Jean Weir

\

Contents

Original titles
Preamble

‘Taking Back Our Lives

Passion for Freedom

Armed Struggle and the Revolutionary movement

Athens, the Revolutionary Struggle trial: Statement to the terror court
of Korydallos,

UK, August 2011 — the struggle against the existent continues

London, 9 December 2010 — Thousands fight against exclusion and the
death society in iconoclastic revelry

‘The End of anarchism?
Afew words...

To the Deranged (Postscript)

1n

2

31

10

16

52

51

58
“The name of ohn Moore, who is quoted opposite, has appeared on this
page in various Elephant Editions pamphlets. Together with his com-
‘panion Leigh Starcross, he collaborated in editing some tranlations fol-
Iowing a brief encounter at a London anarchist bookfar. Introducing
himself as an ‘anarchist poet —he s author of four short books: Anar-
chy and Ecstasy, The Primitivist Primer, Lovebite and Book of Leveling—
and known for his writings on anarcho-primitivism and for editing the
collection of essays on Neitzsche, | Am Not @ Man, I Am Dynamite —he
had enquired with interest about future Elephant publications. To my
xeply that they were slowed down by my perennial need to repeatedly
g0 over them before putting them in print he unhesitatingly offered his
collaboration, which he and Leigh duly and heartly gave for a number
of titles. 1 left London for a while and we lost touch. It was with bitter
disbelief that 1 later learned that he had died suddenly in October 2002

The opposite citation is from one of his articles in an early issue of
Green Anarchist.
irom The Tyranny of Weaknes, Propuls

Words have been colonised by power, so that increasingly language can
only carry the meanings of the dominant order. Hence words are a power-
Jful weapon in the arsenal of power. Language does not operate as a vehicle
for communication, but rather as a means for effecting separation.

John Moore

‘The laboratories of power are programming new model of renunciation
for us. Only for us, of course. For the winning minority, the ‘included’, the
‘model i sill aggressivity and conquest. We are no longer the sanguinary,
violent barbarians that once let loose in insurrections and uncontrollable
revalts. We have become philosophers of nothing, sceptical about action,
blasé and dandy. We have not even noticed that they are shrinking our
language and our brains. We are hardiy able to write any more, something
that is important in order to communicate with others. We are hardly
able to talk any longer. We express ourselves in a stunted jargon made
up of banalities from television and sport, a barrack-style journalism that
apparenly facilitates communication, whereas in reality it debases and
castrates it

Alfredo M. Bonanno'

e Utopi p. 44, Fephant Editons.

4
Original titles

‘Taking Back Our Lives — 325 Magazine #8

Passion for Freedom — 325 Magazine #8

Armed Struggle and the Revolutionary Movement — 325 Magazine #10

Athens, the Revolutionary Struggle Trial: Statement to the terror court in Korydal-
los prisons — Dark Nights 28, 325.nostate.

‘The Struggle Against the Existent Continues (work in progress) — Angry news from
around the world, 13 August 2011

London, 9 December — Thousands fight against exclusion and the death saciety in
iconoclastic revelry — Angry news from around the world

‘The End of Anarchism? A few words... - The End of anarchism? — Luigi Galleani
Elephant Editions, p. 5, A few words.

To the Deranged — intro to unpublished magazine, Deranged 00
Preamble

Words. Mere Words. The pages that follow are in part transcriptions of the spo-
ken word—the wonder worker that is no more’, as Emma Goldman wrote wistfully
over one hundred years ago when referring to the inadequacy of the spoken word
to awaken thought and shake people out of their lethargy. Here in the twenty-first
century anarchists no longer talk about spoken propaganda to awaken the masses,
bemoaning the absence of orators such as Johann Most or Luigi Galleani. In rare
encounters organized by comrades today ‘the masses® are noticeably absent, they
don't even enter the equation. Organized meetings or “talks’ as they are dully re-
ferred to are well-attended if there are 50-100 comrades. But there is no need for
panic. Now all but the most disconnected fossilized anarchists have moved beyond
aims of a quantitative growth in a hypothetical anarchist movement—where dis-
courses addressed 'to the masses” have degenerated into an insulting populism—to
the elaboration of ideas and methods addressed towards immediate action and at-
tack on power in all its forms. Numbers have ceased to be important for anarchists
as a prerequisite for attack. The illusion of ‘Le Grand Soir’ was a wonderful dream,
it kept the flame flickering and thousands of militants waiting in the wings.

No, lack of numbers s no cause for alarm. They are there, the exploited, all around
us—are also “us —and could take us by surprise again at any moment (as could we
ourselves). In the realm of the quanitative our task is to experiment and spread
an insurrectional method for the self-organization of the necessary destruction of
power and subjugation. Small groups with intermediate destructive aims based on
affinty that can multply. spread horizontally and coordinate, without limit. The
apparent rift between anarchist theory and practice thus disappears along with the
false conflict between individual and mass, and not least the conviction that the
tenets of anarchism must be espoused by the exploited before they can fight for
their own freedom along with that of others. An informal practice of attack leads
to fieedom revealing tself qualitatively, in leaps and bounds, far from the straight
line of quantity, education, progess and waiting

‘We have not yet reached the total eclipse of thought, analysis and methodolog-
ical experimentation. What we did depart from a long time ago is ideology (fixed
postulates detached from action) and organizations of synthesis, in favour of nfor-
mal anaxchist insurrectionalist projectualiy: This includes intermediate struggles
which have been gestating in embryo for too long without being fully embraced

6
and experimented apart from a (very) few notable exceptions. The informal adven-
ture starts from a group of comrades approaching an area of tension with a qualita-
tive proposal of self-organised attack, introducing a methodology such that when
quantity does make its appearance it is not in the form of a malleable amorphous
mass, but of a multiplicty of thinking, sel-organised creative/destructive individ-
uals. Their action is therefore not reduced to simply striking the structures of the
enemy but invlves elaborating an informal coordination of attack to be grasped
and experimented. In order to do this we need strong ideas and a methodological
proposition, where words come into their own as part of the arsenal of aftack

Looted by the pedlers of abstraction into the web of illusions or immersed in the
mud of leftst mystification, our words—our ideas—need to be stolen back into the
totality of the strugele, from where we can rvitalise them as transitory instruments
{0 identify the enemy, ignite passions and transform reality.

Only religions—including the secular ones~—invest words with the authority of
etenal truth. For us, words have the meaning that we give them afer decolonising,
them from power af a given moment, in particular conditions of the clash. They
become elucidating and propulsive. help us to elaborate and actualize our attack
‘making it discernible and multipliable. Precisely at a time when language s being
flattened by power and its technologics, anarchists are in the forefront of a reduc-
tion to slogans, fetishisation and acronyms, ACAB surely winning the prize in the
race for cerchral and projectuallobotomisation. We are not interested in locking up
words, ourselves with them, in fortrsses of denity or defending them as our prop-
erty. There s no point in arguing over words. When gone into they turn out to have.
completely diferent meanings for cach of those using them. We need to find our
affnites on the basisof a wider language,the language of knowing, experimenting,
sccking, ‘encountering what our words betray rather than illuminate, elsewhere, in
our hearts, at the cost of our lives !, not through repetition and incantation.

Discourse remains and always will be a vitalpart of the anarchist struggle. Elabo-
rating and elucidating concepts as well a clearing out the garbage acquired through
thoughtless alliances or mentallaziness s a task to be accomplished without delay.
I not a question of holding the 'truth’ but of finding and living out the words we.
need. Not in some altenative anarchist dictionary but in the depth of meaning di
covered in fulflling our destructive longing, sabotaging the existent and expropriat-
ing life from a death-orientated society. The ltteris as ragile as the choreographed
brutes it employs to beat up those lured into the llusion of huge spectacular demon-
strations. Its capacity to continue comes from complicity and consensus,fear, com-
placency and habit, all worthy targets of articulated sabotage by small groups and
individuals armed with few profane words and simple actions against its temples
and their management. Without for that leaving the infrastructure of the Moloch

T Alfedo M. Bonanio,introduction to Feral Revoluton by Feral Faun.

7
intact. ‘Anyone can take a walk in the night. And then, it is also a healthy activity.
Anarchists have not waited passively for the masses to awaken, they have thought
of doing something themselves'*

Self-taught concerning ideas and methods, anarchists have considered public
‘meetings and talks among the most valuable instruments of their armoury from
time immemorial. Once these would take place in the rooms or place of a specific
anarchist group, where a known comrade would give a contribution to some aspect
of the struggle. Today, while the internet discharges emissions almost at the speed
of light, the alternative movement (which anarchists often confuse themselves
with) oscilltes between inviting remunerated experts and organising meetings
in politically correct circles, where the chatter of opinionism imbued with moral
righteousness is “faciltated” in the chronological order of hands raised. thercby
preventing any coherent discussion, so in no way disturbing the plans of those
behind the scenes. No to be forgotten are the great mass assemblies so much in
vogue, which anarchists have begun to adhere to in certain parts of the world
These are excellent stomping grounds for those with a predilection for holding the
floor, arenas where discussion becomes a spectacle of verbal gymnastics among
the gladiators of political rhetoric. And by default for those who ‘can't speak in
public’ (L. don’t have any thoughts so impelling that they will get them out, no
matter at what cost to their modesty) to have their activity mapped out for them.
‘These lyceums of unification and conformity are not even adverse to applying
their oratory skills to defamation and the criminalisation of individual acts in the
delegated zone of combat.

But getting back to attack... It would be absurd to take into consideration the in-
surrectional anarchist concept of affinity groups—based on reciprocal knowledge—if
we were not prepared to discuss deas and methods unashamedly and create the pos-
sibility o do so, both in public and in the shadows far from listening devices of all
species. And some of the most interesting discussions among anarchists have never
been recorded or transeribed, for obvious reasons. Not for that should we recede
into a world of whispers, succumb to the deafening roar of silence or dissolve into
an endless murmuring of ‘opinions on subjects we know nothing about”. Even less
should we delegate everything to the academics who have embraced anarchism as
asubject to be studied always approaching it with a safe dose of detachment,taking
care not to offend the hand that feeds them.

In recent years with the development of an informal movement, there has been a
re-awakening of the method of public meetings or encounters, both at local,national

¥ Aleda M. Boanno, Th Insurectonal Prject, Elephant Ediions, 2000

* Or: "We can talk endlessly, paticulaly of things we knaw nthing sbout, We can express any
opinion we like,even the mos daing, and disappear behind the mcmuing: A1 Daggers Drawn wih
he Existnt, s Defendersand s Fae Criis.p. . Elephant Editions

5
and international level. These are often the fruit of immeasurable blood sweat and
tears by comrades who consider it important to create a moment for going into
theoretical questions, sometimes lasting a number of days, with all the necessary
preparation: posters, leaflts, finding and defending a suitable place etc. And last
but not least, finding anarchists prepared to put their head above the parapet and
talk in public. The encounter ‘Informal Days: International Anarchist Symposium
in Mexico’ in December 2013 was a fantastic example of such an undertaking, and
the fact that the ideas of certain anarchists represent a threat for power in a given
context of struggle was confirmed when Alfredo Maria Bonanno was prevented
from entering the country in order to participate and Gustavo Rodriguez Romero
was kidnapped, tortured and expelled from Mexico during the Symposiun iself.

Such encounters are indispensable instruments for an informal movement with
no fixed organisational structures and are obviously ‘more than the sum of their
parts’, creating occasions for every level of discussion and confrontation between
comrades, not just the offcial talks. These events often o not materialise due to
a lack of comrades prepared to put themselves on the line and express their ideas
in public. But don’t we know that the choice of freedom implies the refusal of
leaders or the delegation of the struggle? Going beyond self-imposed or acquired
limitations? Daring to enter the unmapped terriories inside and around us? We
are not professionals of any of the kinds of action that the struggle requires, no
‘matter how complex and well-executed they might turn out to be. And plunges
into the elsewhere of conscious choice can procure immense joy, be it the taking
back of means in order to advance a project,striking a class enemy or their servants,
sabotaging some of the workings of capital or expressing our ideas in an organised
public encounter. Here a tension can come to create itself among the comrades
present in the squat, amphitheatre or outside in a piazza such that an intensity of
focus creates an energy capable of releasing hidden treasures, ephemeral, as most
of such meetings go unrecorded.

Exceptionally, the following pieces were recorded and transcribed by comrades
who, deeming the discourse worthy of wider diffusion, spent hours decoding barely
comprehensible registrations. It is thanks to them that many of these pages exist
at all. Not forgetting the esteemed interpreters at these events, who are invisibly
present in this brochure as none of the discourses transcribed were addressed to
English-speaking comrades (or judges in the case of the Revolutionary Struggle
trial). Their job was aggravated by the fact that the talks were off the cuf, with-
outa written seript, except for the pronouncement to the terror court in Korydallos
prison in Athens. We made these unforgettable journeys together, cheerful duos or,
in the latter case, players in a murderous theatre of the absurd dep in the bowels
of a vile prison that counts many of our comrades among its hostages.

Putting the following texts together has been an intense undertaking, far beyond
the ‘mere words’ available to who might be reading these few pages now: It has

9
been a reliving of passionate moments with comrades in various citis of Europe.
and beyond, who continue along the paths of their varicgated struggles.

Of the three comrades of Revolutionary Struggle who organised an international
meeting while temporarily released from jail awaiting rial, two of them, Nikos
Maziotis and Kostas Gournas e again hostages i the dungeons of the State, Nikos
afte being wounded in a shootout while on the run with a ‘bounty” of one million
curos on his head, while the third, Pola Roupa, is engaged in the total strugle of
life on the run with a similar price on her frecdom. Their unwavering courage.
and passion continue to inspire us, ke that of so many other beautiful anarchist
comrades near and far, locked in the cages of wrelchedness or tuming the world
upside down in the bittersweet adventure of lfe in hiding.

“The pemicious activity of the terror court in Korydallos continues unabated,
churning out centuries of prison.

“The other inclusions in this ‘work in progress’ are notes that have appeared at
various moments over the past few years. They were stimulated by events or dead-
lins that sparked of feelings strong enough to cross the threshold from the void to
words on paper that those of us who are not writers, Le. those who do not express.
their ideas regularly, compulsively and disciplinedly in the written word. require.

“These pages are neither a memoi nor sentimental journey; they are a going
over and sharing of some ideas, a contribution to the ongoing multiform strugele
andan exhortation to all of us, in the prison citis of capital or wherever else on this
stolen planet, to find our own words, xeign in our passions, seek out our comrades
andact

Let's continue the assault on the existent with all means, undeterred by those
who would silence us with weapons from the stockpile of reaction, be they the kick
of the democratic jackboot. the empty chatter of apinion or the siren cals of the.
candy men of hope.

Jean Weir

10
Taking Back Our Lives®

‘Taking Back Our Lives’ was a two-part series of talks and discussion in
Hamburg and Berlin, Germany, 20 & 22 September 2009, Each event was
attended by around 50-100 people. The Hamburg event was at the long-
running anti-capitalst space Rote Flora’, and the esent in Berlin was at
Stadthaus Bocklerpar, a popular sports hal entirely made of glass.

I'm really overwhelmed to be here with so many comrades. Apart from the beau-
tiful setting... I think maybe it’s the first time anarchists have had a meeting inside
a glass house... ] think we need to examine for one second our expectations, why
we're here, because we live in a world of repetition and things also tend to repeat
themselves with us in the movement. Perhaps we expect a comrade, especially of a
certain age, to turn up and talk about their organisation and in some way hope to
extend this organisation.

