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lunedì 12 ottobre ore 21.30
proiezione del film
"IL CORAGGIOSO"
di Johnny Depp
con Johnny Depp, Marlon Brando
(USA, 1997, 120')
locandina http://www.libreriaanomalia.org/locandina.jpg
Libreria Anomalia - Centro di documentazione anarchica
via dei Campani 71/73 - 00185 Roma - tel. e fax 06 491335
libreria@libreriaanomalia.org - cda@libreriaanomalia.org
Canzone
Il peso del mondo
è amore.
Sotto il fardello
di solitudine
sotto il fardello
dell'insoddisfazione
il peso,
il peso che portiamo
è amore.
Chi può negarlo?
In sogno
ci tocca
il corpo,
nel pensiero
costruisce
un miracolo,
nell'immaginazione
s'angoscia
fino a nascer
nell'umano -
s'affaccia dal cuore
bruciando di purezza -
poiché il fardello della vita
è amore,
ma noi il peso lo portiamo
stancamente,
e dobbiam trovar riposo
tra le braccia dell'amore
infine,
trovar riposo tra le braccia
dell'amore.
Non c'è riposo
senza amore,
né sonno
senza sogni
d'amore -
sia matto o gelido
ossesso d'angeli
o macchine,
il desiderio finale
è amore
- non può essere amaro
non può negare,
non può negarsi
se negato:
il peso è troppo
deve dare
senza nulla in cambio
così come il pensiero
si dà
in solitudine
con tutta la bravura
del suo eccesso.
I corpi caldi
splendono insieme
al buio
la mano si muove
verso il centro
della carne,
la pelle trema
di felicità
e l'anima viene
gioiosa fino agli occhi -
sì, sì,
questo è quel
che volevo,
ho sempre voluto,
ho sempre voluto,
tornare
al mio corpo
dove sono nato.
A brief history of Cuba and the 1958 Revolution which examines the alleged "socialist"� nature of the governing regime.
"..the major event of the twentieth century has been the abandonment of the values of liberty on the part of the revolutionary movement, the weakening of Libertarian Socialism, vis-a-vis Caesarist and militaristic Socialism. Since then, a great hope has disappeared from the world to be replaced by a deep sense of emptiness in the hearts of all who yearn for Freedom...."
- Albert Camus, 'Neither Victims nor Executioners'
As Camus says, a deep sense of emptiness is felt by all those who wish for a revolution leading to the creation of a society which is classless and truly socialist. As the history of the 20th century has unfolded we have witnessed the repeated failure of vanguards and leaders to create the society for which the true-hearted revolutionaries have fought and died. Not so long ago most of the left held up the Soviet Union as an example of Socialism or something with some socialist features.
As the Eastern Bloc crumbled and the true horrors of sick states like Ceaucescu's Romania were exposed Cuba became the new Mecca for the left. What we find there is unfortunate and there is little to inspire us in the country which has had Fidel Castro at the wheel of power for over 30 years.
Cuba, about 90 miles off the coast of North America, is the largest of the Caribbean islands. The social services are in a far better condition than they are in other Latin American countries. Virtually every Cuban under the age of 30 can read and write. But the cost of these benefits is high for the working class who have never been in the saddle of power in Cuba. This is not their role as the doting Father looks after their interests. While the figures about literacy and health are good there are a number of statistics which aren't so impressive.
One Cuban in every 340 is in prison. There are 400 political prisoners. Around 50% of the Cuban male population are known to the police or have criminal records. The Cuban police force regularly carry revolvers, tear gas and electric truncheons. The crime rate itself is very low, so the equipment of the police and the jail population would seem to indicate a state that is repressive in it's dealings with the people.
Batista
To understand how Cuba functions now, why it developed the way it did and why socialism was never on Castro's menu, we must look at the origins and path of the revolution. Fulgencio Batista y Zaldivar had taken control of Cuba in a military coup called the 'sergeants revolt' on September 4th 1933. He promoted himself to the position of Commander in Chief of the armed forces and comfortably ruled through a host of puppet presidents.
Batista contested and lost the presidency 1944, after which he exited to Florida with millions from the small country's coffers. He returned to power in a coup d'état in 1952, three months prior to the presidential elections.
