International capital is involved in these situations. Or Jewish interests in the US or those of the big industrialised countries in the war on Iraq. Attack is always possible, but how can we prevent this attack from simply becoming platonic dissent, so that there ends up being no difference between the destruction of certain interests, peripheral ones, and simply manifesting an opinion of opposition? The problem is not an easy one.
Once one was under the illusion that it would be possible to move great masses of exploited along the model that they were moved by left wing parties and trades unions, but with different objectives. One believed, once upon a time, it seems a thousand years away now, that it would be enough to change the reasons in order for people to move as an ineluctable, almost deterministic fact. Today we need to be clear. It is we ourselves who must move, now, not tomorrow when the prospects of the movement have changed, and capital has also adjusted the its terms of action. And to move today means to attack. What is lacking is not the ‘masses’, but the documentation. In this sense, we believe, there is still a lot of work to be done.

Pinelli, nineteen years on

2010-07-23T00:13:00.000-07:00

Published in Insurreection Issue Five, 1988

An ex Lotta Continue militant has accused himself and three others of being responsible for the death of Pinelli's executioner, police commissioner Calabresi, in 1972. The question is not whether the four accused are responsible for this act so much as at the time there was a general feeling among comrades that Pinelli's murder had been avenged.
A few weeks ago, an ex Lotta Continua militant, Leonardo Marino, presented himself to a Milan judge and "confessed" to having participated, along with others, in the execution of the political police commissioner Luigi Calabresi 16 years ago.
Comrades will remember that it was Calabresi who was in charge of the interrogation of anarchist Giuseppe Pinelli on December 16 when the comrade "committed suicide" by "falling" out of the top floor window of the police headquarters in Milan. Other elements of the political police and the secret services were also present.
Certainly, it was nothing new then, nor is it now, for police interrogators to use methods of convincing that result in the death of those undergoing them. Not to mention the systematic use of torture of every variety that is used as a matter of course to force confessions out of proletarians.
What happened then in the Milan police headquarters that makes the case of Pinelli particular? One must remember the climate of the times: the events of '68 were still fresh. The Hot Autumn of 1969, where the struggles around the renewal of wages contracts were escaping the control of the trades unions. The anarchists, perhaps more for their potential role as a point of reference in the future than for their real presence in these struggles, had to be presented as scapegoats.
As always when the State sees itself threatened, when the usual methods of maintaining consensus are no longer sufficient, it sets its reserve bodies in motion: fascists, death squads, military coups, etc. In this case it was a combination of fascists and secret services to produce the bomb that exploded in the Banca del Agricoltura in piazza Fontana, Milan on December 12 1969. That same day the chemicals industry union signed the confindustria wages contract, thus breaking the workers' front. The State feared the reaction of the mechanical sector, and needed to create a diversion that would at the same time capture the attention of the whole country, and create a climate of fear aimed at pushing the workers back into the ranks of the trades unions.
That wasn't enough. Public attention had to be turned towards and against the anarchists. Valpreda and two other anarchists were arrested. Pinelli was summoned for questioning and put to silence. In fact Calabresi was already renowned for his interrogation technique: making his victims sit on the window ledge of his room and inviting them to throw themselves down on to the pavement below.
When Calabresi was later executed there was a general sense of relief and vindication among comrades. Pinelli's murder had been avenged.
Now the latest pentito has appeared on the scene, accusing himself and three other ex militants of Lotta Continua: Adriano Sofri, ex national leader of the organisation; Giorgio Pietrostefano, ex director of the servizio d'ordine; and Ovidio Bompressi. The first two, he claims, gave orders for the action to take place, the latter, he claims, was the person who shot Calabresi. All three totally reject Marino's accusations.