That's not the case tonight. I'm just trying to communicate a few ideas within
a context of ideas, because we're anarchist—well, I'm speaking from an anarchist
point of view, I'm not taking it for granted that everybody here is anarchist, but
we obviously agree we have a commion enemy—and for anarchists we don’t make
a separation between ideas and action. For anarchists our ideas come from action.
Our ideas are action and action, revolutionary anarchist action, is theory.

We think that language brings us together but language separates us. Yet we
must try in some way, even more so at the present moment when capital has expro-
priated many of the terms that we use and taken them to empty them of meaning.
In the same way as capital has taken our space it’s taken our time and our language,
in other words it's taking our lives. Its taking our lives to sell back to us in the
supermarket of identities: you can have an identity, you can't have individuality.
Individuals scare capital but identities are safe because they can interact.

‘The prevailing model of the present and going towards the future is the model
of tolerance, reciprocal respect, respect for people’s rights and respect for people’s
differences. But these differences must be homogenised into a series of diversities,
not real difference that interpenetrates and colludes and sparks off, like particles in
a free reality of space and time. We must talk, this is another thing. We must keep
talking and expressing our dissent. I'm talking about advanced capital, advanced

T Recorded, transeribed by comrades of 25 Magasine,some ofth fllowing pieces were publshed.
in ssue 8.ofthe same.

1
post-industrial capital,totalitarian democracy if you like. Thisis the way it's moving
and it's pretty far on but it's not entirely there yet

I suddenly appear from another planet, outer space, and come here into a reality
which many comrades in other parts of the world are looking to.. Berlin. And you
see in Berlin a point of reference in the struggle also, a point of stimulus, a point
that excites curiosity. How is it that comrades here are finding the way to move in
this situation?

So I think that what we can aim for at this moment is, if possible, a moment
of experimentation. This isn't intended to be a monologue because it depends on
what we want. We're doing this together. We're not two felds, the one the speaker
the other the passive audience, because we're anarchists. Also because I've just
appeared from the heart of darkness, a country where, lets say, capital has moved
onin a certain way, 4 million CCTV cameras in London and I would say that it's
pretty far on in the objective of capital of social peace.

‘That's not what I've come to talk about but to try to open up some kind of discus-
sion about what kind of methodology we can use at this particular moment in time.
What it means to be an anarchist in this reality that we're living in now, in this
what we might call historic moment. We don’t privilege history over all the other
facets of life but I think we can say we still have a foot in the old world and we are
also partly into the new. We're in between. We still have certain faculties from the
old world, the capacity to reason, to think, to make choices but we're being moved
towards a technology, an organisation of capital, that's moving away from that to
aflatening, so in way we have to look for a moment at what's happened over the
Iast few decades. And coming to Berlin you can actually see it. You can see before.
‘your eyes what's happened to capital over the last forty or ffty years.

Capital is moving out of these blocks, these very intensified blocks of exploitation
where people were regimented into the factory and living areas within a very static
perspective. The cold war, so-called, the existence of the movement, the workers™
‘movement, we're not talking about the anarchist movement but the workers’ move-
‘ment in general. Years of intense struggle. First of all against work pace, assembly
lines, for wage increases and so on, and then in the eighties the struggle moved
towards one against the restructuring of capital when the factories began to clase
down, the mines began to close down. So we're living in a situation now where
production, the production that Europe lives from: energy, automobiles, heavy i
dustry... has moved very far away in the planet to countries like China, Asia, so
these focal points in Europe of struggle have spread, they ve dissipated.

At the same time, in certain countries including Germany there was also at the
end of the seventies and eighties a huge movement of contestation, in some parts
revolutionary. The movement had revolutionary perspectives and also possi
ties. So for ltaly, for example, in the eighties, four thousand comrades ended up

12
in prison. Many of these comrades came from Marsist-Leninist structures and ac-
cording to their analysis they had been approaching a moment that was possibly
capital’s ‘final erisis’. But with the implosion of the clandestine groups and the mas-
sive repression—especially after the Moro kidnapping—mass arrests, many of the
leadership decided that it wasn't capitalism’s ‘final crisi’, that the revolution had
failed, that it was no longer the revolutionary moment and in fact they were facing
‘multiple life sentences and it was time to begin to negotiate with the State. Let's
face it the revolutionary project of the Marist-Leninists is obviously not the same
s an anarchist projectulity of revolution. As you know they had a vanguardist ap-
proach and obviously had no intention of destroying the means of production and
the State.

But while this struggle was taking place in 60s and 70s it was multiform, I mean
it wasn't just the clandestine groups that were carrying out the struggle but many
actions took place in the sphere of illegaity. These actions were carried out by very
small groups of comrades and not claimed with acronyms

At the same time there was mass illegality. Comrades and young people, unem-
ployed, students,just refused capitalism, a direct refusal. a taking of life: going to a
rock concert but not paying en masse, going to a restaurant and not paying, going
on buses and not paying. But we could say that, although there’s always been a
polemic in the movement between anarchists and Leninists or Stalinists tc. there
was somehow a composite situation of attack against the common enemy: But after
the mass arrests the waters began to divide, and this is because it was impossible to
carry on solidarity with a movement that was in a position of negotiation with the
State

For the Leninists, the revolutionary °subject’ became the proletarian prisoner. So,
ina way, a large part of the movement, that had been the revolutionary movement,
the movement of contestation, was taking directives from inside the prison. It wasin
asituation of waiting and there were many rebellions inside the special prisons. But
as time went on, more and more of this movement inside the prison was developing
awhole series of nuances of dissociation from the revolutionary postions of before.
And at this moment, a part of the anarchist movement—that part of the anarchist
‘movement that was for violent attack on the State—began to express more articulate:
theory starting from the small actions that had already been taking place

So this long explanation is to try to say where the roots are, because if we talk
about insurrection—we can all see that all over the planet at the moment insur-
rections are breaking out in different places and we could say that there is also
something insurrectional in this city—T think the problem today is do we have a
‘methodology that we can bring out, look at and intensify in order to make these
insurrections conscious and also to provoke and stimulate insurrection. Because

13
this gets us back to how reality has changed, how the whole set-up of capital has
changed at the level of production.

‘When production was in these fixed enclaves, the factories, the methods tended
tonbe that the exploited would join a movement in the quantitative sense of the word,
‘There scemed to be strength in numbers. As capital progressed and restructuring
took place thanks to the new technologies, there were quite intense moments of
rebellion. Here it became obvious that the unions, although they put up a show—
the classic example is the miners' strike in England—were actually participating in
the restructuring of capital, not fighting against it. And if you look more closely,
because that's what we're trying to do... 'm sorry, [ come from outside and I don't
know the dynamic within the movement here, I'm just talking on the basis of coun-
tries like England where things have gone to a certain level...in the movement in
England against capital there’s very lttle debate, there’s very litle examination of
‘methods and the struggle is tending to take place more at the level of dissent: large
demonstrations, large agglommerations of people but very ltle discussion of where
the movement is going. The deadlines are there, sometimes the deadlines are pre-
sented by capital. The classic example is the summits. We're given these deadlines
and we react to them.

And these can still be seen to be within the quantitative logic of large masses,
large demonstrations, thousands of people, thousands of comrades. Different levels,
obviously, of what each group intends to do when they get to the demo but never-
theless the demo is a circumscribed event. And a large part of the anti-capitalist
‘movement actually has roots somewhere in this great about-turn that happened in
the movement in some parts of Europe. This turning away from revolution but in
such a way that it wasn't actually said clearly, because for some elements in the
revolutionary movement who had a deterministic analysis in which the industrial
proletariat was a key element, there was an interruption in the equation, it couldn't
goon.

‘There are still masses of young peaple, young comrades, who are suffering the
effects of capital, albeit in a different way. So the problematic for this reality was the
‘mobilisation of these masses of young peaple who were suffering the effects of this
new form of capitalism and alienation, and the extension of social centres over the
territory that they saw as a point of reference. The big demonstration, the possibility
to focus one's anger, one’s alienation, to try to belong to something, because we all
need to belong to something solid. They re not pacifists—many of them are—but
they’re not all pacifists. This came from the eighties but it’s a pracess that's stll in
act

Butit's not because we express violence that we are necessarily moving towards
revolution. It might be that capital in its need, as we said before, for participation

and control, s offering moments of contained expressions of violence. In order to

14
protect its real structural essence, it gives us a symbolic enemy. Because when it
comes to it the cop is a symbol of capital, it's not capitalism, it's an instrument of
capital. The bank s a symbol of capital, money is a symbol of capital. If we attack
in a destructive way, money becomes relative. If we arrive at touching communism
directly, not State communism but real communism without hierarchy, without
leaders, well then money disappears immediately. If we reach a point of the spread
of insurrectional struggle that is actually destructive, the workings of capital and
the State lose consensus. People move away from the State because they are or-
ganising their lives and their struggle directly. The cops are no longer guaranteed
by the State and many of them run away because we know that they are cowards
They're violent, they re dangerous, they re killers, but theyre also cowards... You
don't agree?

So, the problems that we now have on our plate, and these problems are pressing,
they are urgent... We need toloak at reality somehow, but with a minimal basic anal-
yses of the reality that we are living in at the moment before our language has been
reduced—because our language is being reduced everywhere. It's being reduced in
the schools. It's being reduced in the social terrain. Many of the humanities, I don’t
know in Germany but in England, are just being eliminated from studies. Science
has completely sold out to capital, and very soon we won't have the capacity to
reason and wil just become reactive.

‘We have two opposing elements, Iwould say, to face. The old element of quantity,
that we must be many before we can move, before we can attack. So we've got
quantity. O quality. We have deadlines like the big demo, the summi, that are
given to us, or the campaign. It might be in the realm of ecology or antinuclear, and
again we have a choice: do we want to have the widest number of people, which
sometimes means forming alliances with different kinds of groups, or do we want
to go for quality in our struggle. Not because we don't recognise that we also need
‘quantity to fight capital, to attack and destroy capital

This s also what we must decide, because not all anarchists want to destroy
capital. In the past many anarchists thought that the project was to grow in
quantity as a movement, The workers taking over the means of production and
self-managing them without bosses or slaves, everybody equal: sort of libertarian,
anarcho-syndicalism you might say.

There’s another part of the movement that wants the organisation. Our lack of
strength is because we are not organised, we don't have a strong organisation. And
50 the efforts of these comrades go into trying to consolidate this organisation to
‘make it grow and increase in numbers before we can do anything to attack, because
we need the justification before we attack of the presence of the working class in
our organisations.

15
But if we've already seen that the working class as a conscious class based in
industry has disappeared, we see that this projectuality is destined to stay as it is.
When we say that the working class has disappeared we're certainly not saying that
exploitation has disappeared or that people don’t work. But the class of producers
on which the old revolutionary theories were based has moved. The main sector
in Europe today is the tertiary sector, it's not production, it’s a kind of managerial
way of organising what is coming from elsewhere. And the services industry.

‘We are also exploited. That's also why we are here. But we are something more
than exploited. We have ideas. We have a vision in some way of another world,
We have a certain clarity in seeing how things are, the various parts of society. We
have an analysis of power.

If we accept that we don't want this world, then we must destroy work because
worlk i destroying not only humanity but also the planet, and in order to do this, we.
‘must also have quantity at a certain point in this project. So! think that the problem
that faces us all today is how can we act immediately, without mediation, to attack
what we know must be attacked and destroyed. And how we can become many.
Who are our comrades? Do we look to the movement? Or the various ecology
‘movements, etc. And of course some of our comrades are there, but how do we find
them if we're not interested in forming a fixed organisation that's visible, with a
‘name, with a fixed modus vivendi, a way of acting, a fixed pre-established way of
acting.

‘We find our comrades by acting immediately in small groups, directly, trying to
act against capital, but in such a way that this moment of attack can spread and
multiply. It's easy to identify and it's easy to repeat. And these attacks need to
be visible. Not only to our potential comrades in the movement, but to our far
‘more potential comrades out there that we don't see. Maybe out there in this same
building there are people who are our comades. This is the point. There are peaple
who are our comrades around us. All around us. In this city, any city, and in the
country.

So how do we make contact with these comrades? These people are also in the
hands of the forces of capital, the forces of the media and the police. Not only
anarchists are attacked by the police. In fact there are attacks all the time on peaple
who are anonymous, have no voice, and there are specific realities in recent years
that have found the way to respond. But in a way these also attack the symbols
of capital, attack the police because the police attack them and so they attack the
police. Even f there’s exhilarating violence that stimulates any rebel or anyone that
wants the destruction of this world—when I say violence I mean it in the positive
sense of the word—at the same time, this is within a paradigm.

16
Where are we as anarchists when something breaks out in the banlicue? Do we
Join in the riot?—as uninvited guests? Or do we have some methodology already in
course that can also take the riot as a point of reference but try to extend the struggle
beyond the paradigm. When we find ourselves in a social situation of rebellion such
as happened in Greece recently... The rebellion was in some way stimulated by the
presence of anarchists in that territory before it happened, through the continuity
of small actions carried out in the territory for months, maybe years before. For ex-
‘ample, a number of anarchists had been attacking police stations and banks in small
groups for a long time. And possibly when Alexis Grigoropoulos was murdered the
great surge after the first two days—because from the Monday all the schools came.
out on strike, all the schools and colleges and started attacking police stations all
over Greece: towns, villages, every police station in Athens, Thessaloniki... Ab, a
question.... ‘Not everybody that's fighting against the police is my comrade. .before.
we talk about what to do the first step is with whony'. Ok, this s true, and we're
‘going to have a discussion and this discussion obviously doesn't end here, it's a very.
big story. This is just opening... maybe that situation already exists here, that there
is discussion among comrades.

Tl just try to say what I was saying about the mass attacks on the police stations
all over Greece. Of course we know that it was a cop that murdered Alexis so
that was also a reason. But we don’t know how much the fact that anarchists, a
‘minority of anarchists, had constantly been attacking police stations.. I mean what
is spontaneity? It was a spontancous rebellion but at the same time there were also
objectives already known to people. They (the anarchists) had attacked banks. They
burned banks, the large shops, the stores

A situation becomes overwhelming, there’s a crowd, there’s no longer a politi-
cal demonstration in the streets where we all know who we are. There's a crowd of
peaple where we don’t know anybody... and this s a situation we're going towards
if we want to destroy capitalism. We won't be in control. Ours is not a projectuality
of control. We're living in a situation of control at the moment, self control to a
large extent, of the movement.

Sowhat is the role of anarchists in a mass insurrectional moment? Well, some end
up protecting the anarchist structures against... this mass of people who have this
great thrust. There's an intelligence where you have thousands of egos all acting
together and it's self-organised at this point, nobody’s organising it from outside.
And that is what defines it, if you like, as an insurrection. But after a few days
problems enter these mass social situations, they can either be repressed, or when
the situation doesn’t know where to go next, a leadership can move in. But if we
say that we need—and we are on the brink now—to attack and destroy what is
destroying us and destroying the future, it's destroying the whole perspective of

17
life for children and these children’s children, then we must try to develop methods
which enable us to extend the insurrection horizontally. And experiment methods
that are not just based on abjectives to be struck but which also have a minimal
organisational, self-organisational, content.

