ON A FEW OLD TOPICAL QUESTIONS CONCERNING ANARCHISTS AND NOT ONLY

I am certainly not nonviolent. All the same I can understand
someone who hates violence to the point of
wanting to banish it from their life; someone who
would never kill, would never use force in order to
be heard; who, because of their character and aptitude,
prefers not to have recourse to it. But I can
only understand all this if it is a question of individual
choice. When nonviolence is presented as a method
of struggle, a road to be followed, when individual
ethics become morals and a collective project, it
seems absolute nonsense to me, useful only to justify
lack of action and an obstacle against those who rebel,
an absolute value to impose on the weak to allow the
strong to forget them in comfort. On the edge of the
abyss, with the earth more and more under enemy
fire, the invitation to use only good manners can look
just like that. Do as you like but don’t preach to me.
That said, I am not a fanatic of violence either. I
don’t like those who boast about their own feats in
such a context, I don’t justify their apology as an end
in itself, I detest those who consider it the only solution
possible. I consider it a necessity in the struggle
against power, nothing more. Like Malatesta, I too
don’t believe in ‘placid sunsets’. I don’t believe that
the reinforced concrete with which power has covered
our existence will melt upon the blooming of the
flower of freedom lovingly planted by the spreading
of our ideas.
Precisely because I am not nonviolent I cannot stand
moralistic condemnation of acts of violence. The
hypocrisy makes me sick. But precisely because I
am not a fanatic of violence, I also cannot stand any
acritical exaltation of these acts. The stupidity of that
really gets on my nerves.
Recently there has been a great prominence of actions
of attack carried out by unknown comrades,
first against the police station of Genoa, then against
the Spanish prison regime. Taking for granted the
hysterical reaction of the media, the reaction of the
police is just as predictable. But what is the reaction
of comrades? Apart from the usual idiots given to
hindsight, the most common reaction is silence. A
necessary silence, to avoid making distinctions between
those in favour and those against such acts
that would only turn out to be useful to the police
investigations. But for too long this silence hasn’t limited
itself to reigning in the days following the attacks,
it protracts itself much longer than that. It is
no longer silence in the face of the enemy who would
like to know, it is also the silence among comrades
who would like to agree. One has passed from the
presence of a minimal form of solidarity to the absence
of any critical discussion. But why ever should
action, whatever it is, not be submitted to critical reflection?
Why a should a hypothetical debate on such
questions be seen as an obstacle, something aimed
at preventing other actions? Why could it not rather
be support, a way of clarifying the meaning of what
one wants to do, to strengthen and improve action?
For me, taking recent events as a starting point I
have decided to write and circulate this text. Its
anonymous form is not due to fear of taking responsibility
for my words, but just a way not to differentiate
myself from the other comrades in the eyes of
the repression.
Claim yes, claim no
As far as I know, not being an expert on the subject
I could be mistaken, to find the first document claiming
an attack by a revolutionary organization we must
go back to Russia in 1878. It was a pamphlet Smert’
za smert’ (Death for a death) circulated by the group
Narodnaja Volja (Will of the people) after the killing
of general Mezencov head of the Russian secret
police. Thirteen days after the murder the pamphlet
claiming it was sent to a Petersbourg daily and in the
days that followed many copies came out in other
cities and were sent to numerous civil servants. At
the time this action made a great sensation – and of
course the criticisms were not lacking of those who
thought that such means could not take the place of
the more important instrument of propaganda of ideas
and rebellion among the masses.
From then this scene has repeated itself hundreds of
times. The details, obviously, change from time to
time but the substance doesn’t change. You could
almost say that the experience of these Russian revolutionaries
became a kind of archetype, an original
model whose future manifestations in reality are nothing
but filiations or imitations. The only variation within
this schema has been brought by the anarchists who
have never considered it necessary to politically claim
their actions of attack against power. The Russian
group ‘People’s will’, in fact, although gathering ‘militants’
of the most diverse ideas, nevertheless placed
itself as a centralized vanguard. Within this organi-
zation, as a militant was to remember in her memoirs,
there was a discussion as to whether the program
to be followed was to be that of ‘forcing the
government to allow the people to freely express their
will to reconstruct political and economic life without
obstacles… or whether that organization must first
move to take power into its own hands, to then decree
a constitution from above that was favourable
to the people’.
With such premises one can well see their need to
claim, to communicate the reasons for their actions
to the masses whom they intended to elevate and to
the enemy whose counterpart they believed themselves
to be. After all, that group wanted to address
the people in that nearly all its members came from
the more well off classes, and negotiate with constituted
power in their name, to the point of sending a
letter to the heir of the Tzar to advise him on what
politic to follow. But when one doesn’t want to represent
anyone, nor places oneself as anyone’s coun-
terpart, why circulate communiques? If one thinks
that action of attack against power must nevertheless
have as a horizon the social revolution, and not
be its parody in the form of armed struggle against
the state, what can the aim of a specific armed organization
be?
It doesn’t seem to me that anarchists in the past distinguished
themselves by claiming actions. The anarchists
who sacrificed themselves by carrying out
individual deeds like Bresci and Caserio didn’t do it
for obvious reasons. Neither did the comrades who
had intended to undertake more continuous activity
such as Ravachol or Henry, nor those who united
themselves with them and others in armed action: Di
Giovanni didn’t do it, neither did Durruti or Ascaso.
And the reason must have been quite obvious. Desiring
a revolution from the base, not imposed or
thrown down from above, all of these anarchists considered
it opportune to act in the shadows keeping
themselves away from everything that could take
them into the limelight. They preferred the reasons
for their actions to come from the base, that it was
the movement itself to express them, rather than take
advantage of the clamour raised to spread them from
above, like the official message of those who had
made a revolt to those who hadn’t. The significance
of an action, if it is not made clear by its social context
could be found in leaflets, newspapers, reviews
and within theoretical debates developed by the movement
as a whole, not in the communique of one single
organization. I’ll give an example: if the movement is
able to express its theoretical critique of prison, when
someone then passes to a practical critique there is
no need to write a communique explaining the reasons
for it. The reasons for its gestures are clear
already comprehensible. When someone wants to
claim one’s responsibility it is only because they want
to put themselves on show. The attack on the Genoa
police headquarters, for example, was so significant
(for the choice of objective and the moment) as to
make all words superfluous. Why was a communique
circulated that said nothing but banalities?
It is true that the Angry Brigade constitute a kind of
exception, still being a question of anarchists claiming
their own actions. Not by chance, precisely that
experience seems to constitute a kind of model for
many comrades who are attacking power today. Yet,