An interesting point to note is the cordial relationship between Batista and the Cuban Communist Party. They were allowed to function openly and supported Batista's candidates in the 1940 elections. As their reward they got control of the state controlled trade union, the Cuban Confederation of Labour (CTC-Confederacion de Trabajadores de Cuba). The First Secretary General was Lazaro Pena, a post he would later hold under Fidel Castro.
The 26th of July Movement [Fidel Castro and [URL=http://libcom.org/history/guevara-ernesto-che-1928-1967] Che Guevara's [/URL] guerrilla organisation] was born out of an attack on the Moncada military barracks in 1953. The attack, though brave, was bungled and failed. The movement really grew during the subsequent trial where Castro successfully gave the impression of the July Movement as being nationalists who would no longer be restrained.
The political aspirations of the movement extended no further than "total and definitive social justice" and "absolute and reverent respect" for the 1940 constitution. Incidentally the attack on the barracks was condemned by the Cuban Communist Party who defined their role as being to "unmask the putschists and adventurous activists as being against the interests of the people". Daily Worker (Paper of the U.S. Communist Party), August 10th 1953
Sierra Maestra years
The July 26th Movement grew in prestige from the trial of the Moncada attackers. Two years later, after the movement had been in exile in Mexico where Castro met the young Che Guevara, they returned on the "Granma" pleasure cruiser in December 1956. The 80 strong insurrection failed in the Oriente region and they retreated to the Sierra Maestra mountains. It is here according to the folklore historians, whom Castro had later appointed, that the discussions of Marx and Lenin took place into the long hours amongst the revolutionaries around the camp fires.
Castro had been a follower of the Partido Ortodoxo which was a nationalist organisation who put their faith in the 1940 constitution. Now, according to re-written history he became a Marxist-Leninist. Che Guevara's story of this time is more enlightening, they "...had neither ideological awareness nor 'esprit de corp'.... ". Castro's Revolution (New York 1964) p.35. Castro goes on to contradict this history of his own making by saying that "the proclamation of socialism during the period of instructional struggle would not have been understood". Granma (Cuban paper) 28th December 1975.
In 1958, a year prior to the revolution, Castro said "true, the extension of government ownership to certain power companies - US owned - was a point of our earliest programmes; but we have currently suspended all planning on this matter."Cuba, an American Tragedy (R. Sheer & M. Zeitlin) Penguin 1964. p. 61 What the 26th July Movement was seeking was "industrialisation at the fastest possible rate. For this purpose, foreign investment will always be welcome and secure here." Cuba, an American Tragedy (R. Sheer & M. Zeitlin) Penguin 1964. p. 63.
The Revolution
By 1958 the Batista troops had retreated to their barracks. The rebels stepped up their attacks. There was broad popular support for the 26th July Movement, and mass strikes and demonstrations followed. (Che Guevara said that the Batista regime collapsed under the weight of it's own corruption.) Many who weren't in the July movement lost their lives, yet they seem to be forgotten in the process of deification which has taken place around Castro.
There was the raid on the Mantanzans garrison in which all the young members of the radical nationalist Autentico Party lost their lives in 1956. Then there was the attempted assassination of Batista in 1957 by the Revolutionary Student Directorate. All of them were massacred.
It is important to remember that the Cuban revolution was the work of a few armed insurgents. It was the work of a few hundred armed guerrillas in the Sierra Maestra mountains and various other rebels. The working class supported the rebels but it was a passive support that did not extend beyond strikes and demonstrations when the dictatorship was close to crumbling. "The emancipation of the working class is the task of the workers" and unfortunately in Cuba true emancipation was not to follow the revolution.
Yesterday's Nationalism - Today's Socialism
Following the toppling of Batista the first cabinet contained a judge, a lawyer, the head of the Havana Bar Association, a member of the Orthodox Party, and the ex-president of the national bank. (Within 14 months all of these disappeared to the USA and became 'contras'.) The 1940 constitution was reinstalled. The first office set up was the National Tourist Board. All this would not seem to indicate a very socialist revolution had taken place.
