Class War
In Italy there is a civil war in course. Just as in every other part of the world, the mortal clash has well defined characteristics in relation to the conditions of exploitation imposed by the dominant class. That is why we are speaking of class (civil) war.

State violence and defensive class violence are opposing each other in a clash that only the politically short-sighted insist on not seeing. The terrorism of the various organisations in the service of the bosses is a constantly detectable element, just as in the other field, an organisation of defence is beginning to take shape aagainst the State assassins, organisations that should be examined and evaluated in their limits and perspectives. The other discourse, the so-called legalitarian one, the discourse that finds its own phonetic expression in parliament, can also be evaluated precisely once it is inserted into the logic of a conflict in course. This is what we shall see.

The violence of the bosses and their servants

In a declaration made to the daily “Il Giorno” April 19 1968, the managing director of the INAIL declared that the phenomenon of accidents at work (white deaths) had taken on the dimension of a war: “one death every hour, someone wounded every 6 seconds”. It is the workers who are falling on the front of exploitation, while the “men of the left” continue their parliamentary antics. Impossible work pace, piece work, increase in nervous tension, monotony, impossibility to adapt reflexes to the machine. The most dangerous period for the life of the worker are the last working hours of the day. It is a true slaughterhouse. Amputations of hands and lower limbs, the loss of eyes, burns, crippling, to rheumatisms, bronchitis, deafness, digestive disturbances, to nervous breakdowns and heart attacks. 80 per cent of the solderers in the shipyards are deaf. A very high percentage of workers in the mining and quarry sector suffer from silicosis. Those employed on the assembly line in the Fiat, with moving belts, discovered after a few years that they had considerable diminution in their sexual capacity. 50 per cent of the workers in the textile sector suffer from dermatitis and respiratory disturbances.
To that we should add the mortal accidents, those usually considered accidental but which are dependent on the very logic of production. In 1960 statistics spoke of a death every hour, today we do not know the exact figures but they have certainly not decreased. It is enough to read the newspapers to realise how many workers die every day because of work conditions, killed at the place of exploitation by the bosses and their servants. It is necessary to recognise though, that the job of the industrialist is not always that of the butcher. The boss gets very upset when there are accidents at work, because it upsets him both at the psychological level (much less) and at the economic one (much more). But the logic of exploitation has its necessary steps which it cannot extrapolate itself from. Its patience runs out though when the exploited, in spite of all the care one has for him and all the pre-occupations one has, insists in not docilely submitting to exploitation. Then it is quite a different matter. To the ineluctable logic of the capitalist process is added homicidal will and determination. The boss turns to the State to have his sacrosanct right to kill, cut to pieces, deteriorate the human material he has bought and is therefore at his disposition, protected.
In this case the police intervene. Let us look at the cases where the police in Italy have deliberately shot into the crowd, killing workers who were demanding their own right to life. The answer was given in bullets which have caused 133 deaths between 1946 and 1970 among labourers, unemployed, workers, rice labourers, students. Looking at the lists of workers killed by the police during demonstrations, in just 1969 one finds the death of a school teacher (Teresa Ricciardi), then all the rest are very poor people, “rabble” who have always been shot at for centuries with impunity. In an article in “L’Unità” in 1950 was written: “La Celere (fast response units) are organising preventively” listing police charges of demonstrations and shootings in detail; other “preventive” versions related to weapons in the possession of workers are drawn up for the use of the government and independent press, designed to justify the use of arms by the police. In Catania, in piazza Stesicora, during a demonstration against the Tambroni government, communist building labourer Salvatore Novembre, aged 19, was killed after being repeatedly struck by truncheons, and as he fell, losing consciousness, a policeman deliberately shot him repeatedly. One, two, three shots until he is slain, rendered unrecognisable. Then the policeman lost himself in the crowd and carried on with his action. Not yet dead, Salvatore was dragged to the centre of the square to serve as an example to the citizens of Catania. Come carabinieri used machine guns to prevent anyone from getting near to the poor youth who died from loss of blood. In Reggio Emilia on the 7th of the same month of July, carabinieri and police shot into the crowd for forty minutes uninterrupted, killing five people. Piergiuseppe Murgia tells