unless one wants to throw oneself into attitudes of
emulation, the example doesn’t seem repeatable to
me. On the one hand it is impossible not to bear in
mind that the Angry Brigade should be inserted into
the historical context within which it matured, that is
in the 70s. In an era in which numerous Stalinist
groups were seminating terrible ideological bricks to
propagandize their own political project and were
lending themselves to taking over the dimension of
armed attack, it doesn’t seem strange to me that some
anarchists wanted to distinguish themselves by not
running the risk of involuntarily working for others.
From the choice of name to that of objectives, to the
style of the communiques, everything tended to distinguish
itself from the mess around them. But once
the whole Stalinist ideology had been surpassed, why
characterize oneself in the anarchist sense, what is
the point in continuing with this self-representation?
Perhaps in countries like Spain, where all the actions,
including anonymous ones, are immediately
attributed to the Eta, but certainly not here in Italy. In
fact for years actions of attack did not produce any
communiques, except sometimes something very
brief and simple and that refused the use of any acronym
of identification. It should be superfluous to
explain the reasons for this: an action can only belong
to everyone if nobody attributes it to himself. As
soon as it is claimed and given an identity, a kind of
separation is created between those who carried it
out and everybody else. Moreover, it should not even
be necessary to remember the danger inherent in
any claim. It is dangerous to consign it, to send it,
and above all it is dangerous to write because the
more one writes the more indications one gives to
the police (all anything but hypothetical danger, given
that there exists at least one negative precedent that
struck anarchist comrades). An anonymous attack
does not allow anyone to emerge and does not facilitate
the police’s repressive work.
If the reasons for anonymity have been expressed
more than once, those against it haven’t. For a few
years now things have changed without there having
been any debate on the subject. In any case it is very
difficult today for an action not to be accompanied
by a beautiful communique, followed by slogans and
signatures. Why? Silence… And so, carrying on like
this, doesn’t one end up in vanguardism? The risk is
so evident that among the very authors of claims there
are those who proclaim themselves to be against
vanguardism, in the hope that it will be enough to say
so in order to be so. But ‘to excuse yourself is to
accuse yourself’. It is the method itself that is
vanguardist and, sometimes, also the explicitly de-
clared contents (as demonstrated in the afflicted communique
of the ARA following the attack on Palazzo
Marino). It matters little if the slogans incite social
war rather than the dictatorship of the proletariat. It
matters little if the signatures change continually.
That just demonstrates that anarchist ‘vanguards’ are
more elastic than the Stalinists, but nevertheless feel
the need to distinguish themselves from the rest of
the movement.
It is not enough to take the Angry Brigade as a starting
point to resolve the problem. I know perfectly
well that the Angry Brigade affirmed ‘We are not in
a position to say whether any one person is or isn’t a
member of the Angry Brigade. All we say is: the
Brigade is everywhere. Without any Central Committee
and no hierarchy to classify our members, we
can only know strange faces as friends through their
actions.’
I also know that their participants did not consider
themselves an organization or a single group ‘but an
expression of rage and discontent…’. But all that
just shows the good faith of these comrades, their
preoccupation not to present themselves as a vanguard,
but it doesn’t demonstrate whether they actually
succeeded in their intentions. A signature that
wants to be a symbol of generalized anger doesn’t
make sense. For everyone to be able to recognize
himself or herself in it the actions and the words explaining
them must be understood and shared by everyone.
You can’t offer a general collective identity
and claim that each one renounces their individuality.
That can only be done if the actions realized and
the words spoken remain at a level that is so low as
to limit dissent as far as possible: very simple exemplary
actions accompanied by maximalist slogans. All
that – given that it might be worth it – can only work
for a brief period, after which other factors intervene
that are a part of any process that makes the
continuation of the experiment impossible: there are
those who want to move on to more powerful instru-
ments, who want to strike more selective objectives,
who want to express more precise concepts… Even
the ALF, who struggle for a motivation that is basically
simple and univocal such as animal liberation,
saw their first defections as soon as they began to
expand. Some other animal liberation groups – tired
of the confusion of the project, the minimalism of the
objectives, the declarations of the spokespersons –
formed. Not only, but, it is the worst aspect, all of
these groups saw themselves forced to give themselves
a new name to avoid being included automatically
in the main cauldron. Because the instrument
of claiming is a strictly political one, with all the harm
that that implies as long as one remains in anonymity
one can do what one wants, without involving or exploiting
others. But as soon as some emerge, they
also force the others to come out so as not to be
considered mere army columns. This mechanism of
identification/assimilation can only be avoided through
anonymity, the diversification of means and fantasy
in the choice of objectives, otherwise, no matter how
many precautions one may take, one could never
prevent the media from putting it into act (so much
more than with the communiques that one sends precisely
to them).
What objectives?
The vanguardist logic is rigid, as soon as one adopts
it, it is applied everywhere. It is enough to think of
the choice of objectives, the depressing road that
throughout the years has led from an anonymously
slain pylon to a letter bomb – with letter included –
sent to the television. In the first case they want to
sabotage an enemy, jamming the functioning of its
system by putting a peripheral structure out of use.
It is a question of a practical action of attack, perhaps
a little fastidious to bring about, but without putting
anyone at risk. In the second case one just wants
to be talked about, make publicity for one’s own firm,
and that is why they turn directly to the doors of the
Rai [Italian equivalent of BBC].. It is just a symbolic
action, far easier to realize, and if the risk of being
wounded falls to some unfortunate postal worker or
TV employee… who cares. It seems that it is not
only the Jesuits who think that the end justifies the
means but also some anarchists. And concerning letter
bombs…
I have been unfair. I said that those who send them
just want to be talked about. I forgot to add that, self
gratification aside, they also want something else to
be talked about. For example the prison conditions
of some anarchists and rebels imprisoned in Spain.
The Russian revolutionary socialists in 1878 had a
similar preoccupation. In one of their famous documents
they wrote: ‘If the press don’t defend the prisoners,
we will’. Today there are the groups of the
5C [one of the informal Fai groups]. Anarchists, not
revolutionary-socialists. Anarchists like May
Picqueray who in 1921 sent a parcel bomb to the
American ambassador in Paris to protest against the
silence that weighed upon the incarceration of Sacco
and Vanzetti. The action was very successful because
the abuse committed by the American government
finally became publicly known, launching a
struggle that had had difficulty in taking off.
But after taking act of the similarity between past
and present, one must have blinkers on not to see the
colossal differences. The Russian socialists killed the
chief of the secret police following the death in prison
of one of their comrades: a death for a death, exactly.