In April 1959 Castro went to America to visit and talk with vice president Richard Nixon about securing a development loan. Castro made assurances to the White House about protection of American interests but he stood firm on Cuban sovereignty. However, even the demands for very limited economic control were against US interests and therefore Cuba was portrayed as part of the "world communist conspiracy". The imperialist USA set out to smash small independent Cuba.
The Americans had wanted Batista to capitulate to a caretaker government before Castro could come to power. They were never really prepared to do business with the man. The further down a road one travels the less options one is faced with. Castro had reached a 'T' junction. The first road would have been to concede sovereignty to the Americans and keep a section of the old ruling class on his side. The second road was to industrialise the country, using the confiscated wealth of the ruling class.
Cuba was going "Socialista". In October 1959 Che Guevara becomes head of the National Bank. In February 1960 a new agreement is reached to supply sugar to the USSR. In July of the same year Castro nationalises American owned sugar companies and oil refineries. By the end of the year few foreign industries are not nationalised. Castro had made a decision, America had refused to budge an inch and now it was time to side with the other major power. So began the myth of the July Movement always being Marxist. As the plaque reads at Havana's main cemetery "What the imperialists cannot forgive is us having made a socialist revolution under the very noses of the United States."
Cuba : Castro's Playground
It comes as no surprise to learn that Castro chose to call himself a Marxist-Leninist. "I am a Marxist-Leninist and will remain one until the last day of my life" said Castro in 1961. This is a good political philosophy to adhere to if one intends to remain in power for 30 years and never release the reins of control to the working class.
How does Cuba function? On this Caribbean island you have a ruling class composed of the bureaucracy which came from the July 26th Movement. You have the remnants of the Stalinist Partido Socialista (Cuban Communist Party) who saw the Revolution and the nationalisation that followed as a means to strengthen their positions.
To the Cuban Communists their own survival is paramount, principles were abandoned as unhealthy a long time ago. Then you have the professionals such as academics, scientists and management. They have fewer privileges than their counterparts in the 'West' but are rewarded with praise and prizes as long as they remain uncritical. The ruling class is bonded together by a fear of the working class.
Castro is the cement which holds Cuban society together. As Che Guevara wrote "It is true that the mass follows it's leaders, especially Fidel Castro, without hesitation but the degree to which he has earned such confidence is due precisely to the consummate interpretation of the peoples' desires and aspirations." Venceremos, the speeches and writings of Che Guevara, London 1968 p.388.
This is the cult of Castro's personality which cannot be underestimated, he is the consummate master of telling the people what they wish to hear. As rumblings of discontent come from the working class about the bureaucrats, they still look to the father figure of Fidel to deal with the nasty bureaucrats.
The 'internationalist' policy of armed support for nationalist regimes in Africa and the scientific work all gives credence to the popular story of one little island standing strong against the wicked winds of imperialism. The economy of Cuba has been distorted for years so that it is like looking at something at the bottom of a pond. The funds from Russia are drying up. The Cuban cigars are partly filled from Bulgarian tobacco. There is little to be said when you find out that there have been sugar shortages in a country where about 50% of the economy is based on this crop.
The embargo is blamed for everything covering vast areas of inefficiency. Trading has been going on with the USA for years through a series of front companies. When the squeeze had to be put on in the 1980's Castro, "El Lider Maximo", came up with the process of 'rectification'. This ingenious plan involved going back to the past and digging up the immortal legend of Che Guevara and returning to a 'high moral socialism'.
Castro came up with such perils of wisdom as "Perhaps one of the most difficult aspects of rectification has been to persuade the workers to give up the excessively high wages stemming from implementation of outdated norms, or erroneous criteria". When one distils the true meaning from such pedantic language, we get the old maxim, work harder and ask for less. The words of a leader who is prepared to squeeze the working class more rather than attack the inequalities of the society which he helped create.
What Now?
The Cuban regime is called many things as people try and categorise it, and excuse it for its policies and glaring faults. The working class did not create the revolution and they have been crippled since Castro and his cohorts installed a new bureaucracy. The aspirations of the workers are low and so is their confidence. However, as you can ascertain from the steps preceding and following the revolution Castro did not set out to even create 'socialism on one island'.
