Work in Progress

If we refuse to let our lives be organised by others we must have the capacity to organise ourselves, that is, we must be able to ‘put together the elements necessary to act as a coherent functioning whole’. For anarchists, individuals who ardently desire the elimination of every trace of tyranny and domestication, this has been experimented in a myriad of forms according to prevailing social and economic conditions, and marked by each one’s particular concept of wholeness.

The old work ethic has disappeared along with the massive obsolete structures of capital which required a permanent army of producers, yet work still has far more implications than mere survival. Millions of people still compete for the privilege of turning up day after day, year after year, to surrender body and soul in exchange for a wage. The alternative: to encounter one’s real desires and create the means required to realise them, could present some surprises and lead to undreamed choices. A job, boring or arduous as it might be, is the easy way out. It gives structure to our day and puts order in our expectations, giving us just enough in our pockets to acquire instant sublimation and quell any sudden surge of hatred towards what is stealing our time and our lives.

Prison has come out of the shadows into the limelight, as not a day passes without some allusion to ‘solving the problem’ of the State’s overflowing dungeons. Advances in surveillance technology are offering alternative models of isolation and control that could see a large number of the latters’ potentially explosive inmates defused and—opportunely tagged or microchipped—sent back to the urban ghettos of capital from whence they came. The main obstacle, bolstered by some retrograde attempts to gain votes through a sworn intractability concerning the ‘enemy within’, is power’s need for mass consensus from those it had led to believe that the State’s protection racket and promise of long custodial sentences were the ultimate social guarantee. The dilemma has given space to a whole range of social cops in an ongoing battle that the sycophantic media have not missed the opportunity to illuminate. The occult world of prison never fails to provide good headlines for those in search of a frisson, ‘enlightened discussion’ or fodder for animated pub talk (the latter often concluding with a call for the reinstatement of the death penalty).

What is anarchy? An idea that helps guide this desire. Anarchy means: no rulers. No domination. No one is a master and no one is a slave. But we live in a world of domination. The overwhelming force of the state, the all-pervading power of the market, the ever-present oppressions of species, gender, race, class, religion, down to the petty hierarchies and degradations of our everyday lives and personal relationships, the social norms of status, submission, isolation dug deep into our bodies. In totality: a system of shit.

This booklet is a modest contribution to understanding the recent revolts in France. Needless to say, it is not sociological or, in a nobler sense, theoretical insight. Revolts can only be understood by those who have the same needs as the rebels, that is to say by those who feel they are part of the revolt. After a brief chronology, in fact, the pages that follow pose the question of how the events of November in France concern all of us, and also try to give a possible answer.

No one can understand what is happening in the land of Palestine, not even those who have followed the sanguinary vicissitudes of the peoples who have lived down there for so long. They face each other with hatred and suspicion, not just men and women, children and old people, but the very dust of the roads and the mud that covers them on rainy days, the asphyxiating heat and the stench of the sultriness.

This is not the first time we find ourselves faced with a similar dilemma. How can we transcend the limitation of means? Reach out beyond the constriction of roles? Encounter those who have begun their individual insurrection but find their path obstructed by a pile of blunt instruments? Those who have decided to venture into the abyss and have become exigent, want to invent their own methods, draw them forth from the conditions they are constrained to live in against their will, now, as the bosses’ calendar indicates the arrival of the third millennium. Those who want to dance with life in more than fleeting encounters, in the adventure of discovery that illuminates destruction in all its possibilities.

This paper was born from the need to accompany the review “Anarchismo” with an agile publication capable of developing ‘circumscribed and condensed’ analyses. Political and social analyses, leaflets, communiques and documents of the anarchist movement as well as of other groups and organisations, as well as many short and very short articles concerning attacks on the structures of power, news items testifying forms of spontaneous rebellion, that are manifesting themselves with different modalities and often turn out to be quite extraneous to the specific ambit of the anarchist or antagonist movement.
Starting from a series of analyses — concerning among other things, the modifications in the productive structures, the perfectioning of information technology, transformations in the world of work and school, the progressive cultural emptying — a perspective of struggle is outlined: not only the attack on the ‘great temples of death’, on the ‘visible complexes that attract everybody’s attention’ but also and principally small and often simple objectives, peripheral structures spread over the whole territory that are beginning to take on increasing importance for capital: factories, commercial structures, seats of power, but also electricity pylons, communications cables, everything that combines in the development of capital and the continuation of exploitation. These analyses and proposals precede the publication of ‘ProvocAzione’ in part, but in this paper they are gone into further and turn out to be still, valid at the present time.

The concept of solidarity is not only used and abused by the various reformist syndicalist and humanitarian movements and even power itself, it is also sadly emptied of any content by many anarchists. The levelling is such as to reveal a symbolic attitude worthy of the Church but which allows us to put our conscience at rest.

Our task as anarchists, our main preoccupation and greatest desire, is to see the social revolution come about: a terrible upheaval of men and institutions which finally succeeds in putting an end to exploitation and establishing the reign of justice.