of the event: “…amidst the blinding smoke one could hear the shots. The police are shooting. They shoot into the crowd. The people stop for a moment, stupified. They cannot believe it. They are shooting from every corner of the square. They are shooting at close range. At people. Shooting without a break. The first to fall is Lauro Ferioli, aged 22, father of a little boy. At the first shots he threw himself incredulously towards the police as though to stop them: the agents are a hundred yards from him: they shoot him full in the chest, they shoot him in the face. A boy who witnessed this was to say, “He took one or two steps, no more, and the machine gun fire set off right away. I found myself right at his side and saw him turn round, fall over on himself with blood pouring out of his mouth. He fell on top of me with all the blood (…).” Meanwhile, the worker Marino Serri who was crying with rage appeared at the corner of the street to protest crying “Murderers, murderers”. Another volley struck him and he fell as well (…) Ovidio Franchi, a boy worker aged 19, died shortly afterwards. A bullet had struck him in the abdomen. Wounded, he tried to hold himself up, clinging on to a shutter. Another, slightly wounded, wanted to help him, then one in uniform turned up and shot both of them. Emilio Beverberi, 30 years, worker, ex-partisan: split in two by machine gun fire. Worker Afro Tondelli, 35 years, is coldly murdered by a policeman who gets down on his knees to take accurate aim and shoots a sitting target.”
Afterwards, on the orders of the police chiefs themselves and on the mandate of the exploiters, the homicidal tactic of the police is modified in the sense of a more subtle refinement. It is no coincidence, in fact, that even in the most acute moments of tension there have been no more mass massacres in the streets. From the dozens and dozens of deaths in the years 46 – 50, it went to the eleven deaths of 1960 (peak year of worker struggles), right to 1972 with a few deaths a year. In recompence the strategy of tension was developed, aimed at involving the left and at carrying out a coup d’etat with the proved complicity of certain institutional organisms. From the death of Paolo Rossi in April 1966, to the death of the four communist comrades in April 1975, another technique of killing was introduced. The assassins in the service of the bosses have struck poor undefended people during various bombings in banks and in trains with the aim of pushing the great mass towards that order which, at institutional level, the fascists and bosses had made themselves the paladins of. If on the one hand the electoral response has been such as to render all thse attempts and all these massacres useless, it cannot be denied that, at least from 1969 to 1973, this new way of killing people managed to keep the government ship afloat. But it had another effect. There is an abyss between the reaction of the communist party at the time, for example, to the attack on Togliatti and their reaction on the occasion of the killing of the four comrades in April two years ago. In the more recent edition, Berlinguer turned up in a double breased suit, to visit Moro to expose his lamentations, and to this farse was added the strike of a few hours here and there and a very distinctive formal debate in the house. What matters is the electoral result, once that is safe who cares if comrades are dying, killed by the violence of the bosses and their servants. So long as nothing disturbs the idyll, of power every human sacrifice to this sanguinary god is consented and exalted.
It has been proved that in this strategy of tension the fascists have been used by the bosses in collaboration with the three “state organisms”: the army, the judiciary, the government. The army has used its special corps. Like the secret services and the police (in this sense improperly, we are including the whole of the police and not only the carabinieri and the army), to extend the web of the various plots, to strike at the level of raids, intimidation and the execution of a number of elements of the left, in particular anarchists; to maintain contacts with other States at the level of the secret services. The judiciary has employed its most trusted judges to “advocate” the most thorny proceedings, thwarting the investigations of the fascists concerning the Milan bombings, revoking superintendent Juliano who had tried to denounce the fascists, shelving [fascist] Freda’s telephone registrations, blowing up the unexpected bomb at the Commercial Bank in Milan, thus getting rid of the handle of the receipt machine saved from the explosion, and so on. The government gave the necessary authorisation (in the case of the Commissario Julian, Fais himself declared he had received orders from the home ministry), organising the complex operation of balancing opposed extremisms, throwing into the boiler of violence and a long string of killings, every possible means and expedient to continue to manage a power that was threatening to leak on all sides. As we shall see further on, the government complicity is not only at a political level but reaches greater efficiency at the economic one, contributing to the systematic theft carried out at the cost of all the exploited.