Recognising that Cuba is not 'socialist' does not mean, however, that anarchists and socialists ignore the U.S. blockade of the island. This attempt to starve the island of even medical supplies is yet one more attack on the working class. The Washington government are happy to squeeze the ordinary people of Cuba in the hope that the resultant discontent will lead to Castro's overthrow.
The American ruling class hate his regime, not because it is some sort of 'socialist' paradise but because its very existence challenges Washington's political monopoly in Central and South America. Their hope is to replace Castro with a government obedient to their wishes, like those of Guatemala or El Salvador.
The revolution was nationalist inspired and Castro adopted the political ideology of Leninism to suit his needs after his courtship of American investment had failed. The working class in Cuba need to unite and fight the ruling class who reap the rewards from their island. Those who see something inspirational in the way Cuba functions today are those blinkered to the possibility of the only true socialist society, one where freedom and equality are central.
[i] Dermot Sreenan
From Workers Solidarity No40, 1993 [/i]
*. All statistics quoted in the remainder of this paragraph are taken from Analysis, Winter 1991-1992.
Peiraeus, the central commercial harbour of Greece remains blocked as dockworkers decided to continue their strike against privatisation by another 48h. More than 215.000 tons of merchandise is stocking up in the harbour while 12.000 containers remain in boats waiting to be unloaded.
The dockworkers of Peiraeus, the largest harbour of Greece, adjacent to Athens, have decided to continue their strike which has caused all sea-related commercial activities to freeze. The strike began on the first of October when the lease of the harbour, which is state-owned, to the Chinize giant COSCO, was officially activated.
A 25 year old Pakistani sans papier immigrant succumbed yesterday to woulds inflicted while being tortured in the police station of Nikea, Athens, two weeks ago.
Mohamed Kamran Atif, a 25 year old Pakistani sans papier immigrant succumbed on Friday 9th of October to wounds inflicted while being tortured in the police station of Nikea, an Athens suburb, between the 26th and 28th of September 2009.
Continuing waves of mass police operations in down town Athens set the pace for new era of repression in Greece
Everyone thought it was just a show of power - but it proved to be the Socialist government's plan for "change" after 5 years of brutal right wing rule.
One day after assuming power, the Socialists launched a massive invasion of Exarcheia, the Athens anarchist enclave, with mass detentions and brutal intimidation of locals.
On the early hours of Friday 9 of October, four days after the landslide victory of the Socialists in the greek national elections, and only a day after assuming power, the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (Pasok) proved its intentions towards the social antagonistic movement that has swept the country since the December Uprising: brutal repression.
The blockade of the city hall of Zografou, an Athens suburb in the foothills of Mt Imitos averted the cementing of four squares into parking lots, despite the employment of thugs.
On Tuesday 6th of October, only two days after the national elections that have seen the largest defeat of the right wing in the country's history, 6 local committees and assemblies of Zografou, an Athens suburb in the foothills of Mt Imitos, the east mountain of the greek capital, ruled by a right-wing mayor with chronic hatred of things green, gathered to stop the auctioning of public works that
A new attack and communique by the Nuclei of Fire, targeting the greek PM's central rally in Athens, shatter any reamining credibility of the anti-guerrilla pre-election persecutions.
The already disputed credibility of the anti-guerrilla persecution of three 20 year old boys for their alleged involvement in the urban guerrilla group Nuceli of Fire Conspiracy (NFC), responsible for over 150 storm-attacks against state and capital targets as well as a recent bombing campaign (with no human injuries due to previous warning calls in all cases), has now all but collapsed after the
According to Kathimerini, the famous Italian anarchist Alfredo M. Bonanno was arrested yesterday (October 1) in Trikala, Greece, on suspicion of driving the getaway car for an armed bank robbery by a Greek man named Christos Stratigopoulos. This arrest occurs in the midst of a wave of government repression against anarchists in the name of "anti-terrorism."
The report says a witness informed the police of the car's license plate, and the police stopped them and found the money in the car.
Sofia Papazoglou, a popular folk singer was attacked by members of the Golden Dawn neo-nazi party in Athens after throwing election leaflets handed to her in the garbage. The singer remains hospitalised with serious burns from use of unidentified acid spray and with impaired vision.