The French anarchist, to make public the infamy
of American justice, struck the maximum representative
of the American government present in
France. Today, the anarchists of the 5C send their
presents no less than to the workers of the Rai or the
secretaries of Spanish travel agencies. The difference
should leap out at us. Of course, those materially
responsible for the penitentiary regime that is
being imposed on the comrades are far away and
probably too well protected to be reached, whereas
the interests of the Spanish State are everywhere
and can therefore be struck. But are these interests
embodied in the employees working in travel agencies?
And because one insists on making an impact
on the media, how can one ignore the fact that the
great means of communication only amplify the words
of the rebels if they can distort their meaning? And
how not realize that such actions make this operation
of distortion all too easy? By sending incendiary
letters left and right one will undoubtedly make them
talk about the comrades detained in Spain, everybody
will talk about them, but in what terms? In the
terms imposed by the media, of course, who will rush
to reinforce the idea already implanted in many that,
after all, if these prisoners have such unscrupulous
champions, perhaps they deserve harsh regimes.
The trouble is that those who think that they are further
ahead, more radical than everybody else, think
so for a very precise reason. This consists in the use
of certain instruments: those who talk just chatter,
those who attack with weapons are acting. All those
who support armed struggle are in love with their
instruments, they love them to the point that they
cease to see them as such and to see them as an end
in themselves, their reason for being. They don’t
choose the means best suited to the end they want to
achieve, they transform the means into end in itself.
If I want to kill a fly on the wall I use a rolled up
newspaper, if I want to kill a mouse I use a stick, if I
want to kill a man I use a revolver, if I want to demolish
a building I use dynamite. According to what
I want to do, I choose the means that I consider most
adapt from all those that I have available. The armedstrugglist,
no. He doesn’t think like that. He wants to
use his favourite instrument, the one that gives him
most satisfaction, that makes him feel more radical,
that allows him to bask in his media celebrity, and he
uses it independently of the aim he has given himself:
he shoots flies, machine-guns the mouse, dynamites
the man and if he could, would use a nuclear
bomb to blow up the building. For the armed-strugglist
the radicality of the struggle does not consist of its
extension and depth and its capacity to question social
peace. For the armed-strugglist, radicality is only
a question of fire power: a calibre 22 handgun is less
radical than a 38, which is less radical than a
Kalashnikov, which is less radical than plastic explosives.
That is why, thirsty for fame and rendered
obtuse by his own technical idolatry, he sends incendiary
letters to simple employees to combat the Fies
prison regime. He does that because it is the only
thing he knows how to do; technics do not accompany
intelligence but take the place of it, and so one
doesn’t even stop to ask for a second whether the
means is suitable for the end one wants to attain. As
far as scruples are concerned, he doesn’t have any
for the simple reason that in his head everything is
split up into black and white, without nuances of colour.
On the one side there is the State, on the other the
anarchists. There is no one in the middle. If one isn’t
anarchist one belongs to the State, so one is an enemy.
The exploited are responsible for the conditions
that they put up with just as much as the exploiters
who impose them on them: they are all enemies, so
that’s their problem.
Strangely this typically militaristic logic is gaining
ground among certain anarchists, among whom there
are even some who support the Palestinian kamikaze.
Incredible if one thinks that such levels of
abjection were far even from the Russian revolutionaries
at the end of the nineteenth century:
vanguardist authoritarians yes, but with a rigorous
ethic, ready to kill an exploiter but without touching a
hair of any of the exploited. And if the authoritarians
took this care, think of the anarchists! The examples
in this sense are many: even Schicchi, well known
also for his fiery language, was capable of going back
to where he had left a bomb in order to defuse it
when he realized that some passerby might have been
wounded.
But the image of the anarchist of the past, the perfect
gentleman, is too goody goody, not very gratifying
for some anarchists of today. There are anarchists
who only manage to give a sense to their lives
if they feel they have been struck by public con
tempt. The more something is condemned, the more
they are attracted. The more the newspapers and
the judges depict anarchists as unscrupulous people,
the more they rush to fill this role. Devoid of any
prospects of their own, they let themselves be told
by their enemies what they are and what they must
do.
Another consequence of what is happening is the
total overturning of the meaning of the term
‘insurrectionalist’, which today is coming to be used
as a simple synonym for ‘violent’ or even simply beyond
dialogue with the institutions. Anarchists who
put bombs are insurrectionalists, anarchists who break
windows are insurrectionalists, anarchists who clash
with the police are insurrectionalists, insurrectionalist
are the anarchists who contest the demonstrations
of the political parties and so on. Not a word about
ideas. In a certain sense one is repeating exactly what
happened at the beginning of the century with the
adjective ‘individualist’. Once there was the convic
tion that anyone who supported violent individual acts
was an individualist, then this term came to be applied
more or less everywhere and often out of place.
In the frenzy of events, who stopped to clarify the
confusion that was spreading? Recourse to individual
violence is not at all a typical characteristic of individualism,
so much so that there were also pacifist
individualist anarchists (such as Tucker) or nonviolent
(like Mackay). And again, was Galleani an individualist
perhaps? Yet he was a supporter of individual
actions… as was Malatesta in certain circumstances.
And there have also been communists in
favour of individual acts. Unfortunately the equivocation
became rooted to such a point that there were
even those who declared themselves individualist even
though they were not at all (as did Schicchi in the
Pisa trial). Misunderstanding, incomprehension… it
is better not to add to such confusion. That the media
do it is quite obvious and comprehensible. But
why should we do it too?
Insurrection is a social event. It is not the challenge,
a singular duel with the State launched by those who
believe that the mass are just sheep waiting to be
sheared. Recourse to violence is inevitable and necessary
in an insurrectional project, just as it is before
(because the social aspect of insurrection can never
be carried to justify waiting). Therefore, also now.
But this violence cannot separate itself from the rest
of the project, it cannot take its place. It is violence
that is one instrument at the service of the project,
not the project that is in the service of violence.
Whoever thinks that an insurrection isn’t possible,
having lost (or never had) faith in the possibility that
the exploited will rebel, should realize the distance
that separates them from any insurrectional project.
If he wants to fight his private war against power,
because that is what it has become, let him do so, but
without passing this off as social war. If he wants to
go down in history for his actions, because this is a
question of pure self-gratification, then let him sit under
the glare of the media, but without claiming to have
the whole movement behind him.
It’s obvious that anybody is free to do what he or she
likes. Someone who thinks that they are above criticism
and should be applauded, understood and followed
without even having bothered to explain the
reasons behind their methods, is a lot less so.