So this is the crux of the matter. What can we take from reality? As we said our
theory comes from action. We can take the theory from the action that has been
spreading from the seventies onwards, these small groups, and take them as an or-
ganisational model that we can apply, that we can use ourselves to attack capital
directly. Because if we all agree on the urgency to attack capital, we don't have to
wait for anybody. We don't have to wait for general consensus before we attack.
But even if we are few we don't want to attack in the dimension of a vanguardist
‘minority but using minimal organisational forms that can muliply. And this form,
for lack of a better word, is the affinty group. So the affinity group—we're not
talking about the affinity group in the activist milieu where hundreds, maybe thou-
sands of people turn up on the basis of a deadline with a specific objective, possibly
a demonstration, let's say within the sphere of symbolic attack (its symbolic be-
cause it doesn’t intend to go beyond the day of the action). So they need efficiency,
they must act immediately and must be able to split up into groups and take various
sectors. And people are invited to form affinity groups someho.

‘Well, when we talk about affinity groups that’s not what we mean. We mean
groups of one, two, three comrades who decide to have reciprocal knowledge of each
other. They want to go beyond this respect for rights, differences, of not asking too
‘much about each other. And we talk, we say what we want to each other. We decide
and we carry out an action. The action doesn't need fifty pages of explanation. It
doesn't need to be signed with an acronym. It's not carried out in the name of the
whole proletariat [laughter]. It doesn't synthesize the whole struggle and intend
to carry on heightening the level of attack: today with some kind of homemade
device, tomorrow with some firearms and next day with a machine gun, because
the objective is to get closer to the enemy—which nearly ahways turns out to be the
police

But the affinity group realisesitself n the action. And these comrades have trans-
formed something, they ve put together the minimal ¢lements necessary to trans-
form reality in some way, and in so doing also transformed something inside them-
selves, a the level of knowledge. Reciprocal knowledge and also the knowledge of
what we are attacking, because its only by attacking—what does a child do with
its toys? It smashes the toy to get to know the toy—the only thing is that now
children’s toys are unbreakable, most of them, so even that's fucked up.

So.basically, it's only by acting that we get to know each other and that we get to
know reality. Our unknown comrades can also see an indication for their struggle.
Because we don't want to bring these people into the anarchist movement, we want

15
to go out from the anarchist movement with anarchist methods. By anarchist we
‘mean antiauthoritarian: against authority, against hierarchy with this element of
transformation and going towardsa struggle which is permanent. It has the element
of permanent conflictuality, self-management of the struggle—not of our lives, of
our miseria—and attack.

So. the next point is the bridge between the individual actions of affnity groups
and reaching the exploited on the basis of aspecific struggle. This is what we could
call an [insurrectionalist] intermediate struggle. It's a struggle that s not the rev-
olution but has one specific objective, which at that time these particular people
are having to face in some way. It might be a nuclear power station, it might be a
‘military base that's about to be built. It might be a prison or a waste disposal unit
that people are against or any of a myriad of things. And there will probably be
‘many forces against this objective, not just anarchists. We'll have the communist
party, the socialist party the trades unions, the local syndicalists, whatever, all of
these different components. But we move away from a “popular front’ kind of or-
ganisation, on the basis of a social analysis of what that problem means i the global
sense—because that’s what makes the objective potentialy revolutionary, the fact
that we move away from the ‘single issue’ where the end justifies the means, and
we move to the means. For us it's the means that we use that are important in the
struggle, not the end result, which is relative within the whole perspective.

S0, we come out with our leaflts, with the means we have of all times: meetings,
outdoor talks, talking to people about the way we sce the social connotations of
this fact, social, economic, ete. And we make an organisational proposal: for a
base organisation if you like. A mass organisational proposal. By mass I don't
‘mean masses of people numerically, but mass i terms of ‘not political the absolute:
absence of any political party or union in this organisational form. So, we propose
a kind of organisational entity and at this point in the struggle we're not talking to
‘masses of people. We're talking to the few people who have already eliminated the
unions as a point of reference in their struggle, as well as the political parties. They
want to struggle directly.

Atthis point we don't hide the fact that we are anarchists. We are anarchists but
we'te not trying to make these people become anarchist in the sense of belonging to
the anarchist movement. We want to give, and alongside them use, anarchist meth-
ods, which means that they must be self-organised. They must hold on to their self
organisation but be able to relate to the other self-organised elements in the same
struggle, without having to mediate this through some kind of fixed organisational
entity. Even an anarchist group. And we must keep our eye on the objective to be
destroyed. Obviously, we are in an area where people are unemployed. Maybe they
don't have housing, it's where the worst social discomfort exists. But we must keep
our concentration on the objective to be destroyed. And it’s in working together

19
that these minimal organisational entities can suddenly contain hundreds of peaple
from one day to the next. They re like a lung, they can suddenly contain thousands
of people and hopefully move to the attack. And it's this attack that can go beyond
the objective, and the struggle extend.

‘Well, I'm afraid this has been very difficult to articulate, to ry to give a coherent
Kind of vision if you like of a proposal of struggle which perhaps already exists, I
‘mean T don't know the situation here. Maybe you're saying, well, you know, that's
old stuff, we're beyond that.

And there are other very important elements in the way capital is going that
haven't mentioned because it's oo vast, such as the included and the excluded. The
included in the project of capital and the masses of excluded who are excluded for
ever from the privileges of capital

The exponential growth of technology, how certain advances—call them ad-
vances. Now it's the technology itself that is able to do many things much faster.
The control of social reality moving from the enclaves, like we mentioned, the
factories, the prisons, the asylums, to the whole of the territory including our
language and reducing our language. And the fact that these technologies are
actually penetrating our bodies now. They're not just external.

‘We're moving away from the closed structure of the prison because in the prison
society, the people whose behaviour is not compliant with the capitalist project
are too many to be held in one closed structure. The technology is almost there
to control huge masses of people in specific areas and keep them within that area,
and, as we said before, this technology of control s objective but it's also subjective.
because soon we won't have the language to move out of certain ghettoes. The
ghettoes will be defined also by that, by lack of language

And last, but not least, is the fact of the availability of the resources that capital
is actually using at the moment. I’s finite,it's not unlimited. For example, energy.
‘The energy resources such as oil are drying up, theyre not going to last for ever and.
capital is going to have to find new energy forms. And the transmission of these
forms will surely affect the whole territory that we're living in. The militarisation
of the whole territory.

Also, as we know, the planet is receding, the areas for producing food are di-
‘minishing. Countries like China with a huge population that they can't feed have.
already moved into certain African countries and leased out huge areas of land, tak-
ing their own slaves, to feed their population. So we're moving towards a reality
where the moving of food and the feeding of populations will become militarised be-
cause more and more people are going to be starving. So, hence the urgency about
what we're saying.

)
We are in a moment—okay, as anarchists we say that we don't take history as
our point of reference—but I think that we could say we are in a historical moment
where we also have a challenge facing us because I think that anarchists are the
only people who have in our hearts the desire for freedom. And we have the sense
of totality, which is what we take into each small action that needs to be done. We.
take the sense of totality.

Tjust want to say this has been a very artificial if you like, an artificially contrived
‘moment starting off with one person talking. That's obviously not the way that
one wants to continue but to open some kind of possibility for something that can
continue in time, examining and possibly experimenting certain ideas.

21
Passion for Freedom'!

So, how is it that you found yourself arrested on September 19, 1994, with four other
anarchists (Antonio Budini, Christos Stratigopulos, Eva Tziutzia and Carlo Tesseri) and
accused of an armed robbery at the rural bank of Rovereto (Serravall),ltaly? How did
your lfe evolve to lead to this situation?

How did 1 find myself arrested that day of September 19, 19947 ... Well it ob-
viously wasn't ‘the perfect crime .. a couple of local people saw some guys jump
overa fence into the forest i the Chizzola mountains; a massive ‘manhunt’ensued,
and within a few hours everybody was rounded up. But I don't think that's what
‘you mean. You ask me how my life had evolved leading up to that moment. 'll try
to answer that question, which seems to imply that this was some kind of climax
that my life had been heading towards.

Actually it's not like that. If things had gone differently and we hadn't been
caught, no one would ever have known about the event. It would simply have been
aday in the life of a few anarchist comrades

Idon’tthink that there’s anything exceptional about anarchists deciding to take

back some of what has been stolen from us all—we have to face the problem of
survival like all the other dispossessed and moreover we are not prepared to simply.
‘survive’ but want to go beyond the limitations of poverty and act on reality. Some
comrades believe that expropriation will be a mass event where all the exploited
will at together one great day, others are not prepared to wait to infinity for that
to happen, or to spend the whole of their lives being exploited or participating in
the exploitation of others

Looking back i time, what was exceptional was the fact of having comrades with
whom it was possible to discuss anything and possibly act together as a result. I say
exceptional, although at that time it was normal * This deepened knowledge of one
another (and oneself) is the fruit of being in a common struggle—demos, meetings,
discussions, actions, etc.—in the dimension of an informal anarchist movement. Re-
Iations between comrades deepen, one gains real knowledge of one another, not just
our goals but the way we are as individuals, the way we react, our strengths and
weaknesses. From there I think it is natural for comrades who know and trust each

Tiotervie:with 325 Magazine

T is an afrmtion of how 1 et personally o the time of wrting. Of cours the sestch for
ffnity is felong, and, when one fnds one's comrade or comrades in afinity not abvays e, the
time i forver i,

)
other to go into certain questions more decply and decide to experiment in order to
‘push their struggle forward and open up new possibilitis in whatever field

For anarchists the absence of hicrarchy also concerns action. When carried out
in a projectual dimension with a real tension towards freedom, the validity of any
one kind of action depends on the existence of ll the others.

The media and the talian State whipped themselves into a frenzy over the tral, but
how was your experience of the solidarity from other anarchists and rebels during the
legal process and during your prison sentence?

‘Actually, the thing developed into two trials . no three. First there was the trial
for the robbery in question, then we were accused of two other robberies in the
area, so that led to a second one (which went on for many months), during which
the “pentita’ (‘repentant terrorist) matured, leading to the infamous *Marini trial”.
‘The local media did go into a frenzy immediately following the Serravalle (near
Rovereto) robbery: all of the elements of the media cocktail terrorist scare’ were
there; foreigners, anarchists guns, robbery, etc... But that was nothing compared to
what was to happen subsequently, at the national level,

‘The reaction of the anarchists of Rovereto and the surrounding area was immedi-
ate and unconditional. Their solidarity was passionate and also ludic at times. They
claimed the identity of the arrested comrades, defending our identity as anarchists
within an articulate denunciation of the role of the banks and the validity of robbing
them, through posters, leaflts, demos, public meetings etc.

Shortly after our arrest, the anarchist fortnightly Canenero was born. I think it
is far to say that, although it might have come out at some later date, for various
reasons our arrest was a catalyst in its appearance then. Its eagerly awaited pages
and the knowledge that comrades very close to me were working day and night to
bring it out was a brillint light that illuminated that initial period in jail. So many
other things happened, it's hard to put everything down on paper. Right from the
start anarchists came from all over ltaly for the trials, the courtroom was always
full and sometimes there were too many comrades for everybody to get nside.

I remember the huge ‘Baci’ (Kisses) and encircled ‘A’ that appeared written in
lipstick on a window overlooking the court after those who hadn't been allowed in
occupied a building opposite and sent their grectings down from above... the news
that over 150 cash points in the area had been glued, resulting in one of the banks
withdrawing their claim for damages... the banner conveying birthday greetings
unfurled in court when one of the hearings coincided with my birthday.

Flares and fireworks were set off against Trento prison during one of the hearings
in the town court,resuling in a number of comrades getting expulsion orders from
the area. While I was being held in the maximum security prison of Vicenza, a
terrible dump, particularly the women’s section, comrades hired a coach and did
an impromptu demo with flres, banners and paint-bombs at New Year, an action
that wasn't without risk because Vicenza was in close proximity to the American

3
NATO base. 1 learned when I got out that everyone had a good time and went
on to party throughout the night somewhere in the mountains. Next day a police
helicopter appeared in the women's exercise yard, and remained there untilthe day
Iwas transferred to Opera prison in Milan.

That demonstration of love and solidarity was a contribution to getting me
thrown out of a disgusting place without any ingratiating ‘letters to the prison
governor’ or such like.

‘These are some of the moments that stand out in my mind concerning the initial
period. Later, following the invention of a ‘repentant’ ‘ex-militant’ of an invented
armed gang that we were all supposed to belong to, many comrades were arrested
or went into hiding to carry on the struggle. | know that many of the remaining
comrades debated intensely to agree and decide what to o, but I don't know as
‘much about that period as I do about the preceding one.

Reading your questions has taken me back to these not so far off times, and re-
‘membering the solidarity fills me with an immense glow. It was amazing. Only
someone who has lived through similar moments can understand what L am talking
about, and as you can see, I can’t squeeze the answer to this question into just a few
lines, even although anything | mention is only a tiny part of what comrades were
doing day after day, for years.

An anarchist defence committee that had been formed earlier became extremely
active in finding lawyers, coordinating contributions from benefit gigs, etc, and
sending out regular news of the whole situation, which was to develop into a com-
plex repressive attack against a large part of the anarchist movement

‘The comrade who sent the money orders was accused of being ‘treasurer” of the.
phantom organisation invented by public prosecutor Marini along with the Cara-
binieri special forces, and a warrant was issued for his arrest. The comrade who
bore the brunt of the committee’s activity was accused of counterfeiting an inter-
nal police note that was sent to Radio Blackout in Turin. Both were subsequently
acquitted or had charges dropped.

Throughout the various repressive phases thousands of posters were printed
and flyposted in all the major towns and cities, and also in many small villages—
wherever there were anarchists who wanted to show their solidarity.

From being a straightforward question of a few comrades ‘caught in the act’ about
which there s litle to be said, the thing had evolved into about 60 anarchists being
accused of belonging to a clandestine organisation, insurrection against the State,
ete. with charges that carried multiple lfe sentences.

Everything stood on the ‘confessions’ o the twenty year old girlfriend of Carlo,
one of my co-arestees, who had been singled out by the ROS (Reparto Operazioni
Speciali / Special Operations Group) as potentially being someone young and im-
pressionable that could be scared into collaborating with the police and judiciary:
She announced that she was an ‘ex-member’ of the ‘gang’, and had participated in

2
one of the robberies in the Trento area. The way the story emerged was so absurd it
was almost laughable, but things began to get quite serious—there were hundreds
of raids all over Italy and many comrades ended up in prison, some went on hunger
strike and were released. There was a wide denunciation of this frame-up against
anarchists, which had now become a main news item: endless meetings, attacks on
the press, the entrances to underground stations glued on the first day of the Marini
trial, demos, itinerant exhibitions, et. etc.

Over and above the arrests, there was a total distortion of anarchist methods,
and tens of thousands of pamphlets were printed and distributed all over the coun-
try denouncing this. Many actions took place, and leaflets and posters were now
being drawn up at national level, following countless meetings with groups and in-
dividuals from all over the country. There were regular interventions on free radios.
Actions of solidarity also took place in Germany, Greece and Spain. A German com-
rade” brought out a bilingual paper, translated many Italian texts—theoretical texts
Imean, not related to the repression and organised benefits and meetings. She was
alsovery close to me throughout the years 1 was inside in many ways. Lalso received
‘many letters, telegrams, cards, conveying good wishes, passion, colour, solidarity
from comrades in many countries, including the UK.

‘Can you tell us about your experience of prison and the conditions, opportunities for
rebelion, etc? How was your relationship with the other prisoners?