Introduction to The Conquest of Bread

2010-07-22T23:56:00.000-07:00

Printed by Elephant Editions 1974

Although The Conquest of Bread is undoubtedly one of the fundamental classics of anarchism, its present day validity is not as certain as it is linked to a precise situation of class struggle which cannot be easily clarified by referring to the analyses contained in the present volume.
Put it aside? Consign it to the pleasing research of the historiographers, ever capable of giving a semblance of life to what has long been dead? Make a great task of separating the wheat from the chaff, patiently pointing out the parts that are still valid and those that are decidedly out of date? And, in such a case, what would remain of the unity of the work which, although accidental as it consists of pieces written at different times, cannot fail to leap to the eyes of even the most casual reader?
These doubts are basically unfounded. The Conquest of Bread has its unitary key to reading which does not seem to have been brought out even in the recent American edition introduced by Avrich, and this key allows for its legitimate use, not as a monument of the past, but as a tangible indication of something lasting and continually in transformation which the power structure manages to hide with varying degrees of difficulty.
Every possible good has been said of Kropotkin, and such a good man was he that nothing else could have been said of him: His conception of life, his optimism, his olympian scientific coolness of analysis, heating up every now and again with some incitement to rebellion: basically all that might seem out of date. And The Conquest of Bread is a book that could appear outdated. Except that the destruction of power is not the schematic process we usually entrust to great explosions of violence, or to small attacks against the structures of repression. The destruction of the constituted order also passes through the slow and optimistic evaluation of the forces available for attack. If it does not take much to accomplish an individual act, often a result of desperation, only reflection and analysis can render that act comprehensible and transform the desperation of the exploited into organised revolutionary force.
And in order to do that there is a need for profound optimism. Not in things or in men, for which there will always be someone ready to point out with superiority those who do not merit that optimism, but in the will of the individual who sums up and recomposes himself as part of the complex project of revolutionary totality.
It is here that we find, or so it seems to us, the key to reading this book, which makes it a whole. Solidarity is a biological fact - says Kropotkin - and, like a seed hidden by a snowy mantle, it lies dormant all winter to come to life again in the spring, so this essential principle of humanity endures the anguish of tyranny to reawaken in the sunshine of the future revolution. Many present-day thinkers have doubts about this. Not so much by referring to the secular thesis of men preying on each other like wolves, as by submitting the too idyllic late eighteenth century scientific vision to the critique of an historical materialism that regards (at least until recently) biology as the devil does holy water. The historical forms of the distribution of production relations contribute to determining society, therefore to the individual.
Good? Bad? Neither good nor bad? The only thing certain would seem to be a proposal for intervening. What should we do in the precise historical conditions of the present day? How should we act in a moment such as this with the class struggle still going on?
Strangely, one would try in vain to find an organisational outlet concerning aspects of the revolutionary struggle in The Conquest of Bread. What to do, before the revolution, in order to get closer to it? How organise? Syndicalism? A federation of affinity groups? What about clandestine organisations?
However did Kropotkin forget about all that? Because, attentive readers of this book would reply, it is a book that concentrates on the problem of what to do at the moment of the revolution and in the period immediately following it, on how to organise production and distribution. And they would be wrong.
The great subject animating the pages of The Conquest of Bread is the movement of the exploited: nothing is conceded to this or that historical group of intervention. And anar chists, as a conscious minority, find a place there only be-cause they are a part of that great movement, not as the representatives of a specific organisation in terms of political space.
This apparently banal fact has been considered by Kropotkin's critics to be due to his olympic superiority over the parts in struggle within the revolutionary movement, and to prove this they point out passages where Kropotkin underlines the difference between anarchists and collectivists, or between anarchists and authoritarian socialists. Moreover, the critics insist, this is due to a defect in analysis itself, a limitation that can be traced to Kropotkin's temperament, disposition and studies, his love for the traditions of the past, from the medieval era to the French revolution. As if not indicating a precise political position were the great sin that everyone would have us believe, like insisting on the political growth of this or that part of the movement being the great step forward that it is so often claimed to be.
It seems to me that Kropotkin was convinced of something far more important: that the revolution would be impossible if it were not already in course. To consider the revolution as something we shall meet some fine day out of the blue, beyond some line that it is not possible to cross today, is a Blanquist myth, that is foreign to Kropotkin and to all anarchists. This is a really important concept, and it does not matter that Kropotkin could not see its ultimate consequences, just as he could not justify the reasons that suggested it to him. This is an immense task that we are undertaking day by day at the level of the class struggle between exploiter and exploited, and from which we can draw the material indispensable for the continuation of the struggle.
Let us explain better. Kropotkin's point of departure is the scientific determinism of his time: science was to solve everything, would transform man's condition, finally subtracting him from exploitation because he would possess the truth, which is synonymous with wisdom. Nature itself, of which science was not only the interpreter but also the consequence and premise for every future investigation, could not be malevolent otherwise it would not have produced an instrument of liberation. Man can be free because he has in him the conditions for liberation, a natural condition of goodness: the rest are accidents due to the mistaken application of nature's suggestions.
From a political point of view this perspective clearly re-quired further support. And the old Hegelian adventure - less credited in countries of fishermen and pirates such as England - had ended up in the social democratic party. The development of science could not include that of the organisational forms both of capitalist dominion and prole-tarian counterpower preceding the revolution. The latter only became possible by going through the first stage (economic/ trade union) to a wider, more comprehensive level, that of the political party.