Translated from Italian May 2007 and published
by Elephant Editions, this text first
appeared on the website Anarcotico in 2003.

SOLIDARITY TO MARCO CAMENISCH

Marco Camenisch was born in Switzerland in 1952. In the late seventies, Marco, as a militant of the movement against nuclear power plants, was engaged in many struggles to fight the local Swiss nuclear mafia. Direct action was the base of such struggles; cutting down pylons, sabotage against power stations, attacks against the people involved in nuclear mafia.
In January 1980 Marco was arrested and sentenced to 10 years for his assaults against NOK power station, responsible for destroyed the natural environment of the Grigioni area in Switzerland. During the trial, Marco refused to talk to the judge, but read a statement in which he claimed his actions as a protest against the criminal bosses of class dominion, and for the liberation of the earth. In December 1981, Marco escaped from the prison together with another five prisoners. A prison warder was shot and another seriously injured. After 10 years of hiding and clandestine struggle, Marco was arrested again (1991), this time in Tuscany, Italy, and sentenced to 12 years. He was also sentenced for a series of acts of sabotage including the killing of a border policeman which he has always denied. In the Italian prison system Marco went through terrible conditions of detention, aimed at destroying his string personality and breaking the international solidarity network towards him Such solidarity has never stopped, on the contrary it has been increasing more and more both through public demonstrations and direct actions. In April 2002 Marco was extradited to Switzerland, where he was sentenced to another 8 years for his escape from prison in 1981 and the killing of a border policeman. In Switzerland too, Marco has been subjected to a regime of isolation and every kind of abuse and oppression including continuous transfers from one prison to the other, without any regard for his conditions of ill health.

Here are a few of the thousands of actions in solidarity with Marco Camenisch

25 July 1999 – Novarra, Italy – demonstration of solidarity outside the prison
1 August 1999 – Turin, Italy – Explosive device full of red paint is thrown against Swatch shop in via Garibaldi.
13 September 2002 – International day of solidarity with Marco Camenisch who has just been through 3 months of special treatment. Moreover his correspondence is strictly censured and his incoming and outgoing mail often doesn’t arrive, he spends recreation period in handcuffs and chains to his feet, he has closed visits after a few month’s waiting. And finally the torture of having spent 20 minutes inside a scanner machine with his wrists handcuffed behind his back, not mention the humiliation of having walked through the long corridor of the hospital with his feet in chains.
Demonstration in Bergamo, Bologna, Florence, Genova, Naples, Triest, Madrid.
14 September 2002 – Turin – Windows of Credit Suisse broken in via Bertola.
16 September 2002 – Pavia – Fire to a mobile phone antenna in solidarity to Marco and all prisoners in struggle.
December 2002 – Rome – An envelope full of bullets is sent to the Swiss ambassador in Rome with the message: Free Marco Camenisch, death to the Swiss State and its cops.
12 January 2003 – Paris – During the night a few boutqiues of Swiss bosses were damaged and the surrounding walls filled with writings such as ‘Free Marco’ ‘Switzerland is destroying you, We are gonna destroy it’. The locks of Adia and Adecco (Swiss work agencies) and of Lloyd Continental were been blocked with glue.
18 January 2003 – Bueonos Aires – Posters claiming Marco’s freedom are put on the walls of the Swiss embassy and Swiss International air. From today Marco is on hunger strike in protest against his conditions of detention. Demonstration also in Brussels in front of the Swiss embassy.
19 January 2003 – Abetone, Pistoia – The ski lift in this ski resort in Appenines is completely destroyed by fire, sabotaging the tourist industry for the season. The claim ‘Fire to the Exploiters, Free Marco’.
20 January 2003 – Carrara – 3 mobile phone transmitters are destroyed by fire in solidarity with Marco.
29 January 2003 – Bergamo – A RAI (Italian national television) transmitter is set of fire.
1 February 2003 – Barcelone – The locks of Zurich Insurance Company are blocked with glue and on the glass of the windows is written: ‘Destroy all prisons’. ‘Free Camenisch.’ ‘Stop nuclear power.’
11 February 2003 – Imperia – Fire to Omnitel transmitter. The claim ‘Free Marco’.


OPERATION BLACKOUT


Between September and October 2003, following the orders of Genoa Public Prosecutor, a series of raids takes place all over Italy against a great number of comrades who showed their solidarity to Marco.
The measure starts on 17 September when the ROS (carabinieri Special Operations) search Marco’s cell and seize his computer, notes and letters. Soon after even Manuella, Marco’s wife, is searched. Both are accused of ‘terrorist activities’ About one hundred Italian comrades from north to south underwent the same treatment and are still under investigation.

Marco Camenisch,
Flughafengefangnis
KLOTEN
Postfach
8058 ZURICH-KLOTEN
Switzerland