The charges against the workers suddenly increased when the struggles for the squatting in Celio in Rome and MacMahon in Milan took place and once again the aforementioned assassins were seen going to the attack of women and children with their usual nonchalence.
Another “democratic” characteristic of the pigs of any uniform is the use of torture against arrested proletarians. Lelio Basso (who certainly cannot be accused of extremism) writes: “…when someone from the privileged social categories is arrested for a common crime, and I am using the word in a very wide sense, he can be sure of going free from coercive measures, even if he insists on denying. Imagine a diplomat G. or a countess B., or a sir L., or industrial X., or civil servant Y., undergoing such treatment!” In fact, torture is the order of the day. In the barracks, the prisons, the criminal asylums, orphanages. The virtuous bourgeois pretend that they do not know about the institutional importance of torture. They are horrified at the misdeeds of the Old Inquisition, claiming that they do not know that that “praiseworthy” institution has never ceased operating. They are afraid in the face of the Nazi crematorium ovens, pretending they do not know that the prison camps for the final solution always exist, even in our country, and they are particularly efficient. But let us speak of torture for a moment.
In an old text of 1777 (V. Malerba “Ragionamento sopra la tortura”), we read on page 36, “Torture is carried out not in punishment of a crime the author of which is not known, but to get out of the mouth of the accused the truth, which for the weakness of reason and inconstance, cunning and falseness of witnesses often lies hidden in the darkness of uncertainty”.
And further on, pages 108-109, “But one concedes to the adversary that a tortured innocent gives in to pain and declares himself guilty, in the case under examination, in which torture was ordered by the judge with all the conditions that implies. What’s for them? To the rarity of this example I oppose the public utility resulting from the law of torture. I would say more, that the inconvenience of subjecting an innocent man, who in the torment confesses to a crime, should not be attributed to the injustice and barbarity of torture, but to a guilty weakness, and the lack of a virtuous strength. Patience is a duty, an indispensable duty. The innocent condemned to torment must accept with resignation and suffer with tolerance all the sufferings, like a slave, which bend his shoulder under the lash, which strikes him, making of his ills a means for aquiring good”.

[…]
What we said is no more than a tenuous claim concerning the violence of the bosses and their servants. Wecan find other aspects in what I call indirect violence. The thefts of the politicians, the mafia organized at State level, economic speculation carried out to the detriment of the proletariat, constitute hidden but just as effective and dangerous violence than the uncovered kind that strikes the individual.