Another big story... Where to begin...? Well, for a start, [wasn't in just one, but
seven prisons over these years, and spent much of the time being shunted up and
down handeuffed in a prison van between Milan and Trentino, squinting through
the pinholes in the metal windows to catch a glimpse of the mountains or the or-
chards in bloom, as the trial in Trento ran its perverted course. The conditions in
each of these prisons were fairly specific and varied immensely. But there are some
factors that are peculiar to all women's prisons—they are a lot smaller than men’s,
and often have far fewer facilities, sometimes to the point of zero, for educational
or recreational needs,

The first thing that struck and annoyed me was that I was alone, I mean, I was
held separate from my comrades, who for much of the time were sharing a cell, so
had ample opportunity to talk, laugh and generally face the situation together. Eva
andIwere kept apart and fortunately she was released a month or so after our arrest.
T'd been in similar situations before, so I knew the score and mustered my strength.

¥ Daniel Carmignani, kown o English-spesking comrades through he now iconie introduction
1o Revolutonary Soldarty (Elephant Ediions), worked ssduously thoughou the perod of the ‘Marni
Hameup!, prodacing DieL unts, Ausbruch/Outbrea.as well s pblshing narchist pumphletsin Germany.
Sinceher desth folloving ol lnes, hese publictions seem 1o have disappeared completel. Having.
nown the insid of a pricon el herself, Danilas soldarty was passionate and unwavering. Thi i
‘o than evident i h many leters during our corsespandence andfo his resson have now decied
10 translte and publish some ofthem, esimony of her ebel warmth and solidarity:

5
‘The solidarity from outside that I have mentioned at length certainly nourished
that strength, but there were many things going on within and around you that you
would have liked to discuss with your own comrades, and that was impossible. |
mean, even concerning some of the trivia in prison, or rather everything is trivi
but can be heavy at times.

Reverberations from the proverbial butterfly’s wing’ can do full circle at any in-
stant, like an iron boomerang and even one's thoughts seem to take on (or perhaps
they have it anyway) a solid capacity to act on reality I think that simply staying
alive, holding to one's individuality and keeping one’s spirits—and head—high s in
itself a form of rebellion in the context of an institution that s deliberately built to
put people down and humiliate them. ‘Things were very different then compared
to what they had been in the seventies and eighties n Italy when there were thou-
sands of comrades in prison, often held in custom-built mainum security prisons.
Rebellion was a constant., a necessity and a continuation of the struggle outside,
almost taking the place of it before the reformist about-turn of many of the Marxist-
Leninist leaders set in

Today, especially if you are a woman, you might be very few in number,inside for
any one of a whole variety of reasons (better-anarchists don't declare themselves
political prisoners, and if they end up on "political’ wings i’s because the State puts
them there to prevent them from ‘infecting the other prisoners). In fact, in some of
the small prisons I was held in, starting from Rovereto, was kept separate from the
other prisoners as far as the limited conditions allowed. The screws weren't used
to secing the leaflets that arrived in my post and their hands would lterally shake
upon coming in contact with some of them and I was transferred from there as fast
as they could.

‘The only thing [ remember about Trento prison is an carthquake one night follow-
ing which I spent the next hour or 5o trying to decide what to do in anticipation of
another tremor until fell asleep. Not ll such events have a happy outcome...8 pris-
oners (and two female guards) were killed, trapped in a fire that broke out in Le Val-
ete women's prison in Turin in 1986. Accounts of prisoners in New Orleans make
the blood curdle in horror, to mention but afew:. We must never forget that—beyond
the anecdotes and reminiscences, prison consists of so many reinforced boxes that
millions of people all over the world are locked up in day and night. The latter are
hostages of the State and live at the mercy of a hierarchy of vile cowards 24 hours
aday.

‘The female wing in Trento was closed down and I was dispatched to Vicenza,
which | mentioned above. The women’s section consisted of two rows of cells fac-
ing each other. In the morning the heavy iron doors were opened, leaving a second
barred gate locked. And that was the ‘prison condition’ for the rest of the day. Pale
thin girls spent their whole days in bed because, although there was an exercise
yard, it was freezing cold outside (Vicenza is in the mountains). The exercise pe-

2%
riod is established by parliamentary decree but nowhere i it written that there is
a“minimum stay’ An obligatory two hours in a huge freezing cold area of rei
forced concrete with nothing to do was too much for most people, and the screws
were quite happy to forego the task of looking and unlocking x number of gates of

So, the battle began, at first the ‘good” way, pointing out the situation to medical
staff, writing collective demands to the governor, etc. to no avail. It was very diffi-
cult to talk to the other prisoners as, apart from the outside yard, there was only a
couple of hours “sociality” each day that had to be signed up for in advance, naming
‘one other prisoner who could be locked in with you, or whom you could ‘visit

Nonetheless, we all managed to agree that we would go out into the yard next
day and, in protest, would refuse to enter when the two hours were up. This, in
the context of prison, is tantamount to insurrection. The day came. The presence
of the screws from the male section downstairs, was confirmation that everybody’s
plans had been thwarted. Shortly afterwards (this was in the period immediately
following the New Year demo) my cell neighbour C. and I were ‘ghosted’: me to the
‘political wing' in Opera, Milan, C. to some out-of-the-way provincial prison.

“This long description is to try to show how a simple attempt to obtain a basic
right’ comes to be considered a dangerous threat to order and submission. The fact
isit's necessary to see the context we're talking about. You don't enter prison saying,
wow, lots of people locked up, here’s fertile ground for rebellion, let’s have a go. In
the first place, most people have many problems and are simply not interested in
how you define yourself, and personally I didn't try doing so, other than through my
way of relating to them and the surroundings, although in some prisons there were
politicals’ who knew about us. That's different. In the normal run of events, when
you are in prison I think your job s to get on with being a prisoner and continue
lving your lfe under different” conditions and try to contribute to raising the tone
of what can often be a pretty dismal reality.

Most of the women inside are in a far worse situation that we are. Many have
children, sometimes thousands of miles away, and worry about them al the time.
‘We are privileged because we have comrades, solidarity, excellent lawyers who are
often comrades themselves.

Having said that, it was a great experience to encounter so many different crazy
people that one wouldn't otherwise have met due to personal choices and all the
ghettos we ‘scum of the carth’ are divided up into: gypsies, drug addicts, ‘murderers’,
historic leaders’ of once upon a time, prostitutes, “drug ponies [mules]’, etc. And
Ilived some intense and at times hilarious moments. Don't get me wrong, prison
wasn't ‘the best days of my life. But, when a number of very particular human
beings who are forced to cohabit against their will make it to come together on the
basis of this common denominator and simply be themselves for a moment with

2
their exquisite idiosyncrasies, a strange alchemy occurs that transcends all walls
and becomes a true moment of freedom, and a threa to the status quo of the prison.

Of course it would have been better to have brought down the walls for real
Many of these women are stil locked up. Many more have joined them.

‘You asked about solidarity, and I can't conclude this reverie without mentioning
an unforgettable moment of solidarity that I experienced from the other prisoners.
As L said, T received a lot of mail that wasn't offcially censored, among which was
the whole collection of Canenero and a considerable quantity of back issues of the
Italian anarchist paper ProvocAzione that came out in the eighties. At Opera, the
Iatter were removed from the cell 1 was in following a routine search, with a few
feeble justifications such as ‘fire risk’ illcily acquired’, ete. What was obvious was
that the contents were definitely not appreciated by those who had come across
them. 1 was furious, and demanded my papers back.

Anyone who's been in prison will know that there’s no such thing as ‘demand
and response’, even the most insignificant request such as getting permission to buy
a pair of socks has o go through a process that might take wecks. [ wasn't prepared
to wait, and to cut a long story short, ended up staging a protest by simply refusing
to go in from the yard and be locked up ater the exercise period. The immediate
result of this was that | managed to get an audience with the Mareschiallo from
the male prison; I eventually got my papers back, and the much hated uberscrew
in charge of the female prison disappeared from circulation for a few weeks, which
gave everyone a break.

The second result was to be escorted to a kind of ‘intemnal court’ on Monday
‘morning, presided over by the prison governor in the presence of serews, cops, psy-
chologists,ete. The verdict: guilty of insubordination. The punishment: two weeks
in the punishment cell. That shocked everybody on the wing, many of whom had
been ‘inside’ for nearly twenty years. The rare punishments at Opera were 2-3 days.
After being checked by the doctor who signed that I was fi to face the sentence (the
doctor always has the last word, even on Death Row...), 1 was marched down to the
isolation block, to be locked up 22 hours a day, and have only essential possessions:
‘my anarchist papers (I made sure I got these), a couple of books, a dictionary and a
small radio. Screnws were assigned to st on the other side of the metal door peering
at me through the spy hole and let me out for exercise in a small, squalid yard for
one hour in the morning and one in the afternoon. Anyone who talked to me would
receive similar sanctions.

After spending most of the night at war with the mosquitoes (it was the middle
of August, 40 degrees) I woke up to the sound of a loud rap number just outside
the window. Peering outside I could see the girls that worked in the garden below
dancing in single file through the plants, rapping out the whole story. What a buzz!
‘Then when I got out for ‘air” all the women in the section were at their windows
singing a whole repertoire of love and battle songs at the top of their voices. The

B3
confusion was such that the screws had to take me away from that dirty yard to the
sports ground for exercise twice a day.

For the rest .. suffice to say that for the whole duration all the prison food ended
up down the toilet as I received a constant supply of fresh food, hot coffee, cte
etc, thanks to the cunning and creativity that only those who are locked up against
their will are capable of, unseen by the uniformed spies outside the cell or the armed.
guards patrolling the walls. When the two weeks were up, big party on the wing!

After you lei prison, how did you feel coming ‘out”into ‘ociety’?

Society? What's that? 1 think I experienced society like an iron vice from the
day ['was bor. They had to lock me in the classroom for the first two weeks [ was
at kindergarten. Perhaps the closest I've been to being ‘in’ society was when [ was
in jail. You can't escape it—unless as I said, you declare yourself “prisoner of war”
and spend the rest of your time alone, with special status. Prison is a microcosm
of the world outside, a kind of caricature that you're stuck in. There's nowhere to
hide, 50 you become socialised to some extent whether you like it or not, for the
sake of the other prisoners and in order to try to do something with your time. But
always within precise limits. Like society outside, the prison structure is polaris-
ing: segregating and excluding the rebels and moving towards the integration and
participation of certain other prisoners in their own incarceration. The times that I
came within inches of this participatory oppression were the worst for me, and the
Kind of reality they are aiming for filled me with disgust. You'd like to spit in the
serew’s eye and tell her to wipe the smile off her face when she comes to unlock
you in the momning, but you can even end up saying ‘good morning”. Recently an
talian comrade told me that when he was in prison last year there were some of
the old Red Brigades militants who always called the serews ‘stronzo’ or ‘pezzo di
‘merda’ - 'shit"in either case, and how the other cons really envied them for it. Had
they tried it,they'd have ended up black and blue and with a few broken ribs.

Generally, you need to teach yourself o contain your loathing for the whole setup.
On coming out I was under house arrest for a while, then I came back to London as
Ihad another short sentence pending in Italy concerning a stolen car connected to
the robbery. I slipped unobtrusively into my ghetto existence here. Not with pride,
Imay say, because such an existence is full of compromise like any other. There's no
real struggle here, no tension in terms of attacking what oppresses you and everyone
around you. You can become a frenetic activist or you can spend some time trying to
take stock, “socialise’ yourself within that reality to some extent and keep carrying
on with your own projectuality as best you can, always in the dimension of seeking
affinities and outlts for the struggle as you want to experience it. So, n this open
prison you're also a misfit, an outsider playing a role and respecting the ‘social
rules’

Italy has a long history of insurrection both in recent times and distant, can you talk.
about some of the social struggles there that you have been involved in?

2
In laly, in the seventies and eighties, although there was a proliferation of clan-
destine organisations in declared war against the State, there was also a diffused
insurrectional movement, and that was certainly exciting, it was in the air you
breathed around you. There were many examples of mass squatting, occupation
of universites, non-payment of tickets, bus rides, meals,etc. in towns like Bologna
where hundreds of young people just refused to pay. Many small actions of at-
tack were carried out by individuals or very small groups of people without all the
rhetoric of the armed organisations, and this was to have a profound effect on that
part of the anarchist movement that had been pushing in that direction. There was
always a strong sense of projectuality and of being part of the struggle for freedom
along with other comrades in this informal movement.

‘That developed into what some anarchists refer to as the ‘insurrectional method”
of struggle. The latter interpretation involves attempts to draw in mass participation
along with anarchists against a given objective, based on a certain organisational hy-
pothesis. This requires a constant engagement in the struggle over a period of time.
Its not a question of a small group of anarchists deciding to attack a particular ex-
pression of power, but an attempt to involve large numbers of people self-organised
ina proliferation of base organisms—nuclei, leagues or whatever they decided to call
themselves—and attack the objective all together. The point of this way of organ-
ising s that it can't become hierarchical, but can extend and multiply horizontally,
and once the objective i in view and all the individuals involved are experiencing
a qualitative change in their relationship to power (absence of delegating, deciding
in first in first person, creativity, ete), the struggle might go even go beyond the
objective.

Tam lucky to have lived one such experience, even if the end result wasn't that
which everybody had desired and worked hard for. But that doesn’t matter. The
time was the 1980's, the place, Comiso, in the sland of Scily, where I was living at
the time. The Americans had decided to deposit some Cruise missiles in the military
base there, and there was wide local dissent about this. Anti-nuclear protestors, the
‘communist party, the socialist party, the greens, etc. protested in massive demos or
pacifist pickets outside the base. The local anarchists decided to distinguish them:-
selves from this circus and act in a protracted struggle i the logic of mass rebellion.
‘The essence of anarchist struggle is in the means, not the end. We drew up leaflets
analysing the reasons, not only military but also social and economic, as to why
the only serious answer to this project of death was to occupy the base and destroy
it, and printed thousands of them on an old hand-operated Roneo duplicator using
stencils that some comrades from Class War had given us in England. Nobody had
any money to speak of and everything was improvised as we went along. We may
aged toassemble a sound system, and travelled, doing—usually Alfredo [Bonanno]
Very strong unequivocal outdoor talks in the piazzas of the neighbouring villages,
which were attended by most of the male population of each place. We also did

30
Leaflets specifically addressed to women and went around the living areas handing
them out and having impromptu ‘capanellé with some of them. We did leaflets
addressed to the workers at the Anic petrol refinery (who refused to go into work
until we were released when the Digos—political cops—pulled us n). and to school
students, handing them out outside all the schools. Some of the pupils refused to go
in for a day as a result, and held a spontancous demo that filled one of the piazzas.
It was here that [ began to see how power actually works at local level: the leader
of the Communist Party came knocking at our door, proposing that we work to-
gether’. Needless (o say, he was given short shrift. By this time some people had
Ient us a litle old house, as many of us lived over 60 miles away. The meetings
and leafleting, posters etc had led to some people from different areas and walks
of lfe— pupils, lorry drivers, farm workers, etc. agreeing on the need to destroy.
the base, and they formed minimal ‘base organisations' that they called leagues for
Iack of better word. These leagues. which often consisted of two or three people.
but had the potential o expand and multply as the struggle intensifid. began to
need a place as a point of reference and co-ordination. ie. to have meetings. draw
up and print leafletsete. A small place was rented in Comiso for that purpose and
eferred to as the Coordinamento for the self-managed leagues against the Cruise
missil base in Comiso. And these were the people who really had the power to de-
stroy the base—with their workmates, neighbours, fmiles, farm animals, tractors,
diggers, etc. That was the dream. But, apart from the repression pure and simple,
there was a combination of obstacles, including the local ‘mafi’ two masked indi-
viduals who burstin on us with guns one night and fired a shot that went through
Alftedo’s trouser-leg.