Marco Camenish was born in Campocologno in Switzerland in 1953. At the end of the 70s Marco began a life of rebel ecologism, carrying out acts of sabotage against invasive energy structures in Switzerland. There for an action in 1979 against a pylon and a substation of Northeast Switzerland Power he was sentenced to 10 years prison. Escaped from Ragensdorf prison (Zurich) he lived in clandestinity, in the final period at Massa Carrara. Marco was again kidnapped by the justice of the assassins on November 5 1991 at Cinquale. The shootout with the carabinieri, resulting in Marco being wounded, and a cop was also wounded got him another 12 years. Transferred from one prison to the other (from Massa to Pisa, Livorno, San Vittore in Milan, Novara, Rebibbia Rome, Biella, Como) after years of struggle, humiliation, blackmail, affective and social isolation, Marco was transferred to Switzerland on April 18 2002. It should be noted that Italian justice did not make him lack anything: he was accused of conspiracy (270bis) for crimes committed in Italy and abroad in 1988; while he was in prison there was an attempt to extend the accusation to his family (including his brother, with a difficult psychic condition, the old mother, his companion and her daughter, a young man of the extreme right) .
Some ‘educando del rosmarino’ thought of inventing an anarcho marxist-leninist organisation (a kind of transgenic!) to justify the escape of Marcello Ghiringelli from Novara prison in 1998. The un… proof of its existence was the friendship between Marco and Marcello, who met in Novara prison.
In Switzerland Marco is doing 8 years for escape and will be tried for other crimes which could cost him a life sentence. He is accused of concourse in murder of a guard during the escape from Ragensdorf (in spite of the testimony of the other they aquitted them) and of the murder of a guard at the border at Brusio going back to 1989. The indizzi of guilt for this last ‘crime’ were his presence in the area.
Not recognising any legitimacy in the governative or repressive organs. Until now Marco had avoided leaving declarations to them during questioning. He only allows the possibility of spontaneous declarations during public hearings. His strength is obviously a source of hatred for the sgerri of universal power, given that also in Switzerland the prison treatment reserved for him is inhuman.
Marco has spent his life struggling against the devastating action of the capitalist technological system, has individuated in this aspect of the beast the central nodo of its proliferation, the instrument of innihilation of all diversity.
He posed the anarchist movement with the priority of direct intervention on environmental transformation, understanding that alienation and lobotomisation are processes that are strictly tied to the elimination of natural and spiritual differences. The cultures linked to the earth are not by chance considered ‘primitive’ and ‘in the course of extinction’ (a term that implies the will to extinguish deliberately as happened with the indios). The process of dismembering of individual will and the devastation of natural reality that ci accoglie and surrounds us. The noise produced by the calpestio of the leaves in the wood, the scrosciare of the ruscello are panic forms caspable of taking the mind to that state of freedom of being, in which any hierarchical paradigm si annulla and all human activity si risolve in the insensato and absurd. This unlimited peace and love are joy and nourishment of the rebel spirit.’ (Krasi)

YET AGAIN, although I can never do it enough, I salute you and embrace you, I salute and embrace each one of you. I am really touched and moved by your numerous initiatives of solidarity and by your precious involvement in support of we political and social prisoners, by your clear and courageous schierarvi for a radical resistence, also because your engagement gives strength to we prisoners to resist. These initiatives are important because they represent the segno of strength and vitality of our solidale resistence. Because they take us, prisoners because we resisted, among you who are many equal and particular at the same time, because you take us to you beyond the walls, the chains and the recint that separate us. These important initiatives ci riportano among you to struggle together the even more important battles of resistence that we find ourselves facing daily, against the war, against occupation and conquest, against genocide, against sexism, racism and xenophobia, against exploitation and social smatellamento. Against the destruction of the environment, against the World Economic Forum in Davos (and anywhere else) which assassins with aureola participated in. These battles must be conducted in a radical manner. Otherwise we are no longer resisting, otherwise we end up being helping hands and accomplices of insatiable exploiters, violent, destructors, true extremists fautori of patriarchy, militarism, industrialism and capital., whose only aim is the need for power. I embrace you again, embrace each one of you. We are, and so long as we are united we will be strong. Marco Camenisch. Pfaffikon December 2002.
The latest news (beginning of May) tell of an improvement in his physical and emotional condition. For a few days now he has had access to a laptop given to him by comrades in Zurich. Correspondence seems to be more fluid even though not all the messages sent to Marco have reached him.
www.freecamenisch.net

SABOTAGE IS THE GRAMMER OF POLITICS

January 21, 2003, the most important ski station of the Tuscan-Emilian Appennines went up in flames completely destroying all the plants of the ski lift that links l’Abtone in Pistoia province, with the main ski slopes. The very modern installation was inaugurated only 2 years ago. Apart from the very serious damage caused by the fire to the plant itself in the heart of the season, there is talk of 10 million Euros damage, as well as the loss of the season! At the site was left the slogan: Free Marco, fire to the destroyers. What follows is the letter claiming the action sent to the Ansa in Florence. ‘We are attacking whoever transforms the mountain into money, destroying it unpunished. So, who loves it rebels and, arming themselves with whatever means, stops the ruin caused by the exploiters. Solidarity with Marco Camenisch, who lived and loved the mountain and, at the moment, is a prisoner on hunger strike inside the squalid four walls of a Swiss prison and can no longer walk in them. With the desire that one day you will get your freedom back, an embrace to you and all the prisoners locked up in the prisons all over the world. Incendiary material in 4 cabins of the ski-lift of Abetone.
Technicians, local administrators and tourist operators have tried to make the situation look as if it is under control, showing false optimism. The damage to the plant is probably more difficult to repair that what they want to make us think. Nothing though compared to other damage, that which the mountains have had to undergo for years because of tourism and its speculators.



SABOTAGE IS THE GRAMMER OF POLITICS

They, we, you, them

Over the past few days, between Trento and Rovereto, some Esso petrol stations were sabotaged by anonymous hands. The multinational, it is well known, won the contract for the supply of fuel to the American military vehicles. ‘Petrol of Death’, it has been called by many pacifists, from the moment that the company will literally enrich itself on the backs of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis that the American army is preparing to massacre. A little gesture against the war, therefore. Although it is nothing, if you like, but concrete, while all over Italy it is being said that it is possible to disarm the war. According to the newspapers, the self-service pumps were cut and blocked with silicone: there was therefore no danger of the petrol escaping.

Once upon a time - about some sabotage in Valencia

www.nodo50.org/valencia_llibertaria

Valencia, November the 24th ??

Local Newspaper Levante-EMV

Local and national police are investigating in Valencia a massive sabotage detected on Saturday morning in public establishments. Authors sealed with silicone the locks of about 50 shops and banks and rubricated their action with anti-system leaflets.

In particular, those pasquinades that could be recovered by the Information Group of the National Police Corp [N.d.T. That´s the special corp in the police that research political actions, although they say it´s only for sabotage and terrorist crimes] say: “This commerce, with its clients, is joining the strike of November the 22nd”. The action, always as it´s described in the writing is some kind of protest against the “excessive situation that is being lived in the prisons of the world”. The same text added a manifesto against the system: “down with capitalism!” and a demand: “Freedom for the prisoners with terminal illnesses and those who have been secluded more than 20 years” [N.d.T. Those are two of the ‘historic’ demands of the prisoners in fight against the FIES regimen and the conditions in jail].