The fact that the continental marxists lived this adventure on the traces of a clash with the newborn but potent teutonic bourgeoisie, was certainly not without consequences. It will never be known to what extent these vicissitudes influenced the elaboration of their theory and, parallely, in what way marxist theory was subject to the apparent conquests of German social democracy. We can only see quite a clear rela-tionship between scientific determinism and political party. But a large proportion of anarchists, with Kropotkin in the lead, were also determinists, and they opposed themselves to the current that insisted on the role of Malatestian voluntarism. Would it be legitimate to deduce that the first were, underneath it all, advocates of a workers' party and the second were not? Such a conclusion would be mistaken. Unfortunately in this field appearances are as deceptive as ever. It was determinism that led the marxists to a quantitative evaluation of their original analyses thus contributing to strengthening the social democratic party while awaiting a clash which could in no way come about by that road. It was the same determinism, with all its scientific errors and limitations (and what analytical model does not have them?) that led the anarchists to a recognition of the movement of the exploited, of the revolutionary process in course, here and now, the progressive drawing in of forces working in one way or another for the self-organisation of human freedom.
On the other hand, that voluntarism that in some marxists emerged as a foreign body or a strategic and demagogical element to be used opportunely, or ended up (in the better Marx) by contradicting the basic thesis without ever seriously putting it in doubt; it was the same as the voluntarism which, with all its declarations for freedom and the inviolability of the individual, and all its good faith when present in those nearest the reality of the struggles such as Malatesta, could not fail to end up in the objective organisation of the anarchist workers' party.
The points of departure were different, the motivations and objectives were different, but the quantitative illusion is identical. The project of growth, the strategy of waiting and the strategic attack managed and coordinated by an organisation to be constructed not over the masses (valid for the marxists), but among them, perceiving economic moments of suffering and disgust towards exploitation, but always as something that must still be well placed, still fulfill a function, find political space; all while waiting for events to mature. Because none of the magnificent utopia of the revolution is visible today; because, when necessary, everything can reduce itself to an act of will capable of opening up the darkness that envelopes the struggle.
Malatesta accused Kropotkin of having put the international anarchist movement to sleep, proposing an ideology of waiting because, in any case, the revolution "will come". Only that accusation should have been directed not so much at Kropotkin's theses and the way they were formulated, so much as to what the movement wanted to read into these theses. They wanted to wait, and they found justification for doing so; they wanted to suspend their involvement following the apparent uselessness of the hot period of propaganda by the deed, and they found justification for doing so; they wanted an alibi for the interventionism against the central Empires, and they found it. Basically, a theoretician is not only a point of reference, is not only what he himself considers to be as a point of reference in his own work, but is also what the reality of the struggle ends up producing: and there was no other way that his works could be read during these years. The patriarchal figure of the scientist had forever overborne the strong characteristics of the agitator and rebel. The times no longer required the words of one who had even exalted the use of the "dagger, the pistol and dynamite" against the exploiters of the people.
Inversely, in Malatesta, the movement could have rediscovered the insurrectional teachings of Matese. The im-pulse of the will to destroy power in every form and on every occasion, suspicion towards agreements and defeatism, the need for organisational instruments of attack and defence. But it did not want that, it wanted progressive numerical growth, and it found justification for it; it wanted the regulat-ed organisation of economic defence, and it found justifica-tion for it; it wanted a form of party that aimed at righting the sins of the marxist one, and it found it there.
So the misunderstanding dictated by the needs of the class struggle are born, grow and become history. It is easy to pass over them without understanding them.
We often prefer to go for the obvious rather than immerse ourselves in these meanderings. Kropotkin, the determinist scientist, responsible for putting a brake on the international movement, is cast aside and condemned in block; Malatesta, heir of the true teachings of the indefatigable agitator Bakunin, the revolutionary asserter of the organisational capacity of the proletariat, theoretician of the will happy to espouse the workers' organisation, should be placed in opposition, therefore accepted unquestioningly.
This in no way contributes to clarifying the struggles that are taking place now.
Take, for example the English neo-Kropotkinians. They have taken to digging under the snow again to find that tiny seed that the geologist and explorer Kropotkin says he has seen. And they insist, often with pathetic monotony, on seeing it here and there, sometimes in the curious degenerate form of the structure of capital, sometimes in the social-democratic attempt to make the masses participate in decisions concerning their own exploitation. By acting in this way it is obvious that one betrays not the word but the profound meaning of Kropotkin's thinking.
Take, for example, the Malatestians of our own country [Italy]. They are continually reprinting The Anarchist Program, the formulation of an historical moment that has now become crystallised in the form of a catechism that resists any attempt to carry it into the field of present day struggles. In better moments they hasten to bring out new catechisms, counting and recounting the comrades who declare their acceptance of these programmatic lines, and arguing behind the scenes about the interpretation of some abstract problem such as violence, which in itself would not be abstract, but becomes so if whoever is examining it has no intention of violently attacking the State but only of continuing to argue about the problem.
The characteristic of Kropotkin's indications is therefore not only that beneficent optimism which is a fruit of the dreams of the science of his time, but is also, and principally, his capacity to see the revolutionary project as totality, sub-tracting it from any attempt to entrust it to natural evolution, or to the violent decision of a minority group.
But this totality is profoundly contradictory, does not permit deterministic models, just as it does not permit voluntaristic incitement. It accepts only man, history, and the economic and social relations that link the first to the second. Within the revolutionary totality the movement finds its sense of direction, -becomes process and project, tends to remove the obstacles constructed daily by the forces of reaction, undergoes apparent defeats that are substantially victories, constructs immense victorious achievements that are in fact heavy defeats. It digs melancholy trenches amidst symbols and banners, amidst colours and betrayals, to find the way that others - the carriers of the truth of the temple - insist on pointing to elsewhere. All that would be impossible if the final dream were not reality as of now, a partial and distorted reality, so much so that the more one tries to translate it into terms that are comprehensible to our limited capacities, the
more it hides itself, to re-emerge dressed in the symbols of ideology.
Here resides the illogicality of the revolution, and it is this that Kropotkin, man and scientist of his time, could not see clearly. But in this also lies our task today. To avoid this contradictory problem would also mean to definitively consign The Conquest of Bread to the dusty atmosphere of the library.