“Then there was the Communist Party, always acting as fire extinguishers as is
their role—and, last, but not least, the anarchist movement iself and our own limi
tations. It's not possible to go into al the details of this struggle now, but looking
back in time, ] think that some record should be made of this aftempt as it was a very.
eal experience that had a strong experimental and theoretical aspec, so belongs to
everybody.

The publishing project you are involsed in ~ ‘Elephant Editions’ ~ is well known for
being the main translator of Alfredo Maria Bonanno and other ‘nsurectional” anar-
chists, whilst we don’t want 10 ad to or create a cult of personality, can you explain
why the ideasof Alfredo, and the other writers you publish,are important for the strug-
e to overthrow the conditions which appress us?

I the first place, we are talking about ideas, quite rare merchandise these days.
Ideas with a subversive charge, which encounter and stimulate other ideas that take.
s out of the swamp of opinion and tolerance and help us to reach the lucidity nec-
essary to act upon and transform the reality that oppresses us. I should say that |
have never approached any o the texts that I've translated and subsequently pub-
lished other than with the purely selish intention of wanting to enter the discourse

31
and clarify some ideas myself. When eventually (after a long struggle) the text be-
comes something tangible in English, I want others to read it too. For (some) peaple
reading such texts becomes an encounter, a level of self discovery derived from see-
ing ideas set out in the written word with a certain level of clarity. Tensions that
we already fecl burning inside us become clearer, making it casier to gather and
assimilate them in order to act. So, the text takes on its own life, makes its journey
within the context of the struggle, contributes to giving the comrades that so desire
it an instrument for recognising and valorising their own ideas and dreams, turn-
ing them into a point of strength in life and in the struggle. The text then becomes
both a subjective encounter and a physical ‘thing’, which in the vicissitudes of its
journey throughout social and ideal space, becomes an element in creating informal
relations between individual comrades. As well as that, we all need analysis—for
example of the economy, the new technologies the changing faces of power and
the struggle, new enemies and false friends, and, let's face it, many of us are lazy
or lack method when it comes to gaining knowledge. Without ideas, analyses and
projectuality we are nothing, mere abstractions building castles in the air, the hot
air of formal structures and their organisational obsessions. The structure of the
Italian language, and these texts in particular, is quite different to the English lan-
guage of ‘pirates and shopkeepers': it always takes me a long time to get them
readable to a certain degree, and to follow the argument through. I’s quite a jour-
ney, particularly as these comrades, Alredo and the others I have translated are
my comrades in struggle, we lived through the experience of these ideas in prac-
tice, they come from the development of the movement over the past few decades.
Ibelieve that these particular ideas, or theories, are an important contribution to
the struggle today because they come from the part of the movement that doesn't
efer to any fixed organisation or formal structure and wants to attack oppression
in all its forms directly. In fact, attack and the theory of attack—which is the same
thing for anarchists—are the essential element of the informal movement, without
which it would exist in name alone. So, there s also a strong element of eritique in
these writings, a critique of the fixed anarchist organisation such as syndicalism or
the federation that relies on numbers, as being limiting and anachronistic in terms
of attack. At the same time, there is a eritique of the clandestine organisation and
attack at the heart of the State’ that was quite prevalent in the seventies, particu-
larly in Italy. Most of these organisations were of a Marxist-Leninist matrix, but
some anarchists tried to do the impossible by forming an ‘anarchist’ version that
ended up falling into the contradictions of any fixed clandestine set-up. And I do
believe that many anarchists at that time felt considerable pressure upon them to
form some such an organisation in order to be ‘in the reality of the struggle’.

The theories we are talking about valorise the formation of small groups not
weighed down by ideological preconceptions, acting directly on reality without any
sense of sacrifice but for their own immediate pleasure and freedom, in the context

2
of the freedom of ll. Another essential component in the writings we are discussing
is that of analysi of the profound changes that have taken place in the past thrce
or four decades and have affected the way exploitation functions throughout the
whole world and the struggle against it The ‘new technologies' that many young,
comrades experience as normality today, actually changed the way the world is
run. The whale productive set-up, including that of food, the extraction of fuel elc.
moved from Europe to Asia and the East. following a massive project of restruc-
turing that was met with rebellion that almost reached the point of generalised
insurrection in some countries. This was followed by a complete change in educa-
tional requirements by the system, and an extensive cultural flttening in favour of
infinite chains of data that take us nowhere

1t should also be said that, once certain texts existed in English, alas the language
of the new world arder,they have been translated into their own language by anar-
chists in other parts of the world who have seen something interesting in them, and
that is one of the things that has given me most pleasure in the whole endeavour

A quick word on the concept of cult of personaity’, as you brought it up. I think
that this concept s strange to anarchists in general. Anarchists are judged by other
comrades according to what they say and do, and the coherence between these two.
factors, not through diatribes about their personal, real or invented, attributes as
practised by organisations that rely on charismatic leaders and such like as came.
about in Russia following the Bolshevik takeover. IF anything, iU’ the other way
around. Personal attacks existat times that take the place of actual critique of the.
methods exposed by certain comrades when some sectors of the movement find
their status quo threatened by these methods. That is easier than attacking the
ideas themselves and opposing them with others that might be more efective, who
Knows. But, s said,this s not a true characteristic of anarchists who by thei very.
existence deny the concept of leader and at the same time exalt the individual, cach
and every individual,in the dimension of equality

£
Armed Struggle and the
Revolutionary movement!

Athens, Greece: A transcription of a brief presentation during an interna-
tional conference called by the members of the armed group Revolution-
ary Struggle. The event took place on the 7-8 June 2012 and concerned the
armed mavements in Europe and their history, plus the prospect of global
social revolution as an answer to the systemic crsis

Speakers also included Brigitte Asdonk (Red Army Faction), Bertrand
Sassoye (Communist Combatant Cells), Jose Rodriguez, Andreas Vogel
(June 2% Movement), Christos Tsigaridas (Revolutionary Popular Strug-
gle) and Commission for an International Red Help. ~Nikos Maziotis
and Pola Roupa of Revolutionary Struggle also made presentations at
the conference. These comrades have since gone into clandestinity, from
where we hope the autharities never touch them again.

Athens, Greece. A hot university, barricaded in, riot cops positioned out-
side.

A transeript not to be lost in translation or memory.

[Chairs clatter, screech on the floor. People cough. The flick of lighters
Quiet chatter in the crowd is a deafening roar... Attention focuses and
wanders off in the heat...The microphone is being set-up...]

Chaos,

1 think I distinguished myself on the poster here as not having an organisation
or an acronym ater my name, (but a great word, “England), o that requires an
explanation. I don't belong {o any organisation or actonym, and of course, that was,
always a conscious choice in my lfe and the years I've lived through These choices,
as the comrades here already explained, were there for everybody to make, if they.

so desired. Asis the case today.

TTeat tramseribed and publshed by 325 410

3
‘We are here now tonight because the comrades of Revolutionary Struggle made
an invitation to the movement of this kind. Given the state of the reality that we
are living in today, the only choice we have is to attack and destroy this world, s it
exists, in the form it exists at the moment, so the question is, how do we go about
this and wha forms do we use?

‘The comrades of Revolutionary Struggle made their choice, they didn't ask the
consensus of the comrades in an assembly—they're individuals, they made their
decisions as e individuals, stood by them and acted coherently and are taking the
consequences. They have emerged from the belly of the beast to come back into the
‘movement to embrace the comrades with their proposals, and this, I think, is what
defines this moment, which is this two days [of the conference].

S0 this encounter also has the characteristic of the struggle, i is a moment of
struggle, not just 2 moment for reminiscing or talking about the past, therefore
it is a moment of solidarity, because there is no difference between solidarity and
struggle, for us solidarity is a continuation of the struggle everywhere.

For anarchists, we don't have a linear view of the past, and then, into the future.
‘We don't have a history with a capital ', but a patrimony, a heritage—which isstill
alive today. Some of the comrades of the past, and even a century before, are sill
alive in the struggle, and there are many aspects of the anarchist movement which
could be summed up as the armed, violent, section of attack against the system, and
‘much of this movement has disappeared. because it hasn't been recorded. it does
not have its reference points, it doesn't have historians.

Twould just like to say that I would ike to consider myself an element of tension
in the attempt to move towards the attack and destruction of the existent. This is
something which can't be described or quantified. It is a qualitative tendency that
exists in the movement, which is giving itself moments of experimentation, and also
evaluation of methods, which is a question that s posed to us tonight, that of armed
struggle.

One more thing I'd like to say, on the subject of England. There are some com-
rades who are also here with us in spirit, in England. They send their love and their
solidarity to the comrades who are promoting this event, as well as to al the com-
rades in the prisons and those fighting in the streets. Greece is a great inspiration
and continues to be a great inspiration in this context. And some of the comrades in
England are working assiduously to make known many aspects of the struggle here,
including the documents and reporting o the tria of the comrades of Revolutionary
Struggle.

Armed struggle is a method, it is not the whole of the struggle, it's a selection,
a choice of field. It is done in a certain way, with certain objectives, but we, as
anarchists, also have other methods, which we apply at the same time or at different
times. So, we are having to continually work out which strategy to use against

35
the enemy at a given moment. We don't make a political analysis, we want the
destruction of politis, but we make a social analysis at the level of the exploited,
with whom we will have to carry ot this destruction.

So, with that rather garbled introduction, (because I belong to the barbarians, the
stammerers, do not have a political way of reasoning,) nevertheless, the comrades
who made the proposition have put us ina situation where we have to make an effort
also, to look at certain things more closely which seemed already given, to look at
them again in the problematic.

One of the problematics for anarchists has occasionally been—1Is it possible for
anarchists to act within a closed group, clandestine or otherwise,in the dimension of
armed struggle? Or does the group end up by definition closing itself and separating
itself from our ofher comrades in struggle, i. the exploited, the excluded. We have
our thoughts, we have our ideas on this question, we have our experiments, we
have our methodology, but everything is in the dimension of a great flux of reality
that we live in, nothing is fixed and nothing is certain forever. We play the game
the way we decide, we take responsibility for our actions, and when needed we pay
the price, we make our own rules, but we're free to break them whenever we like,
because we haven't sworn any allegiance to anyone.

~Iknow, everyone i tired. I don’t know if we are stil barricaded in by the riot
cops, and this meeting is like one taking place in a bunker; which is a reality check
for anyone, but there is never any doubt about being in a war here in Greece.

—Very briefly, they ve been mentioned before, but the various experiments and
experiences of [anarchist] armed struggle (in the sense of the closed group—because:
this can take place in other circumstances)

There was the 1 of May Group, which was active at the end of the 60s, that
carried out various attacks in different cities in Europe, against Francoism and also
against the murder of [Giuseppe] Pinelli®. Sometimes doing coordinated bombings
in different cities on the same day. One aspect which underlined, and for them,
seemed to verify the fact that they were anarchists, was the fact that they attacked
property not individuals. “We attack property, not people” was one of their slogans.
Now, of course, we know very well that anarchists do not attack “people”.

Anarchists atack class enemies. These are not “people’

Another group, the Angry Brigade, which was active in England, carried out var-
fous attacks over a number of years. The specific interest that they generated was
that they didn't write long communigues, just very short and to incite people to at-
tack themselves. I don’t have their exact words here, but one of their communiques

Anachist comeade Gaseppe Pinl bor in Milan 1928, & vy workes,who st the te was
scretaryof Crocenera Anarchia-talian Anachit Black Cross el o is deathfom the 4% flor
o the Ml poi headquartcs whers b ha been held unde ntertogation for 3 days llowing the
st bomb i the Banca Nasionale dell Agricaltrs in il on 12 Decembes 1965,

36
was *what do you want,sit here gazing into nothing in a drug-store drinking taste-
s coffee, or blow it up?” Some of their first communiques were just three words,
or a few syllables. It would be fascinating to talk about the group but I don't think
we have time and I don'tthink it i particularly relevant to the points we want to
make, but 1 do think that one of the great developments they made to the anarchist
approach to armed attack was the very fact of short communiques

Now I come to ltaly, at the end of the 70s, to briefly look at an armed strug-
gle group named Azione Rivoluzionaria, which defined itsef specifically anarchist.
Now there is a strange feeling about going into talking about an armed group, as
an outsider, not as a member of the group, because we know normally those who
o that are the other side—the enemy, the cops and so on. One of the main aspects
of the armed closed organisation is the fact that their actions belong to them.

So,in the latter part of the 705, some comrades of the anarcho-libertarian area—
frstly, we have to say that 77 is a context known in ltaly as the “Anni di piombo’,
the “Years of Lead", because there were thousands of people in the streets, demon-
strating, and there was a diffused armed guerilla in the whole of Htaly in those years.
‘There were many armed groups, of the closed Marxist-Leninist kind, and there was
a critique of these groups, and this critique was active, in the form of small nuclei
of attack. These groups either did not claim their attacks at all or invented a name
for each series of actions or specific attack.

Asione rivoluzionaria formed in a moment of very widely diffused liberatory vi-
olence. Young people had lost all their taboos about violence and in '77 when a
‘communist-syndicalist went to speak to the students in the occupied university of
Rome, he was chased out of the university, and this was a moment of iberation for
‘many, many, young people.

‘When later, a young member of Lotta Continua, Francesca Russo, was killed,
there was a massive rebellion in the streets and the rebels were smashing the gun

Joure not busy b born yone busy buying’. Al the slesgil n the lash boutiques are
made todres the same and have the sme makeup. represening the 10405 In fashion s i everything.
e, capitalsm can anly go backwards. they ve nowhere togo-they re dead.

The future is ours.

Lifei 0 boing thee i nothing o do except spend al o wages o the ltest ki or shirt.

Brothers and Sisters,what are your real desires?

it in the drugstor,look distant, empry, bord, drinking some tastles cafee? Or perhaps
bow it upor burn it down.

“Th only hing you can do with modern slave-houses—called boutiques-—is wrec them You
cun't eformproftcapitaim and inhumanity: Just ki t bl t breaks.

Revalution
Communiué &
“The Angry Brigade

Ed
shop windows, arming themselves and shooting the cops. The whole of these years—
Idon't know if they have been recorded in Greece or not but they are worthy of
examination, because these moments were happening in a time of [capitalist] re-
structuring, which has now taken place. All the heavy industry of FIAT and the
other productive centres were closing down, thousands of men were redundant,
thousands of young people realised they had no future in the terms of the capitalist
society.