Sofia Papazoglou, a popular folk singer of the "entehno" genre known for her progressive politics was attacked on Thursday 1st of October outside the metro station of Katehaki, in Athens, by ten members of the neo-nazi party Golden Dawn when she threw election leaflets handed to her by the thugs in the garbage.
Three of the four accused of involvement in the urban guerrilla group Nuclei of Fire Conspiracy were remanded in custody pending trial, after the state investigator applied the anti-terrorist law to them which permits imprisonment "in expectation of evidence against them".
After two days of a legal marathon, during which hundreds of solidarity protestors gathered in the high court yards, the investigation hearings of the 4 teenagers accused as members of the urban guerrilla group Nuclei of Fire Conspiracy came to an end, with the release of the 20 year old girl and the pre-trial jailing of the three remaining defendants.
The anti-guerrilla fiasco directed by the panicked outgoing government has began to unravel in Athens with bombing victim accusing the police of a setting-up innocent radicals.
It was the right wing government's last stunt and it has already collapsed in widespread public dismay.
Per la seconda puntata di questa mia nuova rubrica ho chiesto a Beppe Sebaste di pubblicare un capitolo – una traccia? – del suo ultimo libro Oggetti smarriti e altre apparizioni (Laterza Contromano, 2009) , ottimamente recensito qui su NI da Chiara Valerio. E lui ha accettato. effeffe
“Come se venissimo scacciati nei boschi” *
di
Beppe Sebaste
Vorrei cominciare da una passeggiata.
Domenica 15 giugno sono uscito di casa dopo mezzogiorno. L’idea era di sedermi a leggere da qualche parte, e magari mangiare qualcosa. Sulla strada ho comprato il Corriere della Sera, avevo con me un quaderno e il libro di appunti di Walter Benjamin su Parigi. Devo fare in questi giorni un programma di ricerca per sollecitare un nuovo credito in forma di borsa di studio, consacrato come quello precedente alla letteratura intima ed epistolare, in particolare di alcuni autori romantici. Ho pensato che leggere gli appunti di Benjamin sulla flânerie mi avrebbe dato delle idee: anche la lettera è un vagabondaggio.
Ho scartato l’Île Rousseau, dove ho spesso studiato, perché il bar è troppo caro e di domenica troppo affollato. Ho pensato alla vieille ville, col sole e gli alberi. Del Café Papon, nella terrazza che si affaccia sul parco dell’università, ho il ricordo di un buon posto dove leggere il giornale.
Ma hanno cambiato l’arredo, e quando arrivo trovo dei tavoli grandi e inospitali, buoni per mangiare la pizza in comitiva (l’accento dominante tra i clienti è americano). Giro intorno al bar indeciso, quando accanto a un albero scorgo un piccione morto, forse decapitato, con del sangue raggrumato intorno. Mi esce una breve esclamazione di disgusto, più che altro rivolta all’inconsapevole indifferenza dei clienti sudati che mangiano lì vicino, e del personale di servizio. Alla fine scelgo di sedermi a un tavolo vicino all’entrata del ristorante, all’ombra e lontano dal piccione. Appena mi siedo faccio uno starnuto, mi guardo intorno per comandare qualcosa e sul muro di fianco, a un palmo dalla mia testa, vedo un buco tra i mattoni in cui galleggiano su delle ragnatele, in un disordine amorfo, vari detriti, tra cui una chewingum masticata. Questa visione mi fa più schifo della precedente, perché non è possibile alcuna redenzione, e brontolando mi alzo seguito dallo sguardo di una coppia. Inizio così una peregrinazione sotto il sole, il libro voluminoso di Benjamin in mano, da un bistrot all’altro, ogni volta respinto da una minaccia diversa. L’ultimo posto puzzava di fonduta al formaggio.