Introduction to Sabate, Guerilla Extraordinary

2010-07-22T23:26:00.000-07:00

First published by Elephant Editions 1974

This book tells of the life, the action and the death of an anarchist guerilla.
Many things have happened since it was first published at the end of the sixties, and experience of armed struggle in Europe is no longer limited to that of the comrades who carried on the struggle against Francoist Spain. But that does not in the least detract from the theoretical and practical importance of Sabate's actions, and the value of this book in particular.
The discourse could be a long one, but let us try to shorten it so as not to complicate things.
It would seem that all anarchists should agree on certain points; not hold exactly the same opinion, but at least be without any major contradictions. The first such issue is that of attacking the class enemy (i.e. the exploiter), both in the macroscopic aspect of the State and in the microscopic one of the individuals responsible for exploitation. Yet when a comrade organises to pass from words to deed, those who come forward with doubts, perplexity, suspicion, uncertainty, are never lacking. There are always some anarchist comrades who have turned their anarchism into a kind of wind-shield to hide their own weakness and compromise. They obviously cannot approve of anyone who contributes to unmasking them with their actions, of who, by attacking the enemy rouses the still waters of sleep, often attracting the attention of the forces of repression.
Such criticism as, "The time isn't right", "These things are only done when the revolution is near", "We must wait to be sure the masses are with us", are constantly aimed at the comrade who intends to act now, right away.
As far as Sabate's actions are concerned, he, in practice, was left alone with only a few comrades who from time to time united with him individually to continue the struggle. But these actions had to take place inside Spain. When it came to wanting to do something outside to strike the fascist regime, there was a flood of disagreement. And also, later, when there was recourse to international collaboration (for example the kidnapping of monsignor Ussia), there were more than a few dissenters. The fact that the action was to be seen in the light of its exceptional objective of saving the lives of comrades who had been sentenced to death was also underlined.
The reader will realise that little or nothing has changed since the time when Sabate carried out his struggle in complete isolation. Even in very recent times, when anarchists have organised to attack, the so-called `official' movement has preferred to remain silent, that is, when it has not come out with declarations of doubt or outright condemnation.
Is this the ineluctable destiny of all organisations? We do not believe so. An organisation that defines itself as custodian of the anarchist movement's ideological traditions must necessarily become conservative and regard all initiatives of attack - especially when not under its control - with preoccupation and suspicion. On the contrary, an organisation born as a structure of attack, capable of modifying itself according to the needs of the moment, that avoids bureaucratisation and has no intention of keeping any `memory', can become the indispensable basis for revolutionary action. And, basically, it is towards this kind of organisation that Sabate's efforts went, as with any other anarchist revolutionary who intends to attack the class enemy.
It is precisely on either side of this separating line that two different models of intervention develop.
On the one hand, the counter-informative model as an end in itself, a structure eternally repeating itself, that survives in its own image, from time to time supplying more advanced opinions on what the forces of power decide to circulate.
On the other hand, a minimal structure organising in order to act, that keeps itself well documented on reality, but only in order to bring about projects of intervention and revolutionary actions, not to distribute it for consumerism. In this perspective everything takes on a different light. In the first place the availability of means. Whoever limits themselves to counter-information bases themselves on the good will of comrades and their subscriptions. Whoever has a precise project of attack must go further, expropriating the necessary finance from the capitalists. But then the level of engagement is also different, in the latter case complete and total.
Of course there are risks. Not so much of life, which for a revolutionary is always at stake in all his decisions, as of separation, isolation.
The imbecility of others, their bad faith in not wanting to understand, their tepidness: all these wound mortally, often more than the enemy's bullets. Interested sympathy is also harmful, as is morbid curiosity.
And Sabate was wounded by all these painful thorns in his side before being killed by the Guardia Civile.
But he never stopped, never drew back. He never let himself be overcome by doubt. And let it not be said (as it has been said) that things were easier for him because we all agree about combating fascism. That is all right for the hypocrites who disguise themselves as revolutionaries, certainly not for anarchists. Fascism is always before us, even when it wears the multi-coloured clothing of Mrs Thatcher's relatively permissive welfare State.
Everyone understands that quite easily. Less easily do they decide to act. That is why a book of this kind is always useful: because reading it pushes one to action, arouses enthusiasm. Because it shows the thousand and one ways in which it is possible to strike the enemy, because it gives no space to resignation and doubt.
It is necessary to understand that we cannot wait for others - not even for other comrades - to give us the sign to act, the final indication. This must come from us. Each one of us, taken individually, must find his or her own comrades and constitute small affinity groups which are the essential element for giving life to the organisation of attack that we need. Actions will come easily, as a natural consequence of the decision to act together against the common enemy. Grand words, declarations to go down in history, the great organisations of the glorious past and vast programs for the future are all useless if the will of the individual comrade is lacking.
And in this perspective Sabate was never alone. His struggle is still continuing today.