The indirect violence of the bosses and their servants

The “mafia” is not a Sicilian phenomenon. It is a way of seeing things, a way of building relationships and solving problems from a perspective that could be called “feudal.” The Mafia organization par excellence today is the large State managerial company, but more about that later. For now, we care how the old mafia forms are used at the level of political power. The antimafia stories are truly and deeply humorous. A notorious mobster like Gioia is a minister of our government. In the clash between police superintendent Mangano and the mafioso Coppola, people are not sure whether to almost give preference to. the latter in terms of honesty. Very obscure aspects lurk in the Commissario’s past. Connections between drug trafficking and the old Mafia have been established, as well as links between the latter and certain political circles, from which could be inferred a specific interest in drug trafficking of many of our men of power. But we are only just beginning. The Sindona scandal has shown us how certain political circles work, certain banks, certain State industrial societies, certain international holdings. Let’s start with a “clean” job . Italy is the eighth exporter of weapons, after the USA, the Soviet Union, Britain, France, Canada, China, and West Germany. (Report of Stockholm International Peace Research Institute). Since the first four countries are grabbing nearly 90% of the world market, the rest must be divided between the remaining producers, hence a deadly combat. The solution is to sell to the “difficult” countries, so Italy is supplier of arms to South Africa (airplanes and naval fire control), Brazil (airplanes), Argentina (airplanes) the former Portugal (airplanes and firearms), Israel (helicopters and anti-tank missiles), “Congo-Kinshasa (planes) the old Greece (helicopters), Spain (helicopters), and so on. As you can see we give a considerable a contribution to the massacre of the people that are under fascist oppression. The loss of the Portuguese and Greek markets will be a big blow. Some of our industrialists are well known sponsors of national and international fascism. Apart from the 18,500,000 lire that Monti gave to Rauti, which there is evidence of, there is a continuous flow of funding that has produced such phenomena as (funded by Piaggio).
The scandal of the sugar tells us how the societies (led by Piaggio and Monti, the same who funded the fascists) paid several billion lire to Christian Democrats and Socialists. But from last year till now, everything has proceeded as before. A few months after the scandal of the sugar it was the turn of the Montedison to escape the price block by implementing up to 50% increases. It is truly the kingdom of thieves. The financial management of large organizations such as ENEL or EGAM is a mystery that could be investigated. The deficit in 1973 was 268 billion, that of 1974, 750, that of 1975 is forecast as 1600 billion, that of 1978 is forecast as 16:800 billion. This is one of the most obvious cases, but there are less showy ones such as that of the ESP or such as the ghost banks that originate then disappear with all the savings of the depositors. But what can we expect in a political reality that moves a notorious pimp like Bernabei from the Television to the chair of the Italstat, instead of at least leaving him to fall into a void?
But all of these operations have one clear meaning: they identify not so much a disease of the Italian institutions in the current year 1975, a disease that should be treated in one way or another, as a chronic failure of the bourgeois democratic institutions. Falsely democratic institutions that have the sole aim of exploiting the proletariat through violence and reducing it to consensus through any means of convincing.
The indirect violence of the bosses and their servants produces an increase in exploitation, the incredible accumulation of wealth on one side of the fence and the formation of pockets of appalling poverty on the other. It also produces the need to protect these riches from the attack of the exploited, hence a new thrust of physical violence against c1ass of producers. Physical violence and economic violence cannot be separated but walk together, the one affecting the other and completing the framework of the reactionary front of the class war.

Proletarian defence

The workers organize class defence. The unions should be the essential structure of this defence, coordinated at representative level with the political parties of the workers. In essence, this form of defence has very great limitations. Even excluding the decidedly reactionary groups of trade unions there are also elements of collaboration in the central unions that appear to be more progressive. The defence of the workplace implied in the reformist demands for improvement, lead, in moments of crisis, to safeguarding not only the worker but also the organization of exploitation. Political parties, which came into the government, have altogether discarded their proletarian covering, hovering in the control room trying to position themselves better to get a share of the pie. Finally, the Communist Party renounced all the features of the old revolutionary party, even the less compromising purely theoretical ones.
But exploitation is paid directly on the backs of the workers and not those of their privileged trade union representatives and politicians, so it often occurs that the latter are overtaken by initiatives of the exploited and are forced to scramble for recovery operations. In essence, proletarian defence consists of a legalistic area (trade unions and leftist parties), which maintain a relationship with power that can be defined collaboration. This is not the place to examine the problem of the true counter-revolutionary essence of this law-abiding area, however, it is an obstacle if only on an official level for power. In addition, proletarian defence begins to organize itself around autonomous groups that reject the logic of trade union associations and political parties.