Eppure, penso, l’aria è bella e pulita, il cielo è azzurro e bianco, c’è il sole e ho voglia di sedermi a leggere. Mi fermo sulla Terrazza Agrippa d’Aubigné, dopo aver percorso la rue Calvin e costeggiato la cattedrale. Da una fenditura tra gli edifici guardo il lago, il getto d’acqua bianca e spumeggiante che spunta sopra i tetti, le onde e le barche a vela. Le case intorno sono sobrie e color crema, dalle finestre intravvedo qualche interno e mi viene voglia di trovarmi a Parigi, così, per vedere delle case. Del lago, in fondo, non mi importa più di tanto. Così mi accorgo, accendendomi una sigaretta, di non avere nessuna premura, e appoggiandomi al muretto decido di sfogliare il mio giornale. E’ morto Borges. Allora vado a pagina tre, che è tutta consacrata a questo evento. Il primo articolo che appare è di Claudio Magris, “La letteratura non salva la vita”.
Spesso mi sono riferito a dei libri. Le letture fanno parte della mia sfera di esperienza a pari titolo (forse addirittura a maggior titolo, mi rimproverava un’amica) di altri miei atti o stati del mondo. Non solo le letture: voglio dire i libri, anche quelli non letti. Di conseguenza anche i loro autori. Sono sempre stato piuttosto sicuro nel riferire frasi tratte da libri, enunciazioni che potessero sostenere le mie idee (dunque mi capitava di avere delle idee da sostenere). Ad esempio citavo Gilles Deleuze, più spesso senza nominarlo: letteratura minore, letteratura di idee, movimenti, macchine astratte, esilio, stare sempre nel mezzo come l’erba, visagéité (voltità), muro bianco e buchi neri, l’ape e l’orchidea, essere stranieri nella propria lingua (cercare di esserlo), linee di fuga, concatenamenti, divenire sempre, non diventare mai, metamorfosi vs metafora, ecc. Naturalmente altri concetti e parole chiave si sono aggiunte alla lista: opacità (contro la trasparenza), racconto breve, soggettività, narrare vs romanzo, diluendosi in un territorio così vasto che la libertà mi è sembrata alla fine totale, e ogni morale provvisoria, un po’ come quella frase di Giorgio Manganelli che un mio amico ama citare, “le vie della salvezza letteraria sono infinite”; e che mi potrebbe anche far comodo, se non fosse che, della salvezza letteraria, non mi importa assolutamente nulla.
La provvisorietà della morale letteraria (che non comporta la rinuncia a un’etica) ha preso per me questa forma, di volere situare quello che scrivo in un luogo o in direzione di un luogo. Non mi interessano soltanto le coordinate, per così dire, geopoetiche di quello che scrivo o che leggo, ma vorrei riportare nella scrittura l’effettualità e la coscienza aurorale che si trovano nell’esperienza quotidiana e nell’esperienza dello spazio. Per questo forse faccio fatica, oggi, a dire la mia sul narrare, o sul racconto, come se fosse possibile enunciare qualcosa che non sia in sé narrazione, come se si potesse dare una riflessione che già non si racconti, e viceversa.
In questo mio desiderio di reportage (si tratta in fondo di questo) c’è un tema che mi sta particolarmente a cuore. Parlo dell’abitare. Sono stupito dell’abitabilità. Più ancora del mistero della luce, il fatto di abitare da qualche parte, che la gente abiti qui o là e che spesso affronti il problema della casa con quieta sicumera, mi turba e mi affascina: sia che si tratti degli invisibili abitatori di quelle ville allineate sul lago, tra Ginevra e Losanna, immersi nella nebbia sei mesi all’anno, sia dei pescatori di tonno dell’isola di Lampedusa. Forse perché mi sembra questa la finzione più grande, la più misteriosa – abitare una casa, un luogo, un genere, una forma, avere delle abitudini, di fronte a cui le mie reazioni sono mutevoli e contraddittorie: nostalgia, identificazione, desiderio di essere come gli altri; oppure repulsione, scetticismo, cercare una via d’uscita o di fuga.