Informal organisation

2010-07-22T04:20:00.000-07:00

From: Anarchismo insurrezionalista. Edizioni Anarchismo, "I libri di Anarchismo" N. 10
June 1999

First let us distinguish the informal anarchist organisation from the anarchist organisation of synthesis. Considerable clarification will emerge from this distinction.What is an anarchist organisation of synthesis? It is an organisation based on groups or individuals that are more or less in constant relation with each other, that culminates in periodical congresses. During these open meetings basic theoretical analyses are discussed, a program is prepared and tasks are shared out covering a whole range of interventions in the social field. The organisation thus sets itself up as a point of reference, like an entity that is capable of synthesizing the struggles that are going on in reality of the class clash. The various commissions of this organisational model intervene in different struggles (as single comrades or groups) and, by intervening, give their contribution in first person without however losing site of the theoretical and practical orientation of the organisation as a whole, as decided at the most recent congress.When this kind of organisation develops itself fully (as happened in Spain in ’36) it begins to dangerously resemble a party. Synthesis becomes control. Of course, in moments of slack, this involution is less visible and might even seem an insult, but at other times it turns out to be more evident.In substance, in the organisation of synthesis (always specific and anarchist), a nucleus of specialists works out proposals at both the theoretical and ideological level, adapting them as far as possible to the program that is roughly decided upon at the periodic congresses. The shift away from this program can also be considerable (after all, anarchists would never admit to too slavish an adherence to anything), but when this occurs care is taken to return within the shortest possible time to the line previously decided upon.This organisation’s project is therefore that of being present in various situations: antimilitarism, nuclear power, unions, prisons, ecology, interventions in living areas, unemployment, schools, etc. This presence is either by direct intervention or through participaton in interventions managed by other comrades or organisations (anarchist or not).It becomes clear that participation aimed at bringing the struggle to within the project of synthesis cannot be autonomous. It cannot really adapt to the conditions of the struggle or collaborate effectively in a clear plan with the other revolutionary forces. Everything must either go through the ideological filter of synthesis or comply with the conditions approved earlier during the congress.This situation, which is not always as rigid as it might seem here, carries the ineliminable tendency of organisations of synthesis to drag struggles to the level of the base, proposing caution and using contrivances aimed at redimensioning any flight forward, any objective that is too open or means that might be dangerous.For example, if a group belonging to this kind of organisation (of synthesis, but always anarchist and specific) were to adhere to a structure that is struggling, let us say, against repression, it would be forced to consider the actions proposed by this structure in the light of the analyses that had roughly been approved at the congress. The structure would either have to accept these analyses, or the group belonging to the organisation of synthesis would stop its collaboration (if it is in a minority) or impose the expulsion (in fact, even if not with a precise motion) of those proposing different methods of struggle.Some people might not like it, but that is exactly how things work.One might ask oneself why on earth the proposal of the group belonging to the organisation of synthesis must by definition always be more backward, i.e. in the rearguard, or more cautious than others concerning possible actions of attack against the structures of repression and social consensus.Why is that? The answer is simple. The specific anarchist organisation of synthesis, which, as we have seen, culminates in periodic congresses has growth in numbers as its basic aim. It needs an operative force that must grow. Not to infinity exactly, but almost. In the case of the contrary it would not have the capacity to intervene in the various struggles, nor even be able to carry out its own principle task: proceding to synthesis in one single point of reference.Now, an organisation that has growth in members as its main aim must use instruments that guarantee proselytism and pluralism. It cannot take a clear position concerning any specific problem, but must always find a middle way, a political road that upsets the smallest number and turns out to be acceptable to most.The correct position concerning some problems, particularly repression and prisons, is often the most dangerous, and no group can put the organisation they belong to at risk without first agreeing with the other member groups. But that can only happen in congress, or at least at an extraordinary meeting, and we all know that on such occasions it is always the most moderate opinion that prevails, certainly not the most advanced.So, ineluctably, the presence of the organisation of synthesis in actual struggles, struggles that reach the essence of the class struggle, turns into a brake and control (often involuntarily, but it is still a question of control).The informal organisation does not present such problems. Affinity groups and comrades that see themselves in an informal kind of projectuality come together in action, certainly not by adhering to a program that has been fixed at a congress. They realise the project themselves, in their analyses and actions. It can occasionally have a point of reference in a paper or a series of meetings, but only in order to facilitate things, whereas it has nothing to do with congresses and such like.The comrades who recognise themselves in an informal organisation are automatically a part of it. They keep in contact with the other comrades through a paper or by other means, but, more important, they do so by participating in the various actions, demonstrations, encounters, etc., that take place from time to time. The main verification and analysis therefore comes about during moments of struggle. To begin with these might simply be moments of theoretical verification, turning into something more later on.In an informal organisation there is no question of synthesis. There is no desire to be present in all the different situations and even less to formulate a project that takes the struggles into the depths of a programme that has been approved in advance.The only constant points of reference are insurrectional methods: in other words self-organisation of struggles, permanent conflictuality and attack.

Affinity

2010-07-22T04:19:00.001-07:00

From: Anarchismo insurrezionalista, Edizioni Anarchismo, "I libri di Anarchismo" N. 10
June 1999

Anarchists have an ambivalent relationship with the question of organisation.
On the one hand there are those who accept a permanent structure with a well-defined programme and means at their disposal (even if only a few), that is divided up into commissions, while on the other there is a refusal of any stable relationship, even in the short term.
Classical anarchist federations and individualists are the two extremes of an escape from the reality of the clash. The comrade that belongs to an organised structure hopes that a revolutionary transformation will result from a growth in numbers, so he holds the cheap illusion that the structure is capable of controlling any authoritarian involution or any concession to the logic of the party. The individualist comrade is solicitous of his own ego and fears any form of contamination, any concession to others or any active collaboration, believing such things to be giving in and compromising.
This turns out to be the natural consequence, even for comrades who consider the problem of specific organisation and the federation of groups critically.
The organisation is thus born before any struggles take place and ends up adapting to the perspective of a certain kind of struggle which—at least one supposes—is to make the organisation itself grow. In this way the structure has a vicarious relationship with the repressive decisions of power, which for various reasons dominate the scene of the class struggle. Resistance and the self-organisation of the exploited are seen as molecular elements to be grasped here and there, but only become meaningful on entering and becoming part of the specific structure or allow themselves to be regrouped into mass organisms under the (more or less direct) leadership of the latter.
In this way, one is always waiting. It is as though we are all in provisional liberty. We scrutinise the attitudes of power and keep ready to react (always within the limits of the possible) against the repression that strikes us, hardly ever taking the initiative, setting out our interventions in first person, overturning the logic of the loser. Anybody that recognises themselves in structured organisations expects to see their number of members increase. Anyone that works within mass structures (for example in the anarcho-syndicalist optic) is waiting for today’s small demands to turn into great revolutionary results in the future. Those who deny all that but also spend their time waiting, who knows what for, are often stuck in resentment against all and everything, sure of their own ideas without realising that they are no more than the flip side of the organisational and programmatical stance.
We believe that it is possible to do something else.
We start off from the consideration that it is necessary to establish contact with other comrades in order to pass to action. We are not in a condition to act alone as long as our struggle is reduced to platonic protest, as bloody and terrible as you like, but still platonic. If we want to act on reality incisively there must be many of us.
How can we find our comrades? We have cast aside any question of programmes and platforms in advance, throwing them out once and for all. So what is left?
Affinity.
Affinities and divergence exist among anarchists. I am not talking about personal affinity here, i.e. sentimental aspects that often bring comrades together (in the first place love, friendship, sympathy, etc.), I am talking about a deepening of reciprocal knowledge. The more this deepening grows, the greater the affinity can become. In the case of the contrary, divergences can turn out to be so great as to make any action impossible. So the solution lies in a growth in reciprocal knowledge, developed through a projectual examination of the various problems that the class struggle presents us with.
There are a whole range of problems that we want to face, and usually care is taken not examine them in their entirety. We often limit ourselves to questions that are close at hand because they are the ones that affect us most (repression, prison, etc.).
But it is precisely our capacity to examine the problem that we want to face that leads to the best way to create conditions for affinity. This can obviously never be absolute or total (except in very rare cases), but can be sufficient to create relations disposed to acting.
If we restrict our intervention to the most obvious and superficial aspects of what we consider the essential problems to be, we will never be able to discover the affinity we desire. We will constantly be wandering around at the mercy of sudden, unsuspected contradictions that could upset any project of intervention in reality. I insist on pointing out that affinity should not be confused with sentiment. We can recognise affinity with comrades that we do not particularly like and on the other hand like comrades with whom we do not have any affinity.
Among other things, it is important not to let oneself be hindered in one’s action by false problems such as a presumed differentiation between feelings and political motivations. From what has been said above it might seem that feelings should be kept separate from political analysis, so we could, for example, love someone and not share their ideas at all and vice versa. That is roughly possible, no matter how lacerating it might be. The personal aspect (or that of feelings if you like) must be included in the above concept of going into the range of problems, as instinctively succumbing to our impulses often signifies a lack of reflection and analysis, or not being able to admit to simply being possessed by god.
From what we have said there now starts to emerge, even nebulously, a first approximation of our way of considering the anarchist group: a number of comrades linked by a common affinity.
The more the project that these comrades build together is gone into, the greater their affinity will be. It follows that real organisation, the effective (and not fictitious) capacity to act together, i.e. to find each other, make analyses and pass to action, is in relation to the affinity reached and has nothing to do with more or less camouflaged monograms, programmes, platforms, flags or parties.
The affinity group is therefore a specific organisation that comes together around common affinities. These cannot be identical for all, but different comrades will have infinite affinity structures, all the more varied the wider the effort of analytical quest reached.
It follows that all these comrades will also tend towards quantitative growth, which is however limited and not the main aim of the activity. Numerical development is indispensable for action and it is also a test of the breadth of the analyses that one is developing and its capacity to gradually discover affinity with a greater number of comrades.
It follows that the organism thus born will end up giving itself means of intervention in common. First, an instrument of debate necessary for analysis that is capable, as far as possible, of supplying indications on a wide range of problems and, at the same time, of constituting a point of reference for the verification—at a personal or collective level—of the affinities or divergencies that arise.
Lastly it should be said that although the element that holds a group of this kind together is undoubtedly affinity, its propulsive aspect is action. To limit oneself to the first element and leave the other in second place would result in relationships withering in Byzantian perfectionism.