For the closed clandestine organisations, the moment had come; for the Red
Brigades, for example, the question became: “Either enlist, or desist”, meaning “Join
the organisation—or stay at home and watch us”. This led to a massive situation of
enrolment in the organisation, which contributed afterwards to a collapse not only
of the organisation but the whole concept of revolution and attack. It has already
been mentioned that there were 4000 comrades in prison, and the State found the
wayto geta profession of desistance: “pentiti’—repentance and denunciation of the
struggle. To get back to Azione Rivoluzionaria, it was a very interesting attempt to
do something different. To quote them: “The movement does not put off the class
struggle but takes it on in first person. What we want is to carry out a destructive
eritique of the State with the use of revolutionary violence. Armed struggle, pro-
paganda by the deed. We want to hasten the time and widen the internal front of
the clash in order to reach a destabilization of the State. Armed struggle is the only.
force credible of making any project today. Create, organise, 10, 100, 1000 armed
nuclei.. Ours i a revolutionary organisation in which we meet at an informal level,
on the basis of various different ideas and experiences of differing comrades” ... The
existence of this group within the movement at the time, stimulated a part of the
anarchist movement to make a critique of the armed struggle method. This eritique
was put into practice a decade later in the 80s,in the form of affnity groups; in this
case against the nuclear industry in Italy. Many of the actions consisted of sawing
down pylons, but these actions were not explained in communiques, rather the an-
archists were present in their critique of the big demonstrations and campaigns, in
their own meetings and interventions. The essence of this methodology is that there
is not one apocalyptic moment when revolution will occur as a result of a crisis of
Capital. “Crisis” is one of the mechanisms of Capital, which undergoes recurrent

‘These crises lead to increasing discomfort, which lead to rebellion and organisa-
tion. They also lead to a proliferation of reformist groups that aim to alleviate the
distress of the exploited. So, if we say, rather than aiming towards one moment of
revolution we are aiming at moments of insurrection, which are partial moments
without being complete, this is more to the point.

“This was also attempted in the moments in the 805 during the struggle against
American cruise missile bases in Sicily, ltaly. This became also an intermediate
struggle. Again we don't have time now to explain fully, but this is a moment in

3
time when anarchists in laly attempted in those years to activate an insurrectional
struggle. This time the intention was to create organisms created by anarchists but
adopted by people who were not anarchist, because the essence of insurrectionary
struggle s taking back our lives and our actions without delegating the struggle to
‘anyone. Not to an armed group nor a trade union.

To close, when we are looking for our accomplices in the struggle, we need to
Iook beyond the movement, o the exploited in saciety. this ‘thing called ‘socicty’.
Not to drav them into the movement but to push them to attack.

Tm sorry if L have strayed from the topic of the historical reality of the armed
struggle, but I find it dificult to look at realiy in a purely historical dimension and
I realise that the intervention in terms of the language and tranlation has been
incomplete —This s because there isn't an answer,there are questions and propos
tions that we need to look at and experiment with.

Our point of reference must always be the destruction of this world, which is
based on work and exploitation. To enter the adventure of freedom, where the
‘means of survival belong to everyone. To each according to their needs, from each
according to their abilitis, desires and without coercion—or moral pressure which
also must disappear from this world!

Let's work with whichever method we desire to destroy the existent!

Let’s destroy the spectacle of representation and I'll be the first to break the mi-
crophone!

39
Athens, the Revolutionary Struggle
trial: Statement to the terror court
of Korydallos!

JUDGE: Are you going to make a religious oath or a political one?.

JW: I've come here to say what I have to say. I don't have to swear.

JUDGE: By the law it's like this you must swear to say the truth. But if you want
you, you can say that by your own honour and conscience you will say the truth.

JW: Ishall say what I have to say.

JUDGE: Can you tell us why you are here?

JW: Yes, I'm here because I was invited by the three comrades of Revolutionary

Struggle to speak as a witness.

Twish to clarify right away that I stand here as an enemy of the State and soci-
ety. Far from being a lively community sharing social well-being and the joy of life,
what s referred to as saciety is no more than the dull organisation of inequality and
exploitation through social roles and forbiddance. The law is the barbed wire that
holds everything in place, and has been internalised to such an extent that it forms
the unconscious basis of daily habit and routine even for those who apply it. The
media form opinions to maintain consensus and the delegation of individual respon-
sibility to that organ of institutionalised terror, the State. The State, which includes
its subjects, i at the basis of every social relation at the present time, including the
one here in this court today.

Ihave come to stand face to face with the enemy inside this bastion of State terror
because I was invited by the three comrades of Revolutionary Struggle. I haven't
come to enter into dialogue concerning these comrades or any others. My presence
here is an act of solidarity and continuation of my struggle as an anarchist. At
least the present judicial proceeding has discarded every vestige of the democratic
swindle, revealing the true essence of power. It's impossible to pass over the fact
that this trial is taking place inside a prison, the greatest crime perpetrated by man
over man, and the physical proximity of the judge and the gaoler is an unusual if

oz

W
unintentional declaration of truth. The judge is nothing without the gaoler. The
gaoler is nothing without the judge. They are one and bear equal responsibility for
their actions. Terrorists and criminals are the servants of the State and capital, not
those struggling to survive or fighting against a world of strife, war, poverty and
oppression.

It s in the context of this struggle that I first heard of the anarchist Nikos Mazi-
otis. He was in the extreme and dangerous phase of a hunger strike to enforce his
refusal to wear a uniform and become a killer in the pay of the State. At the time
‘many anarchists in Italy, where I was living, had also refused to do military service,
choosing to go to prison rather than join the armed force that keeps humanity
vided into classes and intervenes violently to extinguish any attempt at liberation.
But also and above all because military service is one of the State’s weapons for
building model citizens devoid of personality, individuality and their own way of
thinking against which it is necessary to rebel and refuse.

T was already aware of the anarchist struggle, of the importance of the anar-
chist struggle in Greece alongside the exploited, the students, the bus drivers,
schoolteachers, the people of the villages of Halkidiki, etc and had read inspiring
reports of their actions and also about the State repression against them. But it
was Nikos Maziotis, who without knowing it, was to be the propulsive element
in my coming to Greece in person. It was on the occasion of his trial in 1999
that I came to Athens for the frst time, to attend the court in solidarity with him,
It was then that I discovered the wild beauty of the Greek anarchist comrades,
their passion for freedom that found immediate expression in a thousand ways
and never ceases to grow and intensify, inspiring and igniting free spirits all over
the planet. Two things in particular impressed me on that occasion. First and
foremost the unmitigated courage and dignity of Nikos Maziotis as he faced the
perpetrators of power and privilege. His statement to the court, his affirmations
as a man, an individual, a revolutionary, an anarchist, were made looking into the
barrel of the gun of judgement without any concern for the consequences in terms
of the years he was facing locked up in a cell. What he said that day is a classic of
anarchist theory concerning the need for violent attack on the class enemy in first
person and I personally have contributed to spreading it in the English language
(the text, I mean, hopefully also the attacks). It has inspired comrades and rebels
all over the world. What also impressed me and has affected my life ever since
was the immediacy of so many comrades’ action in solidarity, without mediation,
without the taboos about so-called violence that put a brake on the just anger of
the exploited. They expressed solidarity in its only authentic manifestation, by
continuing the struggle, the conscious attack on the profits of the bosses and the
instruments of repression, even and above all when the class enemy was out in all
its force to protect the property and arrogance of the rulers of the planet. Each
with their own means, each with their own responsibility.

a1
Armed struggle is on trial. Anarchists also. For any struggle to be worthy of
the name it must be armed and selF-organised. far from any delegation to the sel-
proclaimed representatives of the workers movement who have shamelessly be-
trayed the latter and collaborated with the bosses by reigning in the bad passions
of those who have nothing to lose but their chains. Anarchists are against hierar-
chy and this also applies to the weapons used in the struggle. The weaponry of
the anarchist combines the idea, the concept of freedom and the need to destroy
not only inequality and poverty but also and at the same time, authority, hierarchy
and obedience. They have the capacity to organise themselves and go to the attack
without leaders or led, and push others to do the same. Words,stones, pistols fire,
dynamite, Molotov cockils, graffit, sledge-hammers, hacksaws, theory, analyss,
identification of the class enemy as it changes in order to stay the same, machine-
guns, spray cans, bazookas are some of the weapons for the self-management of
the atack. (1 forgot the catapult) All combine in destructive playful alchemy far
from the deathiike logic of judgement. Even when class enemy is struck down,
it is just something to be done and let's get it over with. Anarchists abhore the
blind institutionalised violence of the State with its arsenal of uniformed robots,
tasers, tanks, drones, poisonous gases, flash grenades, truncheons, jackboots, ar-
moured vehicles, ety cameras, helicopters flying over our heads, courts, prisons,
concentration camps, bomber planes, missiles, institutionalised religion, the medi
the manipulation of people’s minds, etc. Only the State has the power to send men
to their death o to kil always with the blessing of the priest, aftr insiling them
with patriotism and xenophobia from birth. Greece was the first country to use na-
palm against the guerrillain the mountains. Now, rony of history. it uses nerve gas
imported from the Isracl State which, after evicting milions of Palestinians from
their homes to survive in camps,claims its legitimacy from the gassing of 6 million
Jews by another State over half a century ago.

Anarchists are against prisons even for their enemics and know well that when
the present setup of the means of production is destroyed and social wealth belongs
to everyone, to each according {0 their needs, from each according to their desites,
there will be ltle cause forstrife. The State will do anything to obstruct the struggle
forfreedom in whatever form it takes, whatever instrument it uses. Since the begi
ning ofthe anarchist movement around the middlc of the nineteenth century the or-
gansof power have always reacted particularly violently against anarchists because.
the State, any State,be it red,black or the multicoloured version ofsocial democracy,
cannot tolerate freedom, be it in the form of ideas or in the sel-organised action of
the exploited. I could give many examples but I think we are short of time and I'l
carry on. And of course not only anarchists have been massacred by the State but
the exploited in any attempt they have made to self organise their attack against
oppression, and we saw this the other day in South Africa when 27 miners were
gunned down in a demonstration against the conditions in the mine.

2
In the space of a century and a half the number of anarchists who have been
imprisoned. exiled, guillotined, garrotted, electrocuted. tortured, gunned down in
action, shot by firing squads, beaten to a pulp in the street and left to die in a
cell, pushed out of police station windows or killed in traffic ‘accidents’, add up
to thousands, and often the written word of the anarchist revolutionary has been
as severely punished as the bullet. Far from showing signs of penitence o begging
for mercy these proud fighters faced death as they had faced lfe, fearlessly. with a
proud ery of Long live anarchy! Long live freedom! That is why the exterminatory
delirium of the State is a battle lost before it begins. For every anarchist and rebel
slain by the State thousands more spring up out of the nowhere of the uncertain
and the undecided. And that was visible in 2008 in this country, something which
inspired people all over the world. Every second an anarchist spends in prison his
or her] spirit strengthens, expands beyond the walls and nourishes the solidarity
that he or she inspires

‘The anarchist struggle is qualitative not quantitative. Its aim is not to control and
lead the masses into battle or act in their place but to push the exploited and ex-
cluded to act in first person to attack the class enemy and its structures. Sometimes
it's the other way around. a mass explosion of rage erupts after some exalted lackey
of the State takes the law into his own hands and guns down a schoolboy, a rioter,
a respected elder in the ghetto or a kid in the banlieue. When anarchists put them:-
selves alongside the exploited it is not as their saviours but to fight together with
them to extend and widen their attack, to turn riots into insurrections. Sometimes
eality acts the other way, the rebels surpassing the anarchists in their destructive
fury. In recent years in Greece and in many parts of the world there has been a
proliferation of direct attacks on the structures of capital and the State by small
groups or individuals. Unlike the seventies and eighties when capitalism was un-
dergoing ferocious restructuring that was responded to in part, not only, by highly
structured marxist-leninist armed struggle groups, from the nineties the attack has
taken a more flexible form by anarchist groups based on affnity,often with no name
or acronym. The workerist element of the struggle more or less disappeared along
with the industrial working class due to the introduction of robotisation and real
time operations thanks to information technology and capital’s resulting ability to
exploit starvation wages on the other side of the planet.

‘The armed group Revolutionary Struggle appeared in 2003 at a time when there
was an ant-terroris frenzy globally, which in Greece coincided with the capture of
the 17° of November group followed by true media delirium. At first their targets
were symibols of authority and the State—police, the American Embassy; the Mi

istry of Finance and Labour, and also an aftempt on the minister for Public Order
who had been responsible for upgrading the repression. They acted directly with-
out needing the alib of the masses in order to sirike the common enemy, fo their

2
own dignity and coherence. When in 2008 the so-called financial crisis became of-
ficial along with the responsibilty of the State and the banking corporations, their
actions turned to financially-related targets such as the Stock Exchange, Citibank,
Eurobank, ete.

During the whole period the group published extensive analyses which were com-
bined with their actions and contained astrong class position, exhorting the class of
exploited to rise and attack those responsible. They are a part of this new complex-
ive realty of the struggle against capital and the State, one that is pushing towards
a self-organised revolutionary outlet. Their choice of armed struggle in the specific
sense is not presented as an end in itself but simply as a tool to bring the revolution-
ary perspective to the fore and present the hypothesis of the need for immediate
attack in an unequivocal discourse addressed both to the anarchist movement and
the wider movement of the exploited.

‘The comrades who have claimed responsibility for this organisation are individ-
uals who have been active fighters in the strugeles of the anarchist movement in
Greece inits many forms for decades and are well known in the movement and be-
yond. In the face of the media outrage and scare-mongering following their arrests
they came out and proudly claime the organisation, decriminalising it inthe face of
the terroristic attack of the media on the minds of the population in order to prepare.
the terrain for consensus and support for their political and physical annihilation
at the hands of the repressive organs of the State. They have written volumes ex-
plaining the reasons for the attacks and the need for social rebellion particularly at
this moment where, as in many other parts of Europe and the world, the organised
erime of State, bosses and banks has led to further extortion from the dispossessed
who are now at breaking point. Their message is that of the need for direct attack,
that the structures of capital and the State are not invincible.

‘The words and the actions of the Revolutionary Solidarity group [ch. you mean
the Revolutionary Struggle? _interpreter) of the Revolutionary Struggle group,
(yes...it's the same thing.. solidarity is the struggle and the struggle s solidarity..)
have been translated into many languages in the dimension of the continuation and
intensification of revolutionary solidarity in the dimension of attack. This has led
to multiform actions, from banner-hanging, sabotage, incendiary attacks on banks
and the structures of repression, discussions, international meetings, publications,
posters, ete. and have been one of the recent sources of inspiration to anarchists
everywhere

Atatime when life has been mortgaged to Capital and become lttle more than a
question of accountancy where every day people are bombarded by the media with
figures in billions while they are struggling to stay alive and feed their children,
Revolutionary Struggle has had considerable impact on those who sce the erisis not
as something that has to be re-addressed and corrected, but faced head on and de-
stroyed, along with work and the whole economy. Poverty will never be climinated

m
until we destroy work because it is the condition that forces people to spend their
lives doing soul-destroying jobs at starvation wages.

Millions of young people all aver the planet are made to feel useless and without
hope due to spreading unemployment. It's time to destroy work as a very concept
and take back our lives. Work is a crime, an ideological and physical impasition
on the great mass of human beings, animals, and the earth itself, for the benefit of
a small percentage of glitterati, but believed in and defended by the whole social
set-up, exploiters and exploited alike. In the words of Herman J. Schuurman one
of the founders of the Mokergroep, a group of young proletarians in 1923 wrote
this: We want to create as free people, not work as slaves; therefore we will destroy
the system of slavery. Capitalism only exists because of the work of the workers,
thus we will sabotage it and put an end to it. If we are not working towards the
destruction of capital, we are working towards the destruction of humanity! We
do not want to be destrayed by capitalism, so capitalism will have to be destroyed
by us. I don’t know if the Revolutionary Struggle comrades are advocating the
destruction of work, but that is where the totality of the struggle for the destruction
of the existent takes us, without compromise or half measures.

s
UK, August 2011 — the struggle
against the existent continues!

