That is what we are. Good only for inhabiting the caverns of dreams and metaphysics, unworthy of setting foot in the palaces of concreteness and practicality. We draw out our existence at least a millennium late. We don’t know how to get in line with the times; we don’t strive to come into tune with the present; we insist upon doing untimely things of little convenience to ourselves.
We roughly brandish a machete fit for severing links, instead of skillfully handling a crochet hook to weave them. We express ourselves in a dark and stammering language, rather than having recourse to persuasive and popular speech. In our coarseness, we are much more concerned with individual desires (our own, first of all) than collective needs (above all, those of others).
What else can we claim, if not suspicion and hostility? We deserve them both. And don’t indulge us by considering us naïve. Not in the least, we are precisely backwards. We continue to hold that revolt is the exploration and unfolding of human potentialities, without understanding that first of all it has to resolve objective necessities, so that social struggles don’t need poetry, but rather tactics and organization. We insist on launching provocations to stir up reflection, without realizing that discussions divide minds and poison relationships, so that it is better to be content with yogurt thought, light and easily spread on all brains. We dig our heels in disobeying the tyranny of the number, without comprehending that relations of force are practical and strategic, not ethical, questions, so that “the struggle pays” only if it is made with large numbers. We persevere in considering a utopia that has its feet on the ground false, without realizing that estrangement is the cause of impotence, so that it is necessary to stay thoroughly immersed in reality if you want to change it. We continue to seek affinity that is a sharing of perspectives without being aware of how much more common good feelings—the only things capable of creating good relationships—are; ideas have become, in the best of cases, tools to use and throw away without regrets.
One could go forward, but what’s the use? The innovations brought into the anarchist movement in Italy since the end of the second millennium are right in front of everyone’s face.
From frequent attacks against small targets spread throughout the entire territory, it has gone on to frequent sit-ins in front of the great targets present in the cities. The explicit refusal of party banners in one’s initiatives has been removed in order to better be able to drink a toast to the participation of political forces in our demonstrations that have taken place. Keeping at a distance from all the single-issue organizations that would like to redeem the state has been replaced by a collaborationism that aims to derail their pious intentions. The passion for “outlaws” and “barbarians” has been sold off, replaced by the passion for “mamas with strollers” or “housewives items from Voghera”.[1] Invectives launched against the priests of the intelligentsia, professors skillful in separating intelligence from revolt, have given place to invitations addressed to experts in dispensing data and knowledge. From the choosing of sides that doesn’t go back on its reasons, solidarity has been getting transformed into charity for the victims of the state. Iconoclasm against all religions has been thrown aside to the noble aim of respecting other people’s cultures (if not yet reassessing the unrecognized subversive virtue of prayer[2]). Stubborn silence in the face of the enemy, the much reviled “autism of insurgents”, gets broken by the intervention of the microphones of state media. As to recuperators, despised so long ago, now they are welcomed with open arms and defended to the bitter end. And anyone who doesn’t want to learn to tag along in this left turn, anyone who doesn’t demonstrate enthusiasm for the new course, is just a troglodyte to keep at a distance for fear that, with his bad manners, he will end up ruining the fine climate that has been established, causing the movement to fall back into ineffective marginality rather than raising to effective popularity.
Have you ever noticed the massive presence of the dead among the (involuntary) collaborators of this magazine? It is a further demonstration of our incapacity to be up-to-date, adapted to the demands of the moment. Not managing to achieve a behavioral level that allows balance social relationships, we are forced to associate with phantoms. The future does not belong to us, the present disgusts us, and so we shut ourselves up in a selected past. Troglodytes, living in the past. This is what we are. But it gets worse. We are proud of this.
[1] This would be equivalent to saying “house wives from the Midwest” here.—translator
[2] This is a reference to certain “former anarchists” in Italy who now merely call themselves “antiracists”, who say that the prayers of Muslim prisoners are a form of resistance.–translator
–fom MACHETE-2000