Introduction to Insurrectionalist Anarchism

2010-07-22T04:17:00.000-07:00

From: Anarchismo insurrezionalista. Edizioni Anarchismo, "I libri di Anarchismo" N. 10
June 1999

The following ideas have emerged from a long itinerary of struggle and reflection. They represent a tormented, complex thesis, which is not only difficult to set out—which would simply be due a defect of the author—but even to expose clearly and definitively.
In conflict with my whole being, I am about to set out the fundamental elements of insurrectionalist anarchism anatomically. Will it be possible? I don’t know. I shall try. If the reading of these notes begins to suffocate, then just skip through them and leave it at that.
A mass insurrection, or that of a whole people, can at any given moment lead to the State’s incapacity to maintain order and respect for the law and even lead to the disintegration of social and economic conditions. This also implies the presence of individuals and groups that are capable of grasping this disintegration beyond its immediate manifestations. They must be able to see beyond the often chance and secondary reasons for the initial insurrectional outburst. In order to give their contribution to the struggle, they must look beyond the first clashes and skirmishes, not put a brake on them or underestimate them as mere incoherent insufference towards those in power.
But who is prepared to take on this task? It could be anarchists, not so much because of their basic ideological choice and declared denial of all authority, as for their capacity to evaluate methods of struggle and organisational projects.
Moreover, only those who have rebelled and faced the consequences of this rebellion and lived it to the full, be it only within the microcosm of their own lives, can have the sensitivity and intuition necessary to grasp the signs of the insurrectional movement in course. Not all anarchists are rebels, just as not all rebels are anarchists. To complicate things, it is not enough to be a rebel to understand the rebellion of others. It is also necessary to be willing to understand. We need to look at the economic and social conditions around us. We must not let ourselves be swept away like a river in full swell by the resounding demonstrations of the popular movement, even when it is moving full steam ahead and its initial triumphs lead us to hoist banners of illusion. Critique is always the first instrument, the starting point. But this must not merely be a surly taking sides. It must be a participatory critique, one that involves the heart, feels the excitement of the clash against the same enemy, now with its face finally stamped in the dust.
It is not enough simply to rebel. Even if a hundred rebels were to get together it would still not be sufficient, they would merely be a hundred crazed molecules writhing in destructive agony as the struggle spreads, wildly sweeping everything away. Important as an example and stimulus, rebels end up succumbing to the needs of the moment. No matter how effective and radical they are, the more their conscience carries them to attack—often blindly—the more they become aware of an insurmountable limit due to their failure to see any organisational outlet. They wait for suggestions from the mass in revolt, a word here, a word there, in the quick of the clash or during moments of calm when everyone wants to talk before taking up the struggle again. And they are not aware that even during these exciting moments there are always politicians waiting in ambush. The masses do not possess the virtues we often attribute to them. The assembly is certainly not the place put one’s life at risk, but one’s life can be put at risk by decisions made in assemblies. And the political animals that raise their heads in these collective moments always have clear ideas concerning what to suggest, with fine programmes of recuperation and a call to order already in their pockets. Of course, they will not say anything that is not absolutely correct, politically, I mean, so will be taken to be revolutionaries. But they are always the same, the same old political animals laying the foundations for the power of the future, the kind that recuperates the revolutionary thrust and addresses it towards pacification. We must limit destruction, comrades. Please, after all, what we are destroying belongs to us ..and so on.
To shoot before—and more quickly than—others, is a virtue of the Far West: it’s good for a day or two, then you need to use your head. And using your head means you need a project.
So the anarchist cannot simply be a rebel, he or she must be a rebel equipped with a project. He or she must, that is, unite courage and heart with the knowledge and foresight of action. Their decisions will still always be illuminated with the flames of destruction, but sustained with the fuel of critical analysis.
Now, if we think about it for a moment, a project cannot just turn up out of the blue in the middle of the fray. It is silly to think that everything must come forth from the insurgent people. That would be blind determinism and would consign us gagged into the hands of the first politician that stood up on a chair and made a few organisational and programmatical proposals, throwing smoke in everyone’s eyes with a few words strung one after the other. Although insurrection is a revolutionary moment of great collective creativity, one which can produce analytical suggestions of considerable intensity (think of the insurgent workers of the Paris Comune who shot at the clocks), it is not the only source of theoretical and projectual wealth. The highest moments of the people in arms undoubtedly eliminate obstacles and uncertainties, clearly showing what had only been hazy until then, but they cannot illuminate what is not already there. These moments are the potent reflector that make it possible to bring about a revolutionary and anarchist project, but this project must already exist, even if only in terms of method. It must have been elaborated and experimented to some degree, although obviously not in every detail.
On the other hand, when we intervene in mass struggles, clashes with intermediate claims, is that not almost exclusively so as to propose our methods? Workers in a particular factory demanding jobs and trying to avoid being laid off, a group of homeless people trying to get shelter, prisoners on strike for better conditions in jail, students rebelling against a cultureless school are all things that interest us, up to a point. We know perfectly well that when we participate in these struggles as anarchists, no matter how they end up there will not be any corresponding growth in our movement, and this is quite irrelevant. The excluded often forget who we even are, and there is no reason in the world why they should remember us, least of all one based on gratitude. We have asked ourselves more than once, in fact, what we are doing in the midst of such struggles for claims, we anarchists and revolutionaries who are against work, against school, against any concession to the State, against property and also against any kind of negotiation that graciously concedes a better life in the prisons. The answer is simple. We are there because we can introduce different methods. And our methods take shape in a project. We are with the excluded in these intermediate struggles because we have a different model to propose, one based on self-organised struggles, attack and permanent conflictuality. This is our point of strength, and we are only prepared to struggle along with the excluded if they adopt such methods of attack, even concerning objectives that remain within the realm of claiming.
A method would be no more than an agglomeration of meaningless words if were we unable to articulate it within a projectual dimension. Had they paid some attention to this aspect in the first place, many anxious critics of anarchist insurrectionalism would just have gone back to their momentarily disturbed slumber. What is the point of accusing us of being stuck in methods that are a hundred years out of date without taking a look at what we are talking about? The insurrectionalism we are talking about is quite different to the glorious days on the barricades, even if it might contain elements of a struggle that moves in such a direction at times. But as simple revolutionary theory and analysis, a method that comes to life in a project, it does not necessarily take this apocalyptic moment into account, but develops and intensifies far from any waving of banners or glittering of guns.
Many comrades are fully aware of the need to attack and are doing what they can to bring it about. They perceive the beauty of the clash and the confrontation with the class enemy hazily, but do not want to spend much time thinking about it. They want to hear nothing of revolutionary projects, so carry on wasting the enthusiasm of rebellion which, moving into a thousand rivulets, ends up extinguishing itself in small isolated manifestations of insufference. These comrades are obviously not all the same, you could say that each one constitutes a universe of his or her own, but all, or nearly all of them, feel irritated by any attempt to clarify ideas. They don’t like to make distinctions. What is the point of talking about affinity groups, informal organisation, base nuclei or coordinations, they say? Don’t things speak for themselves? Are not tyranny and injustice, exploitation and the ferocity of power, quite visible there in front of us? Don’t they exist in the form of things, and men basking in the sun as though they had nothing to worry about? What is the point of wasting time in pointless discussions? Why not attack now? Indeed, why not turn on the first uniform we come across? Even a ‘sensible’ person like Malatesta was of this opinion, in a way, when he said that he preferred individual rebellion to waiting to see the world upturned before doing anything.
Personally I have never had anything against this. On the contrary. Rebellion is the first step. It is the essential condition for burning our bridges behind us, and even if it does not cut the bonds that tie us to society and power with a thousand thick ropes in the form of family, morals, work, obeying the law, at least it weakens them. But I am convinced that this is not enough. I believe it is necessary to go further and think about the possibilities of giving more organisational strength to one’s actions, so that rebellion can transform itself into a project aimed at generalised insurrection.
This second step obviously does not appeal to many comrades. And, feeling such efforts to be beyond them, they underestimate the problem or, worse still, criticise those who do spend time and effort on the question of organisation.
Here we will try to provide a few elements to enable us to examine the organisational aspect of insurrectionalist anarchism in some depth. In particular, the problem of the affinity group, informality, self-organisation of struggles, base nuclei and the co-ordination of these nuclei (anarchists and non-anarchists) with affinity groups (of anarchists), through informal organisation.
As you can see, the question implies complex problems of method, and this means understanding certain concepts that are often distorted within the context of insurrectionalism. We must therefore give them our full attention in order to get rid of some of the preconceived ideas that often limit our vision without our realising it.
This introductory note will become more schmetic as it takes a look at these key concepts. The text itself will be more articulate, but would probably be difficult to follow without first becoming familiar with these concepts.