On the other hand, yesterday a woman burned a mixture of sulphur and acid in a tomato bottle of 5 Kgs. in the WC of the Sciences Museum, provoking smoke; an action that could be attached to the sabotages in shops.

ON SABOTAGE AND TERRORISM

from PROVOCAZIONE


To attack the structures of exploitation and death should never be considered terrorism. those responsible for pollution and oppression are easily identifiable. the task of anarchists is to show that rebellion is possible, and to work for the generalisation of the attack.

An attack on the Montefluos establishment at Spinetta Marengo, a few kilometres from Alessandria in Italy, has as always, raised various questions that we think should be gone into.
The attack was against two main electricity pylons belonging to the SELM, a company which supplies energy to the chemicals factory which is part of the Montedison group.
The press put great accent on the fact that algoflon is produced in the factory in a continuous cycle which cannot be interrupted. A sudden putting the plant out of action, including the cooling system, could, they said, cause an escape of poisonous gases.
The press and institutions all cried scandal and wrote columns about the narrowly escaped ecological disaster that the sabotage might have caused. The national dailies, trades unions, various greens and ecologists distinguished themselves by accusing the authors of the sabotage of ecoterrorism, and of being potential polluters.
First, a few clear words, even if we run the risk of being repetitive and saying the obvious: the only terrorist is the State, with all its institutions, structures of exploitation and oppression. We will not tolerate the label of ecoterrorism or terrorism appioppata on any comrade or individual who rebels and decides to act against exploitation, pollution or any of the other appendices of power. The Montedison saboteurs have all our solidarity and we shall always denounce those who tend to isolate the attacks against the structures of death with these lies.
The state is the terrorist with its police, judicial, political and social (parties, unions) apparatus, as it unleashes its armed gangs in defence of interests and against the population, creating the psychological terrorism of the “leap in the dark”, etc.
Terrorists are the governments, both in act and potential, who legislate over others. Terrorists are the aspiring governers who, even if they act in the social field, have as their recondito aim not the action itself but its political advantage.
Anyone who acts to respond to a structure that oppresses, exploits or pollutes him, can never be considered a terrorist, but a militant in the struggle for his and others’ freedom, for the construction of a new world.
The media have tried to create a climate of condemnation concerning the authors of the attack because, they say, they could have caused pollution. the unions have prepared to act as a barrier against the “mad poisoners”, they who, they say, have always been involved in the defence of the environment and security within and beyond the factory. the greens and ecology organisations are pointing their finger at these comrades, guilty of not recognising the formers’ legitimacy to represent the struggle against pollution and of adopting means other than rhetoric.
We don’t believe the press is credible concerning the possible danger of pollution due to the attack. We cannot fail to bear in mind that reality is too often manipulated to create consensus for power and those attacking it . How bad the saboteurs who were about to pollute the whole area are (which for anyone who isn’t aware of it, is the beneficiary of chemical waste from the ACNA plant), and how good are the workers and technicians who with their spirit of devotion and sacrifice managed to save the situation.
No comrades, we must be clear here abd re-define the roles that each one has always anacted. Of course no one, and surely not those who sabotaged the Montefluos electricity supply, can justify an ecological catastrophe caused by an attack on the factory, but it is important to say clearly who would be responsible if such a thing were to happen. certainly not the comrades, who were not able to calculate all the effects of the action. Those responsible are undoubtedly the factory that produces such poison and which perhaps had every interest, until that day, in keeping this production hidden. those responsible are the politicians and economists who are turning the production of toxic substances that allow them to produce greater profit. Those responsible are the unions who fight for the defence of the workplace no matter what it is, what exploitation it involves, what toxic substances or arms it produces. those responsible are the greens, the false ecology parties who channel the struggle towards false objectives, so making it useless and functional only to political power games. those responsible are the media, who as bosses of information create the psychosis of the light going out, the machines that stop, economic depression, in order to impose choices of capitalist “development”. those responsible are those who close their eyes, hold their noses and “go ahead” and pretend nothing is happening around them for the sake of a “quiet life”.
Of course, not everybody has the same level of responsibility, but none of them are justifiable, and as revolutionary anarchists we cannot remain indifferent in the face of attempts to turn the other way. History is full of these attempts. another blatant example is that of “earth First”. Five militants of this group are accused of having tried to cut electric cables linked to a group of nuclear power stations in Arizona. again there has been an attempt to accuse the authors of sabotage of having put the area in danger of a nuclear disaster.
It is necessary to repeat that those responsible for any eventual nuclear pollution are the governments, the builders and those who make the nuclear plants function, not those who are struggling against them. moreover, the statistics speak clearly, the numerous radioactive leakages, the escape of poisonous gases, the discharge of polluting substances, all these cannot be said to come about due to attacks by ecologists, revolutionaries, or even by attacks by secret services or “terrorists linked to foreign powers”. the pollution is due to carelessness, lack of security systems, accidents, and to the very presence of the nuclear power plants and other such industries in the first place, and that’s without even mentioning the many accidents that have occurred in the past and been covered up.
To end up, we repeat that it is right to carry out attacks on everything that pollutes and makes our life unliveable and we think that as anarchists and revolutionaries we must not fall into the inganno perpetuated daily by the media. We denounce the positions of those who talk of ecoterrorism and terrorism to point to those who carry out direct action, thuse showing they have adopted the terms and concepts used by power. Those who sbraitano that certain actions are not understood by the people and are therefore counterproductive, and that it is necessary to explain the reasons for our aversion to capitalism and the State patiently and with devotion, putting off action until the day when everyone will understand it are unjustifiable.
We think that the awareness of exploitation, oppression and pollution does not need to be explained as it can only be lived, and only those who have made a choice on the opposite side, a conditioned choice if we like, but still a choice,, does not have a consciousness of all that. The task of anarchists, of revolutionaries, our task, is that of demonstrating the justice of rebellion and that this is possible, giving indications, beginning to weaken small tasselli of power, and showing by example how to attack the structures of death, how to identify their weak points. Only with the generalisation of the attack will it be possible to lay the foundations for a radical change.