In Turin, Milan, Rome, Marghera, Pordenone, Florence, Naples, etc.. an alternative within the same working-class movement has developed in recent years , which involved active minorities and vanguards of different kinds. Vanguardist structures of a Marxist-Leninist character as well as active minorities of a libertarian character. It is in this perspective that the actions of the revolutionary groups who went into clandestinity to fight the bosses and their servants arms in hand should be considered. It makes no sense to say that these “manifestations of violence” are against the interests of the workers’ movement, unrealistic and adventurous, and objectively provocatory. The armed struggle in capitalist societies such as Italy, Germany, Britain, France, is possible and has been demonstrated by groups like the Red Brigades, the NAP, RAF., the Angry Brigade, the GARI. It is not a question of adventurist positions but positions that follow logically from the same struggles of the exploited.
Let’s examine this difficult point: The labour movement creates struggles under the pressure of a growing class consciousness, often these struggles are beyond the control of managers, for both local and accidental reasons, and because workers are losing their confidence in the trade unions cadres and political parties: These experiences of autonomous struggle, wild, destructive, grasping the essence of capitalist exploitation: murder and robbery; become the patrimony of the politically aware minority who seek, each in their own political perspective to develop it further. And here lies the critical moment. In fact, in the clash between the classes, the holder of the power indicates the possible limits of the conflict, the so-called limits of legality, which when exceeded the repressive mechanism sets off. In this way, the active minority, taking the wealth of experience that comes from the autonomous struggles of the exploited, try to go forward, to be a point of reference, an indication, but in doing so and forced to radicalize their own position against the repressive mechanisms of the State. This is pushed to the extreme limits, to armed defense against the machine gun of the police, up the attack to survive, until death. To say that the experiences of armed struggle in Italy and Europe today are experiences orchestrated by the right, fascist provocative and criminal experiences, is criminal and worthy only of the clowns and the sold out of the Communist Party, not only because it offends the sacrifice of so many comrades that offer their lives for their communist ideal, but, and I would say mainly, because they deny any further revolutionary outlet to the experiences of the base of the proletariate in struggle.
Taking into consideration. The closer esperience of the Red Brigades we must, first of all, say that we cannot agree with the general political line (Marxist-Leninist) held by them, although we must admit that it is the most subsequent Marxist revolutionary group acting in Italy today. Apart from this, we must recognize the validity of their actions, a judgement that cannot be contradicted once it is placed in the right revolutionary perspective. The terrorist violence of the bosses and their servants is constantly in act, every day workers are systematically killed at the workplace, every day in the prisons, criminal asylums, in befotrofi, proletarians and children of proletarians experience that violence that well fed reformists know only by hearsay. Against this system that makes torture and terror the two essential foundations of production, one cannot remain at the stage of peaceful protest, we cannot continue to attend the visits of Mr. Berlinguer in double-breast to protest to the murderers that from behind Parliamentary immunity authorize and call for the massacre of the workers. Although many comrades belong to the extra-parliamentary movements and not a few anarchists faced with the problem of armed struggle pronounce against them. When, in a single issue, in 1972, we spoke of it as an inescapable need that was needed to be studied and considered, as an indispensable final showdown with the fascist and clerical forces, we received a barrage of criticism and accusations, even reaching the point of accusing us of being provocateurs. But the truth is that even within the extra-parliamentary forces and the anarchist movement there is a predominant pacifist current that continues to delude itself to save in this way, a space of political freedom that power can annul at any time.