Written in the heat of the moment and posted in my now defunct blog
Angry news from around the world, this artice, a ‘work in progess” was
added to by 325 comrades, namely the paragraphs concerning the media,
cop strategy and the UK anarchist movement, and published in 325 #9 and
by the deeply missed Darko Mathers in August 2011 Revolt: Anarchy in
the UK (Dark Matter Publications). I finds a place in the present compi-
lation as it was a gut response to certain disparaging attitudes within the
anarchist movement concerning the greedy’ looters.

Thursday, August 4, Mark Duggan, a ‘real straight up and down respected man®
(words of London rapper, Chipmunk) from Tottenham in London, was blasted to
death while on his way home in a cab by a mob of cops wielding Heckler & Koch
MP5 carbines. 29 year old Mark, father of four young childzen, lived on the hous-
ing estate known as Broadwater Farm, a depressed predominantly Afro-Caribbean
area. The area is infamous since the riot of 1985 after 49 year old Cynthia Jarrett
collapsed and died of 2 heart attack as police raided her home. (During the riot a
policeman, PC Blakelock, was hacked to death with a machete) Today, n the words
of aresident, if you're from Broadwater Farm, police are on you every day, you're
not allowed to come off the estate. I you come off the estate they follow you They
followed Mark Duggan and he ended up dead.

August 6 — The arrogance of the killrs in uniform in the face of the protest by
the victiny's family and supporters, plus the brutal attack on a 16 year old girl by
police during the vigil was the last strav.

“That night in Tottenham the police station was attacked, polce cars set on fire,
double-decker bus ends up a twisted wreck after being engulfed in flames, press pho-
tographers are beaten and relieved of their equipment for the decades of lies they
have propagated. Bank windows smashed. Countless shops looted, stuff thrown
all over the streets. Young guys storm McDonald’s and start frying up burgers and
chips. Indignant anger clears the brain, flushes out the cops in the head. Collective.
fury at this latest police murder combines with the daily bullying and humilation

T (work n progeess) Angey news rom arund the world

16
of being stopped and scarched, the moralising, the false promises, useless lives, no
future, desire for status-affirming ‘needs’ unattainable due to increased taxes, un-
employment and cutting of benefits, 4 million cameras, garing security cops at the
entrance to every store, the colonization of al remaining urban space by trendy
bas flled with the noisy chatter ofthe carefree...that and much more that we don't
know and will never experience welled up and fucled the will o smash through the.
invisible and plate glass barriers that hold everything in place.

‘The hostages of the open prison, the young people of the ghettos of London, rise
up and the capitalists’nightmare inally materialiss,as the last link in the consumer
chain of submission snaps. It explodes into a free-for-all when, in a flash of illum
nation the solution o the existential dilemma is found: MUST HAVE/CAN'THAVE,
CAKE. ' simple: learn and apply. possibly burning store to ashes on retreating
‘The rioting escalates, scores more people come into the area responding to call
outs on twiter to come up and fight the cops and loot shops. Over the following
days it spreads to many other parts of London and onward towards other itis.

“The rage also spreads beyond the main clashes in Nottingham, Manchester, Bris-
tol. Gloucester, Liverpool. Birmingham. In many incidents the stories escape cat-
egorisation or quantification. One thing sure that is not reported and deliberately.
ignored i the chiefly anti-authoritarian flavour to the uprising, the government and
corporations relentlessly branding the people ‘scum’, thieves’ and other low simple
catchphrases of demonisation. The failure in this to stop young people identifying
with the uprising is obvious when it is seen how quickly the riots replicate and
need litle trigger to begin breaking the Queen’s peace. Mainstream media report-
ing becomes incredibly formulaic, and the bosses make mileage from their scenes
of interest in reaching their poltical abjectives, looping the same images over and
over, overlaid with the stereotypical talking heads’ condemnation and reassurance.
“The widespread disorder does not stop. The people who lost thei fear go outside,
collect themselves to atack and take as much as they can.

“The police are overwhelmed and beaten by the small fluid groups who don't wait
around to be crushed, but instead move quickly. spreading terror in those who can't
identify themselves as belonging to the mob.

‘Some anarchists and ‘rebels with consciousness’ did rush towards the smoke sig-
nals on the horizon. For some ol to stop in their tracks, in many cases riveted to.
the spot as spectators ofa scenario never played outin their wildest dreams: crowds
of young people queuing up outside high street stores like customers a the January.
sales,calmly forcing their way inside under the implacable gaze of ows of riot cops,
to reappear later with huge bags,even troleys, overflowing with consumer goods.

Elsewhere, behind the hastly improvised barricades erected and st alight by lo-
cal kids in back streets as they prepare to greet their daily enemy — the cops in
thei anti-riot vans — with hail of bottles and stones, the outsider, immediately
xecogmisable by age and colour,is viewed with suspicion. Who are you? What do

a7
you want? In various areas, the odd gang, spurred by the momentary shift in the
balance of power in the streets, starts high-jacking people’s cars and driving off
in them or setting them alight, or trashing and looting comer shops, holding no
attraction but for the benefit of diversionary chaos so that other small groups can
organise and initiate their own attacks. For some, black clothes and face masks are
a sign of organised illegality and command respect accordingly. Each area and par-
ticular environment creates differing possibilities and modes of co-operation and
confrontation. Still days after the clashes there is a changed air in the glances and
atmosphere between those in the different scctors of the clash, put under the same
rule. Open fighting against the police and the system they defend is a unifying fea-
ture for popular resistance against all regimes. Very soon it became clear that this
seemingly strange police tactic of standing by and watching looters empty stores
was no accident, as it had already been reported by right-wing media that the police
would let the situation play itself out for 3 days before going in with heavy repres-
sive blows, a story which subsequently disappeared from the news. This standard
British counter-insurgency tactic, developed in the colonies and in Northern Ire-
Iand,is used in the preliminary stages of the social insurgence to attempt to create
a situation of havoe where all the contradictions of the mess of society can exacer-
bate, to force the false question: Do you want an authoritarian regime to maintain
repressive order, or do you want ‘lawless chaos™? The question is posed by power
to the servile masses, using the rebellious as their spear of inquiry.

‘The police removed their personnel from the most seriously affected areas, giving
space for the rit to lterally bum out — letting the ‘violence' reach such a point as
to deny the intensification which could have resulted had the clash been kept at a
certain social level, possibly drawing in anarchists, leftists and angry students.

‘The front line of the clash ~ that against cops, police stations, media politicians,
started to disappear as the target of these attacks withdrew or were overcome. This
channeled the affray into the requisitioning of goods by uncontrolled masses. The
design was to secure the forces of the police following their defeat on the streets in
order to prepare the massive repressive operation from CCTV surveillance, snitch-
ing and investigation — and provoke a media-boosted backlash from those who
identify with the system of work and law demanding that the police enforce a se-
vere crackdown. A backlash which was not only seen in the posses of marauding
shop-keepers and British nationalists, but also in the citizenist outery for an open
prison society by tidy controlled individuals not adverse to controlling others.

On Wednesday August10th the moment that power had been waiting for in some
form or another occurs. Three young men defending local Asian-owned shops in
Birmingham are killed when a car is rammed into them. An irreparable loss for
those who knew and loved them, great gain for power. The articulate appeal of one.
of the fathers in his heartfelt call for “peace’ (how many rivers of tears were spilled
that day for sons killed by the capitalist moloch all over the planet) is relentlessly

a8
exploited by the class enemy, just as the resulting coming together of Sikhs and
Muslims to defend their structures s depicted as a triumph of democracy. The fact
that the divide and rule policy that characterises British power was instrumental in
the partition of India and creation of Pakistan, an operation tht resulted in over
a million dead, has been erased from the annals of history. Rule Britannia! This
Disney-like multicultural paradise is a fragile mosaic of erstwhile plundered peoples
secking to survive, living shoulder to shoulder each with their miserable prospects
of inclusion or exclusion according to their capacity for collaboration, subservience,
and self-mutilation.

One part of the equation that has been totally ignored over these days are the pro-
ducers of the much coveted goods themselves. Crimes spring from fixed ideas. The
sacredness of property is one of these ideas and is the crime par excellence that is
dangled before the disinherited masses. Just as war is disconnected from murder in
the psyche of the common man or woman, the plunder of the resources of the planet
and subjection of the invisible producing slaves is totally absent from their diatribes
about 'stealing’ and ‘looting’ What s a high street store in flames compare to the
existence of the store itself? Every supermarket is a ‘crime scene’, MacDonald's
and Coca Cola are veritable motors of mass destruction. After babbling sensational
accounts of the riots from the teleprompter, the newsreader's disapproving frown
erupts into a beaming smile as she announces the news that Apple has surpassed
Exxon Mobile to become ‘the world's most valuable company’. Wonderful Apple,
such style, smart gadgets. Perhaps the searing profits should be put down to good
management as we read in the daily press: The man now running Apple, Tim Cook,
had a delicate job last year. After nearly a dozen workers committed suicide at Fox-
conn, a contract manufacturing plant in China, he flew to visit the company ~ and
pressured them to improve working conditions. One move was to hang large nets
from the factory buildings.

To see the recent events as something that do not concern anarchists and con-
scious rebels would be just as absurd as to simply take them at face value and join
in the looting spree for a moment of quick gratifcation or to be ‘in the reality of the
struggle’. That doesn’t mean staying at home safely out of the way of these amoral
‘greedy’ rioters. What can a movement of predominantly vegan, bicycle-riding anti-
commodity anarchists or their moralising anarcho-workerist counterparts have to
o with the pluri-appropriation of plasma screens, trainers and fashion labels? The
dividing line, which anarchists cannot stomach in spite of their heritage, is that the
rebellious protagonists of the past days were not fighting for the noble cause of
freedom’ but were fighting for themSELVES. Selves alicnated and stunted by the
Voracious reality they have been born into, spurred into action in an immediate as-
sault on forbiddance. Now they are being demonised by those who should know
better, for their lack of ‘political awareness’ and altruism. In such situations anar-
chists can only take stock and seck to put into action elements of projectuality that

2
is already being elaborated and experimented in small agile groups. What is evident
from this flash-point of insurrection is that the anarchist movement, for want of a
better term, here in Britain, is largely inadequate as to be insignificant in terms of
the attack and the capability to prepare a line of light beyond the existent, et alone
during a mass riot

If the uprising has caught us unprepared, if we have not already found our affini-
ties, worked out our ideas and put into practice minimal attacks on the reality of
dominion and class oppression, it is not from the ‘children of men’ that we will get
the best indications to enter and extend the struggle. Anarchists risk being passive
spectators, “provocateurs’ or simply clumsy gatecrashers of someone else's party.

‘Some comrades have already begun the trajectory of their own projectuality, their
‘own experimentation and attack, which has also materialised over these days along-
side or within some of the attacks on the structures of the consumer god and its ser-
vants. Without flags, banners or high-sounding political claims. Others are asking
themselves how to move in that direction, how to carry on now that ‘society’ the
great myth, the centuries-old swindle adapted to the imperatives of the corporate
cartels defended by their servants, government, cops and media, is being reasserted.

Now the party’s over, the CCTV footage s being analyzed, facial recognition
software is being deployed, the snitches are queuing up for payment. ‘Wanted’ pho-
tos are being displayed on huge ‘digi-trucks’ driven throughout the cities. People’s
doors are being smashed in by screaming gangs of riot cops wielding battering rams.
Families are being given eviction orders in the old fascist ardor for collective pun-
ishment. Welfare payments are to be discontinued. Kangaroo courts are working
24/7 and the cell doors are slamming shut as the “community” is polarised in open
conflict. Almost 2,000 arrests so far. Police and politcians argue the toss as to who
subdued the battle and Twitter and Facebook have been saved from banishment by
becoming the instrument of the good citizens. The broom has been stolen from the
reprobate witch to become the symbol of citizenship as hundreds sweep and sweep.
in this neo Civil Defence corps.

The media and soft cops are hard at work to find the magic formula, the new
superglue to hold together the untenable. On the margins, some good anarchists
and leftsts will give a hand, no doubt

Nothing will ever be the same after what has happened over the past few days.
Our task is not to join forces with the recuperators but, using every means, to start
to dentify significant objectives and contribute to creating the conditions where the
excluded, on whose backs they come into existence, can do something to destroy
them.

‘We are moving into phase of new, more brutal, more fascistc levels of epression
with full consensus of reawakened, engaged citizens. The way has been paved for
acceptance of the next stage in British neo-fascism, the Olympics and the related
‘massive installations for surveillance and control

0
The struggle against the existent continuies, opening up new encounters and fields
of experimentation to combine with the unyielding ingredients of all our interven-
tions: affnity, solidarity and self-organisation of the attack.

51
London, 9 December 2010 —
Thousands fight against exclusion
and the death society in
iconoclastic revelry!

A day not to be forgotten. A unique day, when a prominent fraudster and
his spouse were brought down tosize by the great levele, FEAR, cloguently
displayed on their ghastly faces when they found themselves surrounded
by a quick-thinking body of demonstrators moving on from Parliament
Square on December 9 2010. On bumping into Charles ‘her to the throne
of Great Britain’ and his jewel-bedecked consort arriving a the London
Palladium for a Royal Variety performance, they seized the moment with-
out hesitation. The road was quickly blocked and the couple, alone for
a terifying moment inside the family Bentley, became the target of irre-
pressible derision and rage. The vehicle was smattered in paint and back
‘windows smashed as they were surrounded by hundreds o unchained ‘sub-
jects’ i scenc of iotous mockery: Carpe diem!

London 9 December, 2010 — Thousands of young and not so young pour uncon-
trollably like mercury into Parliament Square to make themselves seen and heard.
No fetishisation of the cops—they are simply ignored or got out of the way with
the means at hand. Barriers intended to fence people in like sheep become a part of
the improvised weaponry, thrown back from whence they came amidst music and
laughter. ‘We kettled the cops, heh, heh, hely. At one point a posse of mounted
riot cops gallop into the crowd~there is no panic, and without fear to stimulate
their adrenaline, they ride straight out of the compound. Meanwhile, impervious to
the people’s solicitations, the demoeratic dictatorship—worthy servants of capital’s
restructuring—press ahead in their contribution to the division of the warld into
included and excluded.

As the young people's anticipation turns to rage, some of the symbols of greed
and power (dead and alive) that infest everybody’s lives are derided, brought down

ngry news from around the world

52
to sz, simply, from the heart, far from the calculated deadly violence of police who
step in, one of them almost murdering a demonstrator, smashing his skull with a
truncheon,

Now, days later, it is the job of the lackeys of the regime to vomit out the lat-
ter’s essence, VIOLENCE, in a twisted condemnatory accusation against the peaple
whose lives are at stake now and in the future to come.

Perhaps a broken window in a high street store revealed the institutional violence
of the sweatshops of Bangladesh that supply their trashy goods under the whip of
starvation wages?

Perhaps paint on a riot cop’s shield sparked the will to live, ie. rebel, ie. exercise
one’s physical and mental force in one’s own interests, regardless of the threat of
the blind institutionalised violence of the State?

Perhaps shouts of ‘Off with their heads!” and the terror on the faces of the occu-
‘pants of the cracked, paint-bespattered royal hearse jolted us out of the Disneyland
of everyday ‘lfe’, giving a glimpse of a new/old wonderland, where vague historical
images encounter vibrant hitherto undreamed dreams?

‘The Treasury, the supreme court?