Portugal, June 2008, truck drivers strike

At the midnight of the 9th of June [2008] initiated in Portugal an illegal truck drivers and owners strike, with the declared objective of obtaining a reduction in the oil prices (as happened last week with the fishermen). From the beginning the truck drivers and truck owners took a distance from ANTRAM (the association of the sector of road transportations) because they didn’t feel represented…
From the first night there were flying pickets in almost every Portuguese road usually used by truck drivers. The people in the pickets blockaded the roads and highways with their own bodies as soon as they saw some truck approaching. This was to reveal itself to be tragic, with one man ending up dead, run over by a truck driver who wasn’t on strike. Some transportations and supermarket companies were openly defying the strike, explicitly ordering their drivers to not stop and sending groups of trucks escorted by police cars, with fear of attacks. But this didn’t turn out as expected.
On the second night of the strike dozens of trucks who belonged to or who were working for specific companies were attacked with stones while travelling, in very different parts of the country (Cantanhede, Figueira da Foz and at least in different parts of three highways). Dozens of winscreens were broken. At various places where non-striking truck drivers were parked several acts of sabotage occurred, such as slashed tires and battery and brake cables cut. At least twelve “non-striking trucks” parked in different parts of the country were attacked with fire and burnt down. A Judiciary Police source says dozens of these trucks were burnt down. The vandalism and sabotage went on the following night. Trucks that hours before were working escorted by riot police vehicles, hours later appeared burnt down, also with cables cut.
In the supermarkets there was almost no food, and lines of shelves were simply empty. Nothing to sell, what a beautiful vision. The gas stations all over Portugal didn’t have any oil or gas. The Lisbon airport had only enough fuel for military and emergency planes. Thousands of cops on the roads, no blockade would be permitted. The journalists asked for the government to be harder with the repression, that the country was in the hands of the truck drivers, and that the state of emergency be declared. The following day some journalists who wanted to do a live coverage of an assembly of workers nearby had some trouble: the camera cables were cut by anonymous hands. Anonymous in the middle of dozens of truck drivers.
Meanwhile, on Thursday, an ad-hoc “representative commission” that was constituted by some truck drivers and owners reached an agreement with the government, and it didn’t involve a reduction in oil prices. The same old story: end of strike, everyone back to work. The truck drivers on many flying pickets didn’t want to end the strike, at least not until the reduction in the oil prices. The deals were good, but for the big truck owners. The truck drivers didn’t feel represented by this ad-hoc commission, as happened also with ANTRAM; but they thought everyone else fell. Representation fucks you in mysterious ways.

In Spain, the truck drivers were also on strike, they made flying pickets across the whole country, and stopped thousands of trucks, including some Portuguese ones.
Some of the trucks whose drivers didn´t stop were attacked with stones, sabotaged or burned. The Spanish truck drivers also asked for the reduction of oil prices.
In Valença, some fishermen and boat owners blockaded a bridge with barricades and burning tires, in solidarity with the truck drivers.
A few days after the beginning of the strike, the riot cops started to attack the flying pickets, removing the trucks and identifying drivers; at least 90 people were arrested and a man was sentenced to 8 months in prison, accused of attacking a cop.
The consequences of the strike were similar to the Portuguese ones, the supermarkets were empty and thousands of trucks had to been escorted by the riot police.
In Almeria 4000 farmers clashed with the police, while they were doing a demo against the escalation of oil prices, al least 20 people got hurt.

ON SABOTAGE AS ONE OF THE FINE ARTS

a contribution to the topic of the theory of the practice of Sabotage

Who will revive the violent whirlpools of flame if not us
and those that we consider brothers?
Come! New friends: this will please you.
We will never work, oh tides of flame!
This world will explode.
It’s the true path. Forward, on the march.
—A. Rimbaud
The spread of sabotage, its increasing practice, on a greater or lesser scale, far and wide against the domination of the market is a given fact. Burning ATM booths, disabling locks at shopping centers, smashing shop windows, setting fire to the offices of temp agencies and employment offices, the sabotage of the infrastructure of capitalism (high-speed railroads, dams, expressways, construction projects) … are offensive practices against the colonization of our lives by the most advanced form of colonialism – the integrated spectacle.
All this is put into practice by individuals as bored with survival as with commodities (life reduced to economic imperatives) and disillusioned with false opposition (more false and less oppositional with each day that goes by), parties and unions that want to manage our misery and integrate us into a mode of production that prevents us from any participation in the decisions that relate directly to us and that assist in enslaving us, mutilating every gesture of negation of the existent.
The spectacle writes the scenario and distributes the roles: worker, professor, student, housewife, mother, father, son, daughter, unemployed, police, soldier, artist, humanitarian, intellectual… the majority, individuals who assume different roles in the course of 24 hours, see their existence as still more terrible, assuming this is possible. Everyone with his [or her] neuroticschizoid viewpoint will react to the stimuli launched by power in the way that was already expected.
All social activity is planned in order to reinforce the spectacle, thus slowing down its unstoppable process of decomposition. Though we don’t want to hear the shrieking of militants of whatever organization, clearly we are not against the concept of “organization” as such, but against “organization” conceived as an end in itself , as the crystallization of any ideology, and as a separated organ, representing a class.

We are for the autonomous self-organization of the exploited. History has shown through two clear examples that the traditional form of the party (Russian revolution) and union (Spanish revolution) were nothing more than two attempts to manage capitalism and not to overcome it, and this is something that, consciously or unconsciously, everybody knows. In the seizure of power, it is not destroyed, but exercised: in the first case, the class of bureaucrats replaced the bourgeoisie, and in the other case, the anarcho-syndicalist leaders participated in bourgeois power, calling for the self-management of exploitation and alienation, while the base tried to overcome the relationships of production and social relationships in practice through the direct management of every aspect of their lives and not just work.
To be precise, both forms have the exaltation of work in common (something that they also share with national-socialism and with every political form of capitalism).
Their quantitative vision sought an increase in production, leaving aside the qualitative increase of life. This (practical and theoretical) defeat of the traditional organizations, which claim to represent us, has not been absorbed by the working class (it seems that we only know how to work), and we go along without maintaining any possibility of control over essential aspects of our lives, in a world that is developed, not only without our participation, but against us.
But, comrades, history is not cyclic; it is a cumulative process and already weighs too heavily upon our weary bodies.