We are not concerned here to defend the work of the Red Brigades, just as we are not interested in theorising in absolute the utility or negativity of armed struggle in Italy. We just want todraw attention to the fact that in our current situation, in the face of torture, abuse, exploitation, murder, there is something moving, a will to organize and struggle. Another group, much more problematic than the Red Brigades, is made up of the NAP. Not much is known of this organization, apart from a few flyers distri buted, one of which is published among the documents at the bottom of this file. The specific field of action are the prisons. Why? On this subject a rhetoric of the occasion would be easy: The reality is much more shocking. Torture, physical and moral 1’annihilation, killings, the use of bed restraints, sudden transfers, threats, isolation. Prison can be a place of rest and quiet, almost a resort for the mafia friends of the politicians or for spies who collaborate: it becomes hell for rebels and representatives of the active minority of the proletariat. In this reality revolutionary propaganda has always flourished. Today, it finds still easier ground both due to the large number of comrades who have entered prison in recent years, and for the reforms, quite impracticable, thathave been voted by parliament, alike the last ones that led to the events of Rebibbia. The N.A.P. have tried to work in the rebellious perspective of prisons and a number of their members have fallen in the course of gun battles with the police or killed in mysterious circumstances. But beyond the Red Brigades and the NAP., that costitute two glaring examples of how the forces of some of the active minorities organise, in the field of armed struggle there are a myriad of small actions on their own, of struggles against the bosses and their servants, which under the sign of autonomy encompasse reportable direct action. In this perspective, the discourse is still completely open.
The tactics

In 1969 Baader wrote: The substance of the position of German revolutionaries, is therefore that of the armed defence of proletarian struggles. Instead, the critique of the reformist organizations wanted to see the claim. To impose only one tactic: armed struggle. Instead the indication that reached us from the organizations that work underground is that next to the struggles of the exploited, even manipulated by the unions and parties, in addition to action for clarification of the substantive counterrevolutionary role that these bodies carry out, in addition to the task of clarification about the new forms of repression, should be developed defense organizations of the proletariat, organizations capable of addressing future work and to serve as a control in respect of the reactionary attempts to seize power with the help of the fascists.. What is emerging from the tactics of the urban guerrilla groups in Italy today is a pluralistic message. They do not deny the need – in the current state of capitalist development – of the worker struggles, but at the same time, denounced as murder, any attempt to cut off the means of defense of the proletariat. In the event of a physical confrontation with the reaction and with the fascists thousands of comrades would be unnecessarily sacrificed to the current deliberate obtuseness of the Communist Party leaders and hangers on.
As we saw in this same article, the claims of a possible military and fascist solution, with the protective intervention of the CIA, become much stronger as the electoral threat of the PCI gets greater and their assurance not to show their teeth gets more ineredibili. The bosses even if they can also have faith in those sold out like Berlinguer and partners, cannot delude themselves that the base is as malleable, not all having donned the double-breasted. From the game of the balance of opposites (just as valid as the scheme of opposed extremists) a lot more efficient attempts for a solution in the coup sense could emerge. In that case a few dozen heroes would not solve anything and thousands of comrades would end up massacred. The tactics of the guerrilla army in Italy today spoints to the dangers of a ‘Chile’ situation suitable for our country.But, suppose, for the sake of argument, the opposite eventuality: the end of every coup aspiration; elimination (ie cutting funding) of the fascists, Communist administration. The exploited fallen into a different abyss always with no way out.
Ideological cover to make one shudder. Red flags and patriotic songs at full blast. But even more refined and cruel exploitation and genocide in the workplace because (apparently managed by the same workers forces). In this perspective, the revolutionary discourse would be equally valid: no longer against fascist dictatorship, but against another no less terrible dictatorship even though of a different colour. The attempt to disarm – not only physically but also psychologically – the masses can be functional to prospective authors of a military coup, but in fact comes in handy (and is defended to the bitter end) to the Communist Party that it intends to take over the management of power with all the calm thatthis requires, without disturbing anybody, to form the cadres of the exploiting class of the future.
The new armed resistance must therefore imagine a possible future fight against the attempt of coup by the right, as well as a Communist dictatorship implemented by the bureaucracy of the party and the unions. Today, however, it is forced to fight with the present fascism represented by an elusive, state of affairs; difficult to define, and the darkness which are all concerned about, the right, the left, the centres and even the “extreme> left. And precisely this present struggle, struggle to the death to survive, that is forcing the guerrilla army in Italy to solve tactical and strategic problems that are not easy, but are a heritage of great interest to all those that are giving themselves, as we anarchists, a double possible future fight.