An anarchist group can be composed of perfect strangers. I have often gone into anarchist meeting rooms in Italy and elsewhere and hardly known anybody. One’s mere presence in such a place, the attitudes, the jargon and the way one presents oneself, the level of discussion and statements impregnated with basic orthodox anarchist ideology, are such that any anarchist feels at ease within a short space of time and communicates with the other comrades as well as possible, to their reciprocal satisfaction.
It is not my intention to speak of the ways that an anarchist group can be organised here. There are many, and each chooses their own comrades as they think best. But there is a particular way of forming an anarchist group that puts real or presumed affinity among all the participants before anything else. Now, this affinity is not something that can be found in a declaration of principles, a glorious past, or a history of ‘militancy’, no matter how far back this goes in time. Affinity is acquired by having knowledge of each other. That is why one sometimes believes one has affinity with a comrade, then discovers that that is not actually so, and viceversa. An affinity group is therefore a melting pot in which such relations can mature and consolidate.
But because perfection is a thing of angels, even affinity needs to be considered with a certain mental acumen and not be accepted supinely as the panacea for all our weaknesses. I can only discover that I have affinity with someone if I reveal myself to that person, do away with all the affectations that normally protect me like a second skin, harder and tougher than the first. And this cannot simply come about through small talk, me chattering about myself then listening to the other’s tales, but must come about in things that are done together. In other words, it must come about in action. When we do things, we unconsciously send out tiny signals that are far more revealing than words. It is from these exchanges that we create the conditions that are necessary in order for us to gain knowledge of each other.
If the group’s activity is not doing for the sake of it so as to grow numerically, but has the qualitative aim of comrades being aware of each other and feeling at one with each other, sharing the tension towards action and the desire to transform the world, then this is an affinity group. If it is not, the search for affinity will be no more than the search for a shoulder to lean on.
Affinity is therefore the knowledge that comrades acquire of each other, which is gained through action in the realisation of one’s ideas. A glance backwards to allow my comrades to see who I am is reabsorbed by looking forward together into a future in which we build our common project. In other words, we decide to intervene in specific struggles and see what we are capable of. These two moments, the first, let us say, of the knowledge of the individual, and the second, the projectual one of the knowledge of the group intertwine and constitute affinity, allowing the group to be considered to all effects an ‘affinity group’.
The resulting condition is not fixed in time once and for all. It moves, develops, regresses and modifies during the course of the various struggles, drawing from them so as to grow both theoretically and practically. It is not a monolithic entity. Decisions are not made vertically. There is no faith to be sworn upon nor commandments to believe in, in times of doubt or fear. Everything is discussed within the group throughout the course of the struggle, everything is reconsidered from the start, even if solid, eternal points might seem to exist already.
The affinity group’s task is to elaborate a particular project, the best place to study and examine the conditions one decides to operate in. It might seem that organisations of synthesis are better instruments for intervening in struggles than affinity groups, but the vast range of interests held by anarchist structures of synthesis is only apparent. In fact, in an organisation of synthesis, groups are allocated tasks at congresses, and although they are free to interest themselves in all the problems that characterise this society divided into classes, basically only operate according to what has been dictated by the congress. Moreover, being linked to programmes and principles that have been accepted once and for all, they are unable to make independent decisions and end up complying to the rigid limitations fixed by the organisation in congress. The latter’s role is to safeguard the organisation itself, in other words to ‘disturb’ power as little as possible and avoid being ‘outlawed’. The affinity group avoids such limitations, sometimes easily, sometimes only thanks to the courage and decision of the comrades that make it up. Of course, such structures cannot give courage to those who lack it. It cannot suggest attack unless each individual is already a rebel in his or her soul. It cannot go into action if people are only prepared to think at the level of an afternoon chat.
Once the problems concerning what is to be acted upon have been gone into, the necessary documentation has been found and analyses worked out, the affinity group goes into action. This is one of the fundamental characteristics of this kind of anarchist structure. It does not wait for problems to appear like a spider in the middle of a web. It looks for them and seeks a solution, which must obviously be accepted by the excluded who are bearing the brunt of the problem. But in order to make a proposition to a social reality that is suffering some specific form of aggression by power in a given area, it is necessary to be physically present among the excluded of that area and have a real awareness of the problems involved.
The affinity group therefore moves in the direction of local intervention, facing one particular problem and creating all the necessary psychological and practical conditions, both individually and collectively. The problem can then be faced with the characteristics and methods of insurrectionalism which are self-organisation, permanent conflictuality and attack.
One single affinity group cannot necessarily carry out such an intervention on its own. Often, at least according to the (few and controversial) experiences to date, the nature of the problem and complexity of intervention, including the extent of the area as well as the means required to develop the project and the ideas and needs of the people involved, require something more. Hence the need to keep in contact with other affinity groups so as to increase the number of comrades and find the means and ideas suited to the complexity and dimension of the problem that is being faced.
That is how informal organisation originates.
Various anarchist affinity groups can come together to give life to an informal organisation aimed at facing a problem that is too complex for one group alone. Of course, all the groups participating in the informal organisation must more or less agree with the intervention and participate in both the actions and ideas.
Affinity groups often develop informal relations that become constant as they meet regularly to prepare for specific struggles or—better still—during the course of these struggles. This facilitates the circulation of information about the latter and the projects that are in preparation, as well as signs from certain areas of the world of the excluded.
An informal organisation ‘functions’ quite simply. It has no name as it does not aim to grow numerically. There are no fixed structures (apart from the single affinity groups, each one of which operates quite autonomously), otherwise the term ‘informal’ would be meaningless. It is not formally ‘constituted’, there are no congresses but only simple meetings from time to time (preferably during the course of the struggles themselves). There are no programmes, only the common experience of insurrectional struggles and the methods that distinguish them: self-organisation, permanent conflictuality and attack.
The aims of the informal organisation are conferred on it by the individual affinity groups that make it up. In the few experiences that have materialised it has been a question of one specific objective, for example the destruction of the Cruise missile base in Comiso in 1982-1983. But there could also be more than one intervention and the informal organisation would make it possible for single groups to intervene in these different situations. For example they could alternate when it became necessary to be in one place for a considerable length of time (in Comiso groups stayed in the area for two years). Another aim could be to provide both analytical and practical means, and provide the financial support that the individual group might require.
The primary function of the informal organisation is to make known the various affinity groups and the comrades that make them up. If you think about it, this is still a question of a search for affinity, this time at a different level. Here the search for affinity is intensified by the project—which does not exclude the ever-increasing knowledge of the single individual—and comes about at the level of more than one group. One deduces from this that the informal organisation is also an affinity group, based on all the affinity groups that make it up.
The above considerations, which we have been developing over the past fifteen years, should have been of some use to comrades in their understanding the nature of informal organisation. This does not seem to be the case. In my opinion, the most serious misunderstanding comes from the latent desire of many of us to flex our muscles. We want to give ourselves a strong organisational structure because that seems to be the only way to fight a power structure that is strong and muscular. According to these comrades the first characteristic that such a structure should have is that it be specific and robust, must last in time and be clearly visible so as to constitute a kind of light amidst the struggles of the excluded—a light, a guide, a point of reference.
Alas! We do not share this opinion. All the economic and social analyses of post-industrial capitalism show how power would swallow up such a strong, visible structure in one gulp. The disappearance of the centrality of the working class (at least what was once considered such) means that an attack carried out by a rigid, visible structure would be impracticable. If such structures are not simply destroyed on impact, they would just be co-opted into the ambit of power in order to recuperate and recycle the most irreducible elements.
So long as the affinity group continues to look inwards, it will be no more than a few comrades giving themselves their own rules and respecting them. By looking inwards I do not just mean staying inside one’s anarchist place, limiting oneself to the usual discussions among the initiated, but also responding to the various deadlines of power and repression with declarations and documents. In that case the affinity group would only differ from other anarchist groups superficially: ‘political’ choices, ways of interpreting the various responses to the power structure’s claim to regulate our lives and those of all the excluded.
The profound sense of being a ‘different’ structure, i.e. one based on a way of organising that is quite different to all other anarchist groups—in a word, on affinity—only becomes operative when it sets out a project of specific struggle. And what characterises this project more than anything is the presence of a considerable number of excluded, of people—in a word, the mass—bearing the brunt of repression that the project is addressing with recourse to insurrectionalist methods.