No fortress is impregnable, the structures around us that affect our lives and rule
the planet continue to exist thanks to consensus, ignorance or indifference, all con-
ditions that are undergoing a radical upturning.

The detox has begun, we are flushing the State out of our veins!

So. in the words of an Angry Punk, found in a leaflet some time ago in the
streets of London: SMASH YOUR TV, PISS ON YOUR NEWSPAPER, FIND THE
'PEOPLE THAT SHARE THE SAME HATRED AGAINST THIS SOCIETY AND ACT
DIRECTLY AGAINST THE TARGETS!

B
The End of anarchism?
A few words...!

‘The end of anarchism? An odd question perhaps at a time when just about ev-
erybody one meets is ‘an anarchist in their heart of hearts'. No enlightened person
would ever admit o being in favour of authority or hierarchy today, and even many.
of the marsist leninists of once upon a time would never admit to being in favour
ofaState’*

And the anarchists? There are anarchists everywhere, in the four coners of the
carth. More than a few are giving the power structure a sting, inspiring others to
do likewise, and some are magniloquently paying a high prie for it

There are anarchists—and not only—present in focal points of the struggle such
as that against high speed railways and nuclear power, in large demonstrations and
confrontations with the police—while there are also those who silently light up the
darkness of the night with the ridescent glow of freedom.

Anarchists defend immigrants against racist attacks and support rebellions and
riots in the concentration camps of fotress Europe. There ase anarchists locked up
in prisons, and anarchists who act n solidarity with them. In the UK, following
their spirited presence in the student demos of last year and a quantity of diffused
attacks elsewhere over a period of time anarchists were given the status of public
bug-bear by the police and media, who invited the populace to ‘shop an anarchist”*

There are anarchist individualists—and anarchist individuals.

There are anarchists who are against society and anarchists who participate in
neighbourhood assemblics. There are even anarchists who vote in clections, al-
though they are not making a song and dance about it

Vintroductory ot t the recenly republished Th End o Anarchism? by Luigi Glleai

Infct, Lenin himsef preferred the sogans of the anarchists untilthe “dictatorship of the prole-
taratand his own personaldctatorship were ey established. Read The Gullotine af Wk by Grégory
P. Masimofl, Cienfuegos Pres,

et o an image ofthe anarchist emblem, th City of Westminster polices counter terorist
focus ek called or anti-anarchis whisteblowers [sitches) statin: “Anarchisi s 3 plica pos
ophy which considers the state undesizabe, unnecessary, and harmfal, and fnstead promotesa stateess
Sociry or anarchy. Any information rlatin to anarchiss should be repoted to your lcal police’
(press report 31 July 2011)

e
There are anarchist academics and academic anarchists. And then there are the.
anarchist punks, activists, organizationalists and all manner of libertarians in the
great zoological park generally considered the ‘movement” ‘against.

Without a doubt there are anarchists everywhere—but is there anarchism? Is
there, that i, a sense of the totality of the struggle a struggle that always tends to-
wards the absolute destruction of the existent and the experience of freedom, wher-
ever one is, in whatever manifestation of the partial struggle we are involved in at
2 given moment?

“The totality of the struggle s not a global vision of the enemy setup in allts forms,
it is the totality of freedom without limits or impediments of any kind, therefore
something in movement, that grows to infinity, always in act, yet totally present
when we think it destroying limits and domestication.’ How many anarchists con-
sciously transport this sense of the totality of the struggle into the ardor of their
attack against the enemy?

Once we grasp it it never leaves us, it is our compass whether we are in the stormy
seas of revolt or in the stagnant waters of babylon, whereas to ignore t leads us into
the dead end of ecumenism, frontism, illusions of quantity, or simply being swept
into oblivion by the great tsunami of the excluded in revolt. Galleani doesn’t talk
about the totality of the struggle in this little book, but he does talk about some-
thing without which the latter could never materialise. He talks about anarchist
communism, that which ‘implies that the material and moral needs of everyone be
satisfied without any restriction other than that which is imposed by nature’ and
that the contribution to production ‘should be given voluntarily by everyone, ac-
cording to their capacity and aptitude’

As well as implying the destruction of government in allits manifestations, the
non-existence of authority means the freedom of the autonomous individual, all
individuals, within the free society (or absence of society, in whatever forms this
would take).

Even if allusions are made to anarchist communism today, the implications of
what this signifies are rarely if ever gone into by anarchists, as the immediacy of
the struggle is what interests us and fear of drawing up a blucprint of the future
society’ terrorises us with its sceming implication of imposing a model, therefore
authority.

In response to his old comrade Merlino's statement that what is essential in anar-
chism has been absorbed by socialism, Galleani elaborates the clear distinction be-
tween anarchist communism and the socialist model of collectivism. Collectivism,
common ownership of the means of production involving ‘from each according to
their ability, to each in proportion to their work, is based on an evaluation of the fin-

These words have been sole from Alftedo M. Bonann'sitroduction to Fral Revalation,Feral
Faun.

55
ished product, whereas anarchist communism implies full satisfaction of the needs
of the individual regardless of the value of the product. Surely this must be the es-
sential foundation of the ‘world without measure’ that we often refer to, et rarely.
think through. If we did, this would affect our choices and climinate dubious ‘al-
liances’. We repeat ad nausea that the means we use condition the ends we achicve.
By the same token the ends—intended as embarking on the road of freedom, which
as we have said is infinite and never actually ‘ends'—we desire should affect the
‘means we use, and never losing sight of the latter might prevent some unfortunate,
when not disastrous, undertakings.

‘We are living in times of ‘crisis’ and this often leads comrades down the blind
alley of pragmatism and compromise, verging on political realism. The arrogant
‘upsurge of nazis, sadistic cops or whatever other enemies of freedom can lead to a
unidimensional stance in alliance with those who define themselves in oppositional
terms, thereby losing sight of the revolution, the splendor ofits beckoning and the
vicissitudes of creative diffused insurgency and attack.

Galleani repudiates in total any struggle for partial gains or reforms,‘the ballast of
the bourgeoisie’ that the latter throws out under the violent pressure of the masses,
‘making some ‘inane concessions” If the socialis aims at the conquest of parliament
(albeit without the State), or at least some form of administrative bodies, the most
ardent desire of the anarchist—and all the ‘excluded'— s to see parliament in flames
as part of the self-organisation of the attack. *.instead of the mere passive and
polite resistance so fervently recommended by the socialists, the anarchists prefer
boycott, sabotage and, for the sake of struggle itself, immediate attempts at partial
expropriation, individual rebellion and insurrection” To the horror of the socialists.

For Gallean the consequences of anarchist abstentionism ‘are far less superficial
than the inert apathy ascribed to it by the sneering careerists of scientific social-
ism’. By stripping the State of the constitutional fraud with which it presents tself
it exposes its essential character as representative, procurer and policeman of the
ruling classes'. In the name of what ‘greater cause' can any anarchist put that self-
evident truth aside, thereby liquidating themselves instantancously, reducing being
an anarchist to some kind of identity that can vacillate under the pressure of lack
of perspective and the abject principle of ‘necessary evil'? At a distance of over
a century, Galleani reminds us that “Anarchism rejects authority in any form: to
the principle of representation, it opposes the direct and independent action of in
viduals and masses: to egalitarian and parliamentarian action, it opposes rebellion,
insurrection, the general strike, the social revolution” For any of us who might have
forgotten

Galleani denounces the supreme cowardice of rejecting individual acts of rebel-
Tion when it s we ourselves to have sown the first sced. “The propaganda of the
anarchists creates the psychological climate among the people..our responsibility

56
inall acts of rebellion is more precise, more specific and undeniable where our pro-
paganda has been energetic, vigorous and has left a decp impression...

“There is no incompatibility or contradiction between communism and individu-
alism in the context of a free united co-operation of all people for production based
on solidarity. Communism is simply the foundation by which the individual has
the opportunity to regulate himself and carry out his functions.

Every anarchist who is faithful to his denial of privilege and aspires to an eco-
‘nomic reality where land, mines and ll the tools of production are indivisible com:-
‘mon property s, in his aspirations, a communist. At the same time if he denies
authority and is part of the realisation of complete independence and autonomy
of the individual from any economic, political and moral boss, he is inevitably an
individualist. Antithesis? No, integration.

It would no doubt be interesting to make an in depth analysis of Galleani’s the-
sis, his use of language, his unqualified belief in progress, ete., but here we have
preferred to give the reader just a few sparks from what might otherwise seem to
present itself as an historical document, and end with Gallian's unadorned home
truth: The anarchist movement and the labour movement [read leftism) follow two
parallel lines, and it has been geometrically proven that parallellines never meet.

Lets fight with all those who have no place in this execrable world, for the con-
quest oflife and the realization of our dreams,

57
To the Deranged (Postscript)

These pages arefor the deranged, individuals not submerged in habitregimentedby
protocol or banalised by identity, who refuse to be controlled, faciltated”or herded
into mumerically-oriented deadlines. They want to encounter those who can still
raise their voices and howl with joy in a subdued world where the ironic smirk
of the all-knowing has replaced the wink of complicity and laughter has dissolved
into 2 kind of hiccough. a punctuation mark to round off the glib remarks of the
eternally detached. They would ike to meet those who combine destructive tension,
with wisdom, and, armed with creative devilry, venture into the poisoned jungle of
capital to hack it down and letlfe surge forth.

The deranged are neither dumbed down by habit nor blinded by the ‘greatest
show on earth'. Rather than run around for a cause to support they are fighting their
own cause, egoistially conquering moments of freedom, subverting and attacking
the existent with al means, knowing that Chaosis life and that Reason continues
to generate monsters

The authoritarian organisations of attack in the not too distant past were prod-
et of Reason, but they didn'tget the chance o put thei ultimate goal of managing,
power into effect. These structures have scen their day and old schema have given
way to flexible projects of social contral. It s precisely in this terrain that recy-
cled Marxists and certain anarchists/libertarians are finding common ground. to
the point that you can be an anarchist one day; a post-marsist the next and if the
stomach resists, mutate into an indigestible hybrid. The anaschist aesthetic is more
appealing, but the radical Let have so many fascinating theories.. The labyrinthine.
tomes of these aspirants-to-power-turned-cohabitants-with-the-existent are more
seductive these days, their workerist verbiage now extinet along with the prole-
tariat

Social control s becoming self-control: large numbers released from the prison
factories and mines of western Europe—thanks to neo-slavery and digital technol-
ogy these now function (almost) prfectly on the other side of the planet—require
order from within and the suppression of individual tensions. This has led to the
development of an ‘anti-authoritarian’ practice and a ‘non-hierarchical” poliically
correctlanguage that has been generally accepted regardless ofideology, which has
taken a back seat. The internalised fear of a raised voice, someone speaking out of
tum, the intrusion of an idea or ritique into the smooth machinery of dissenting
consensus is turning thousands of people into bored and boring participants in the.

B
same old designs of the same old minorities concealed behind the wall of resigned
participation that can even embrace aspects of well choreographed street "violence’
or neighbourhood initiatives. There has hardly ever been a conscious decision to ex-
periment some of the insurrectionalist methods that have appeared in embryon in
the struggle in recent decades. These have rarely been taken up and addressed in de-
liberate attempts to provoke rebellion, preferring to subjugate anarchy to alliances
with the leftst forces—that welcome them with open arms, of course—pouring all
their ereativedestructive potential into the dead end of patching things up.

Beyond all that, there is an elsewhere that is almost tangible but continues to
elude us. It is dissipating into thin air, leaving a dissolute state of ennui tainting
xebel visions and dreams. We have done it all seen everything before. Stormed the
heavens. Entered the prison gates and come out again, relatively unscathed. “The
‘movement is at a low ebb’. "We need new ideas, new methods to transport us into
the fild of battle once again’

In spite of that, attacks on capital and the State by individual and small groups
of anarchists have been practically the only ones perceptible alongside the huge
spontaneous revolts that have shaken the ground almost everywhere on the planet
in the recent past. And this anarchist attack has not just been addressed at the
structures of power but also against the enemy within, both in the form of citizen
snitches and a stagnant movement whose only strength is addressed at attempts to
denigrate or recuperate the rebels, the uncontrollables.

However, the anarchist movement as a whole cannot be seen as privileged point
of reference for the necessary destruction of the existent. If the (apparently) floun-
dering capitalists were to throw out buoys to those gasping to stay alive in the deadly
seas of economic megalomania, how many anarchists would be among the first to
reach out to grab one? What better than a bunch of organisationally obsessed anti-
authoritarians to (self) manage the new wild capitalism’s eternal swindle of ‘fixing
things', now that formal authority is out of fashion and the politician has moved
from inveterate clown to obsolete clone?

Thatis why the time to attack is now. There is nothing and no one to wait for. To
act now, with determined projectuality where our destructive tension isthe defining
factor in our lives, not something that appears every now and again out of the blue.
In the era of ‘use and discard” flexibility, snap decisions and about-turns, there is
little desire to think things through, discuss strategies and methods, identify an
intermediate target and act towards the destructive culmination of the attack.

‘The production of trivia has led to a trivialised world. Some of what loosely de-
fines itself the anarchist movement has fused with the urban subculture, dissipating
tensions nto asocial whirl of benefit gigs and various forms of anaesthetic from -
sic to ‘soft substances to dull the pain.

For those in the logic of horizontal attack on the workings of power (which are
complex and always in a esperate battle to maintain equilibrium and consensus)

5
on the other hand, the abjectives are specific,they do not have ‘revolutionary’ con-
notations but insurrcctional ones. A few comrades. an analysis of the objective in
question, simple means of communication, a minimal organisational proposal and
above allthe decision to see the experiment through to its destructive climax. An
informal insurrectionalist movement s above all a methodology of self-organised
attack, nota fixed organisation. It does not require numbers in order to exist. A few
comrades might enter relations of affnity and decide to move against a particular
objective,in an insurrectionalist intermediate struggle. But they are not acting in a
vacuum, they wish to stimulate conscious rebellion by the exploited, not just wait
for the next riot to explode. Not desiring to increase in number as a group, they
propose the creation of minimal self-organised formations that could multiply and
widen into a generalised attack on the existent at any moment, but don't have to
wait for this before attacking themselves.

Aninformally organised projectuality of destructive action directed against class
enenies or thei structures refuses mediation, delegation or negatiation. It can have.
NOCOMMON GROUND with political arties, unions or any other fixed political or
armed structures, s these are antithetical to and enemies of freedom. The concept
of alliances or a common strugle is absurd. Paralll ines never meet. I they do,
one o other has lost ts essence. Anarchists who end up making political alliances.
in the illusion of numerical strength are traitors: of themselves and what they say
they stand for and of the rebels they had enchanted with their eris of reedom, to
become nothing more than witless alles of the boss class

Time is running out. We must rescue our anger, our bad passions, from the
swamp of tolerance and politial correctness. focus our hearts and minds on the
great challenge that is bidding us break out and encounter our future comrades.
and accomplies, the exploited. the angry ones, the rebels. They are all around
s but will remain invisible like ourselves until we come out into the open with
unequivocal words and above all actions.

The workings of capital are there to be found if we look for them, far from the
‘propagandistic fausse pistes and staged ego-trips of trumped up puppets and show-
men. Most of the materials necessary for attack are available on the shelves of the.
supermarkets and are simple household obiects waiting to be appropriated. The
xest, the ‘hardware’, the accomplices,the solidarity, will come forth from the reality
of the struggle itself and the new paths it reveals

0
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