As we have seen the radicalization of the proletarian struggle is leading some active minorities to reach levels of action that are considered “outlaw” from power. From this moment one is, “going underground.”. The conditions of survival are then very precise. First you must find the money necessary for the very lives of militants and the implementation of some actions: This money is generally made by the revolutionary expropriations that the minority does a carico of the exploiting class, in anticipation of expropriation and the final total that will be the social revolution. These are actions that have been carried out by revolutionaries of every era (from Garibaldi to Stalin to give a not too relevant example), which is facing today, as in the past, the angry criticism of the reformists, fearful that the mass might confuse their candid program with that of cornmon robbers. The rest of the actions, the abduction of individuals responsible for proletarian exploitation, spies, fascists; acts of sabotage against state property, against the political centres, offices of reactionary political parties etc. And countless other discoveries from time to time of revolutionary proletarian fantasy, constitute the field of what is called “armed propaganda>. Of course, many criticisms can be made from time to time about the political opportunityof this or that action, the time lens, the reason for a choice, etc., and we are not saying here that we absolutely agree with the tactics of shooting first because in this way we always end up being right, on the contrary, we just want to say that this wealth of experience should not be thrown overboard, but studied, analyzed and criticized.
Criticism

In essence, the criticisms that have been made to the experiences of armed struggle today in Europe and Italy are all equally of a net rejection. The problem is not even considered. The comrades that accept armed struggle as a possible instrument of opposition to state terrorism are considered provocative, agents of the reaction, fascists. A criticism of this kind indicates only one thing: the fear that leftist political parties, the extra-parliamentary movements of hangers on as well as some anarchists have of losing their “agibility”. The PCI is talking about provocators and bandits. The extremists are more clear. Avanguardia operaia says, “with regard to the revival of the so-called red terrorism by fanfanian propaganda, we reiterate our severe condemnation of those who put themselves out of the labour movement. The Pdup-Manifesto are more sophisticated: . And Lotta Continua, “… political conception of despair that pushes some militant groups and to lose the bond and trust in the class organizations of the workers, to engage in a private and suicidal war to adapt instruments such as bombs that proletarian and anti-fascist consciousness rejects in the hardest possible way.”
The communique of the Federazioni anarchiche (FAI, GAF, GIA) on armed struggle is of the same kind: … We do not agree with these criticisms because we consider them incomplete. In fact, especially the communique of the anarchist Federazioni coglie nel segno when they speak of state provocation and the possible use in the provocatory sense of the groups that theorise and bring about armed struggle; coglie nel segno when they state that anarchism has nothing to do with the armed vanguards of the proletariat; but they do not convince us when they reduce anarchist action to simply the stimulous of social contradictions, in support of the selfmanaged struggle and direct action of the exploited mass, if alongside all that one doesn’t consider opportune – before the spreading of state terrorism – to organise a defence against the violence of the bosses and their servants.
In that way the critique is unilateral. The validity of certain struggles is affirmed and that of the armed struggle of a popular matrice is denied, while, in contrast one cannot deny that the state carries out a terrorism that is not only psychological but is also physical. One should conclude that the state oppresses us with econoic, cultural, etc exploitation, and kills us with military repression, while our defence must stop at the first level, leaving them the initiative to kill us as and how they like, with all commodity, like al tiro a segno. Not just that, things do not stop there, in the case of the extraparl.amentarians and the communist party they go as far as to see any attempt at defence as fascist and provocatory.