Never did mockers waste more idle breath.
—William Shakespeare
A Midsummer Night’s Dream

The contradiction between the possibilities of the means of production (the use of a few of them for the enjoyment of all, since most of them are useless and harmful and would be destroyed) and the relations of production (waged exploitation, commodification, the exclusions of class society) has reached an insurmountable point of rupture. In the spectacle it is easier to falsify the nature of this contradiction than to increase mercantile production with increasing use value. This inertia forces it to display all of its methods for recuperating any real movement of opposition and to turn the spectacular critique of the spectacle to its advantage.
A self-critical hypocrite directed by its own police of decomposed thought (pro-situationists, cadres, nongovernmental organizations, recuperators, artists, journalists… the clique of politically correct alternatives).
These toilet brushes of modernity, like good priests, hope that with their patches, the proper development of the system will lead us, hand in hand, into an ideal world planned by their false consciousness and by the putridity of their armoured brains; as if they had ever given us anything. Their social function, which has been denounced for decades already, has been worth more to them than any aggressions, beatings or assassinations, and we are sure that these will not be mere anecdotes. They deceive and manipulate us. We must not allow them to have a single day more. They are the guardians of the keys of our informal chains. They amuse us with insignificant debates. They impose their opinions on us, avoiding questions so simple that they make them tremble with terror: How best to live? Who and what keeps us from this? Questions that immediately unmask the professionals of the lie. Critical coherence and the critique of incoherence aid this operation.

Injustice is not anonymous; it has a name and an address.
—Bertold Brecht

Situationist theory, as integral critique of the totality of the conditions of survival and of the mercantile-spectacular capitalism that necessitates them, has been confirmed in events as falsification.
One cannot fight alienation by means of alienated forms. The sabotage of this world starts with a break with the roles the system imposes on us, the sabotage of our death in life and the refusal of the roles that they have allotted and appointed to us. To speak of Revolution in these times is “to have a corpse in one’s mouth”. We only need to look around ourselves to see a scenario that constantly reminds us of defeat. Sabotage is thus an action that serves as a propellant against the unreality that oppresses us. A practice that has not gone unnoticed by ideological recuperation, which has transformed it into “terrorism” (the professionalization of sabotage that has done no more than reinforce the system, due to its centralist, hierarchical and militarist character). Today, what is proposed is not the creation of an armed organization of this type, but widespread attack by small affinity groups, uncontrollable by any higher organization, that come together and dissolve like the lunar tides. The tides that are born of the awareness of how bad things are and of the worsening that awaits us due to events.
In the 19th century, such a practice existed that put the incipient capitalism in check. Beyond the Luddite attacks, the “proletarian rounds” rendered their repression and recuperation, in which the embryonic unions would play a role, almost impossible due to their lack of a rigid structure and their maximum flexibility in attacks. A group of people came together, struck and disappeared into the mass, while a new group came together within it. Such widespread sabotage makes it difficult for the enemy to organize repression. Thus it transforms the attack into a universe of pleasure for the enlightened hooligan, the feelings of which are impossible to describe or communicate with the poor and banal language of words.
The game of subversion, the rules of which are written by those that participate in it, becomes an effective weapon against capitalism in all its forms.
There is much more to destroy than to build.

Our epoch does not need to write poetic slogans, but to realize them.
—Situationist International

It has been demonstrated that small groups that attack do more damage than large organizations that specialize in armed struggle. The Angry Brigade continued its actions when people were arrested and the English state assumed the movement had fallen apart. The Kale Borroka (street struggle) in Euskadi, which Jarrai (the youth organization of the Basque nationalist left, NDR) recently declared uncontrollable is another example. Power has difficulty repressing and eliminating little groups that with complete security do not know each other, and the only thing that unites them is the desire for the destruction of a system that prevents them from living and condemns them to survival and uncertainty. They don’t attempt exhibitionist actions in order to make propaganda as some acronym or mark of origin. In the case of the Asturias, sabotage was a class weapon used innumerable times, particularly in labor conflicts with these enterprises: Duro Felguera, Hunosa, Naval and Ciata…(Asturian businesses and mines where sabotage was determinant in the struggles going on in the 1990’s); every weary person, regardless of her or his ideology, uses it. From the clerk who steals office supplies to the worker who damages the machine to which he is chained, passing through the use of plastic explosives like the licensed professionals of Duro Felguera. Today, the example is the burning of the ETTs (temporary employment agencies). The practice of sabotage remains limited to precise and very localized conflicts, without global perspectives, simply aiming for partial solutions with economic demands that remain within imposed limits where capitalist logic unfolds. The same holds in the case of the ETTs, an attack that goes beyond the temporality of a conflict in one enterprise, but that does not place wage slavery into question. Instead it only questions its most extreme form, not aiming at putting an end to exploitation, but rather to the ETTs.
Today the conflict is global and it is not resolved through partial struggles, but through total struggle and through the refusal of this society as a whole. It is necessary to put an end to the reduction of our lives to commodities and to wage labor that wears us out, not just to ETTs. We must put an end to class society and not just fascism. Misdirecting our attention toward partial objectives only benefits the managers of our misery and those who will one day lay claim to its management, and both are among the targets for sabotage.
The widespread practice of sabotage (unhindered autonomy, maximum flexibility, self-organization, minimum risk) among like-minded individuals, opens the possibility for real communication, destroying spectacular communication, smashing the apathy and impotence of the eternal revolutionist monologue. Relationships and the possibility of contact with other people in the refusal of the spectacular role, these are transient situations that in their preparation and development carry in their essence the qualities of the revolutionary situation that will not retreat and that will suppress the conditions of survival. It does not fall into the irremediable alienating hierarchization that every specialized armed group of an authoritarian and militaristic character, to which the masses delegate their participation in the attack, carries within itself
The quantitative growth of this practice does not come to us from the hands of propagandists of the spectacle, but rather by taking a walk through the scenario of capitalism, and finding in this drift the burned ATM, the ETTs with shattered windows, the smiths changing the locks of a supermarket. These visions make our complicit smiles blossom and move us to go out that very night to play with fire with the aim of making the same smiles rise on the faces of unknown accomplices through the fellowship of destruction. The number doesn’t matter, but rather the quality of the acts: sabotage, expropriation, self-reduction… they return part of the life that is denied us back to us, but we want it all.
Comrades, the game is yours and we take courage in its daily practice. Organize it yourselves with your accomplices.
Against the old world in all its expressions, in order to leave pre-history, let’s launch and multiply attacks.

FOR THE ABOLITION OF CLASS SOCIETY
AGAINST THE MARKET AND WAGE LABOR
FOR ANARCHY
FOR COMMUNISM
STONES AND FIRE

Asturian Institute of Comparative Vandalism