The essential element in the insurrectional project is therefore mass participation. And, as we started off from the condition of affinity among the single anarchist groups participating in it, it is also an essential element of this affinity itself. It would be no more than mere camaraderie d’elite if it were to remain circumscribed to the reciprocal search for deeper personal knowledge between comrades.
But it would be nonsense to consider trying to make other people become anarchists and suggest that they enter our groups during the struggle. Not only would it be nonsense, it would be a horrible ideological forcing of things that would upturn the whole meaning of affinity groups and the eventual informal organisation that might ensue in order to face the specific repressive attack.
But here we are faced with the need to create organisational structures that are capable of regrouping the excluded in such a way as to begin the attack on repression. So we come to the need to give life to autonomous base nuclei, which can obviously give themselves any other name that indicates the concept of self-organisation.
We have now reached the crucial point of the insurrectional project: the constitution of autonomous base nuclei (we are using this term here to simplify things).
The essential, visible and immediately comprehensible characteristic of the latter is that they are composed of both anarchists and non-anarchists.
The more difficult points reside elsewhere however, and on the few occasions of experimentation these have turned out to be a source of considerable misunderstanding. First of all, the fact that they are structures in the quantitative sense. If they are such—and in fact they are—then this characteristic needs to be clarified. They are actually points of reference, not fixed structures where people can count themselves through all the procedures of established membership (card-carrying, payment of dues, supplying services, etc). The only aim of the base nuclei is struggle. They operate like lungs in the respiratory system, swelling when the struggle intensifies and reducing in size when it weakens, to swell again when the next clash occurs. During quiet spells, between one involvement and another—and here by involvement we mean any aspect of struggle, even simply handing out a leaflet, participating in a public meeting, but also squatting a building or sabotaging one of the instruments of power—the nucleus acts as a zonal reference, a sign of the presence of an informal organisational structure.
To see autonomous base nuclei as needing to grow quantitatively would be to turn them into union-style organisms, i.e. something like the Cobas in Italy, who defend workers’ rights in the various productive sectors through a wide range of activities such as claiming and defence of those they represent. The more delegates there are, the louder the voice of the claimant. The autnonomous base nucleus does not have delegates, it does not propose struggles based on wide objectives such as the defence of jobs, wage increases, or safeguarding health in the factory, etc. The base nucleus exists for the one objective that was decided upon at the start. This can also be a claim of some kind, not made through the representative method of delegation, but faced using direct methods of immediate struggle such as constant unannounced attacks and the blunt refusal of all the political forces that claim to represent anyone or anything.
Those who form the base nuclei should therefore not expect some complex level of support to cover a wide range of needs. They must understand that this is not a question of some union-style defence organisation, but is an instrument of struggle against one specific objective, and is only valid if the initial decision to have recourse to insurrectional methods stands firm. Participation in the nuclei is quite spontaneous, as there are no benefits other than the specific, exclusive one of strength and organisation concerning the objective that has been chosen together, and attacking it. So, it is quite logical not to expect such organisms to develop a high numerical or (even less) stable, composition. In the preparatory phase of the struggle those who identify with the objective, agree with it and are prepared to put themselves at risk, are few. When the struggle is underway and the first results begin to appear, the hesitant and weak will also join in and the nucleus will swell, only for these last-minute participants to disappear later on. This is quite natural and should not worry us or make us see this instrument of mass organisation in a negative light.
Another common area of incomprehension is the short lifespan of the autonomous base nucleus itself. It comes to an end upon reaching the objective that had been decided (or through common agreement concerning the impossibility of reaching it). Many ask themselves: if the nuclei ‘also’ function as a regrouping point of reference, why not keep them in place for possible use in some future struggle? Here we come back to the concept of ‘informality’ again. Any structure that carries on in time beyond its original aim, sooner or later turns into a stable structure whose original purpose is distorted into the new and apparently legitimate one of quantitative growth. It grows in strength in order to reach the multiplicity of goals—each one interesting enough in itself—that appear on the nebulous horizon of the exploited. As soon as the informal structure plants roots in a new, stable form, individuals suited to managing the latter will appear on the scene: always the same ones, the most capable, with plenty of time to spare. Sooner or later the circle will close around the so-called revolutionary anarchist structure, which by now will have found its sole aim, its own survival. This is precisely what we see happening when such an organisational structure, albeit anarchist and revolutionary, establishes itself: it becomes a rarefied form of power that attracts all the comrades who want to do good for the people and so on, etc, etc.—all with the best will in the world, of course.
One last organisational element, which is necessary at times, is the ‘coordination’ of autonomous base nuclei. The coordinating structure is also informal and is composed of various representatives of the base nuclei. Whereas the individual nuclei, given their function as ‘lungs’ can be informal to the point of not even having any fixed meeting place (because a nucleus can arrange to meet anywhere), this cannot be so for the coordinating body. If a struggle—still circumscribed to the specific question that started the project—lasts for a considerable length of time and covers a fairly wide area, it is necessary to find a place for the various activities of the base nuclei to coordinate themselves.
The presence of anarchist affinity groups is not directly visible in the coordination, and this can also be said concerning the informal organisation. Of course anarchists are present in all the various base nuclei, but this is not the ideal place for anarchist propaganda in the classic sense of the word. The first thing to be done, both within the coordination and the individual nuclei, is to analyse the problem, the objective to be reached, then look at the insurrectional means to be used in the struggle. The task of comrades is to participate in the project and go into the means and methods to be employed, along with everyone else involved. Although this might sound simple here, it turns out to be far more complicated in practice.
The function of the ‘co-ordination of the autonomous base nuclei’ is therefore that of linking up the struggles. Here we have only one thing to suggest (absolutely indigestable for anarchists, but quite simple for anyone who is not an anarchist): the need, in the case of a mass attack against a given structure of power, to decide upon individual tasks before the attack takes place, i.e. to agree on what needs to be done down to the minutest detail. Many imagine such occasions of struggle to be an orgy of spontaneity: the objective is there in front of everyone, all you need to do is go ahead and rout out the forces protecting it and destroy them. I am putting things in these terms here, although I know that many will have a hundred different ways of seeing things, but the essence does not change. All of the participants must have a precise idea of what to do, it being a question of a struggle taking place in a given area that will have to overcome specific armed resistance. Now, if only a few people know what to do the resulting confusion will be the same, if not worse, than if no one does at all.
A plan is therefore necessary. There have been instances where it was necessary to have an armed military plan simply to hand out a leaflet (for example during the insurrection of Reggio Calabria). But can this plan really be made available to everybody, even just a few days before the attack? I do not think so. For reasons of security. On the other hand, details of the plan of attack must be available to all the participants. One deduces that not everybody can participate in drawing it up, but only those who in some way or other happen to be known either for their participation in the autonomous base nuclei, or because they belong to the affinity groups adhering to the coordination. This is to avoid infiltration by police and secret services, something that is more than likely on such occasions. People who are not known must be guaranteed by those who are. This might be unpleasant, but it is unavoidable.
The problem gets complicated when the project in course is known to many comrades who could be interested in participating in one of the actions of attack we are talking about. In this case, the influx would be considerable (in the case of Comiso, in the days of the attempted occupation, about 300 comrades came from all over Italy and beyond) and the need to avoid the presence of infiltrators becomes far more serious. Comrades turning up at the last minute might not know about the action in course, and will not be able to understand what is going on. In the same way, all those who decide not to accept the above verification will end up feeling left out.
And finally two last points that merit a concise, linear explanation: why we consider the insurrectional methodology and projectuality to be the most suitable means in the revolutionary clash today, and what we think can come from the use of insurrectional methods in a situation that is not insurrection in act.
As far as the first question is concerned, an analysis of social and economic reality today shows how structures of synthesis reproduce all the defects of the political parties of the past, great or small, making them ineffective or only useful to the restructuring of power.
To the second question, one could reply that it is impossible to say in advance how the conditions leading to insurrection will develop. Any occasion might be the right one, even if it looks like an insignificant experiment. But there is more. To develop a project of insurrectional struggle starting from one specific problem, i.e. a precise manifestation of power to the detriment of a considerable mass of excluded, is more than a simple ‘experiment’. It is insurrection in act, without wanting to exaggerate something that starts off as something small, and will probably remain so. What is important is the method, and anarchists still have a long way to go in that direction, otherwise we will remain unprepared in the case of the many insurrections of whole peoples that have taken place to date and continue to do so.
Basically this book is a contribution to the great problem ‘What is to be done?’.
Catania, 21 November 1998.