Frankly this reasonig does not seem right to me. But there is more. Pinsisting on these positions one is objectively playing the game of the repression that is applying the rule of « divide and rule », experimented everywhere and which the mass murderer Stalin was a master of. Through instruments of this kind anarchists such as Berneri were slain in Spain, the collectives remained defenceless and more than a few comrades were forced into clandestinity « anarchy reigning>. Let us stop our fear for a moment, let’s stop and think. When our judgment coincides perfectly with that of power, when our declarations seem to come out from the multimillionaire printing presses of the communist party, when fascists and communists si pallegaiano the terrorist respectively to harmonically equilibrate the game of opposed extremisms, when the policeman speaks the same language as we do, there must be something wrong with us, not in the instruments of power that do not usually make such kinds of mistakes. In pratice the condemnatios that we often pronounce against the experiences of armed struggle are based on news supplied by the press in the pay of the bosses; of actions compiute; of real motivations, of the frameups constructed a priori and a posteriori by the police, we know nothing. Yet our first instinct is to condemn immediately whatever disturbs the programmatic framework of our political activity.
Acting in this waythe struggle against repression crystalises in a monovalente form, following the desires of those who have an interest in not disturbing the waters too much. The groups that recognise the need for armed struggle are isolated, leaving them in balia of eventual provocations.It is logical that an emarginated group can defend itself up to a point, working in certain conditions of clandestinity and with the obstacle of having all the left against it, unleashed in an abnormal and criminal critique,does not have instruments di verifica, cannot control its position nor even its own analyses.
The convictions stem from the official left originate from the same matrix that gives approval when it comes to “strugglet against fascism in Spain and other uncivilized countries”.
And precisely these days the mass massacre of five anti-fascist comrades who were shot by the Spanish executioner, comrades belonging to clandestine organizations of armed struggle in Spain (ETA and FRAP). On this occasion, the anger was unanimous.
It has a certain effect reading bastards like the Christian Democrats in this way: “We all feel deeply humbled and aware of the duty to ensure the system of freedom that can be the bearer of many flaws, but as long as it remains such, constitutes an element of certainty for citizens and equilibrium and peace for the international community. ”
And the worthy comrades of the Italian Communist Party: “the executions must encourage all democrats, all anti-fascists, to extend their mobilization to increase initiatives, to draw into the struggle millions and millions of fighters for freedom in Spain. ” And the freedom of Italy, France, Germany, Russia, the United States, of the rest of the world?
Even the Pope spoke. Concealing less well than the other political criminals the true reactionary matrix of Catholicism: “We reiterate the strong disapproval of the series of terrorist attacks that have marred that noble and always dear to us dear nation, and the courage of those who, directly or indirectly, are responsible, for such an activity, considered, wrongly, and taken as a legitimate tool of political struggle. But to this condemnation we must also make follow a condemnation of a repression so hard that he also ignored calls from many quarters that have been raised against those executions “:
But this “holy crusade”, led by Paul VI, worthy successor of the holy fathers of the Inquisition, characterized well by the ‘august’ presence of the words of the Where there is boss exploitation, either under the idiotic sign of fascism idiot, or under the intelligent sign of bourgeois democracy, which conceals a no less odious fascism, armed struggle is legitimate in that it provides for the defence of the proletariat. And if the comrades of the Italian Communist Party who have found so many eloquent words these days to defend the Spanish revolutionaries victims of th executioner Franco, were consequent with themselves, they should use the same words with the revolutionaries of our own house, or at least open a clear critical debate on the proposals that are coming from this side, preventing everything from disappearing in the mist of an alleged provocation ultimately useful only to the boss reaction.
Among our tasks, in addition to those engaged in the masses, political clarification, the push toward self-managed initiatives and direct action, must also be that of the organisation of proletarian defence. This can not be – rightly – the work of a vanguard that proposes the conquest of something or the guidance of the proletriat, but must be the work of groups that seek to strike the enemy in the property and people, developing the first elements of the popular resistance that developing the first elements of the class war in course, overcoming the contradictions of capitalism in a revolutionary sense, may, in a not too distant future, at the economic, ideological and even military level start the road to revolution social.

ALFREDO M. BONANNO

(Original title: Guerra di classe
Anarchismo, First series – 1975 – numbers 4-5 – pages 195-207)