Alla ricerca di un gesto, di una consuetudine, ho appreso nel cuore della città vecchia di Ginevra della morte dello scrittore Jorge Luis Borges. “Devono essere tutti fioriti gli alberi del cortile del Liceo Calvino, a Ginevra, adesso che Borges è morto, a due passi dalla scuola dove andò da ragazzo”, intonava un corsivo del Corriere. Allora mi volto, è vero, sono tutti fioriti da un pezzo. Dopo mi sono sentito più calmo. Ho letto sulla flânerie in un baretto qualsiasi, poi ho scritto sul quaderno una traccia di questo mio intervento a partire da quella “coincidenza”: scrivere sui luoghi (la scrittura deve dare delle forme per vedere il mondo; uno di quelli che oggi mi piacciono di più è James Ballard); passeggiata nella vieille ville (incidenti, piccione morto, odore di fonduta e morte di Borges – uno scrittore che ho amato – proprio nei luoghi in cui mi trovo in questo momento); questo apologo non ha una morale, e forse non è una storia, difficile è estrapolarne i nessi, ma non è la mia preoccupazione; infine, che di Borges mi piace soprattutto il gusto per gli avvenimenti semplici, effettuali, eventuali, e insieme il fatto che la sua opera non è che una serie di frammenti, di testi molto brevi e sparsi, come ha detto lui stesso.
Borges ha soprattutto insegnato che non c’è differenza tra pensare e raccontare, e ha introdotto una possibilità nuova, anche se evidente: fare il riassunto di una narrazione più lunga, di quel romanzo che si è troppo stanchi, o pigri, o scettici, per scriverlo e abitarlo.
Esiste una bellissima storia, raccontata dai chassidìm, che mi viene ora in mente, e che mi sembra molto adatta a rilanciare un’idea etica del raccontare, oltre che a chiudere questo testo. La cito a memoria come l’ho letta tempo fa in un libro sulla mistica ebraica.
C’era una volta una generazione di chassidìm che, quando dovevano assolvere un compito difficile, o prendere una decisione importante, andavano in un luogo nei boschi, accendevano il fuoco e dicevano delle preghiere, assorti nella meditazione. Un chassidìm della generazione successiva, di fronte alle stesse incombenze, andava nello stesso posto nel bosco e diceva: “Non possiamo più accendere il fuoco, ma possiamo dire le preghiere”, e questo era sufficiente. Ancora una generazione dopo, un altro chassidìm che doveva assolvere lo stesso compito, andava nel posto e diceva: “Non possiamo più accendere il fuoco, e non conosciamo più le segrete preghiere, ma conosciamo il luogo dove tutto questo accadeva”, e infatti bastava. Finché, in un’altra successiva generazione, dovendo affrontare lo stesso compito, il chassidìm restava seduto nel proprio castello, e diceva: “Non possiamo più fare il fuoco, non possiamo dire le preghiere, e non conosciamo più il posto nel bosco, ma di tutto questo possiamo raccontare la storia”. E infatti bastò, il suo racconto ebbe la stessa efficacia delle altre azioni.
Per concludere devo aggiungere una telefonata.
La sera di domenica 15 giugno mi ha telefonato un amico da Parma. E’ un bravo poeta, in questo periodo non compra i giornali, sta molto in casa e sta ultimando una raccolta di poesie. Mi ha letto qualche suo verso, poi mi ha annunciato che, di lì a poco, gli avrebbero tagliato il telefono. Poteva quindi indugiare più a lungo del solito. Nel corso della conversazione mi ha letto una frase di Kafka tratta da una sua lettera, non so quanto nota. Non so neanche se essa faccia parte delle coincidenze, o anche solo della storia, né se sia possibile situarla in un tempo. Ho però trovato importante trascriverla. Eccola:
“Noi abbiamo bisogno di libri che agiscano su di noi come una disgrazia che ci colpisce duramente, come la morte di qualcuno che amavamo più di noi stessi, come se venissimo scacciati nei boschi, via da tutti gli uomini. Come la notizia di un suicidio, un libro deve essere l’ascia per il mare di ghiaccio dentro di noi”.
11 ottobre. Scritte contro il ministro dell’Interno Roberto Maroni, i Cie, la Croce Rossa e Maurizio Laudi sono apparse sui muri dell’ospedale Cottolegno. Altre scritte rivolte contro Carabinieri, Polizia e Croce Rossa sono state trovate questa mattina anche in via Cecchi.
macerie @ Ottobre 11, 2009
LEEDS SURREALIST GROUP
The past two decades has seen something of a resurgence of organised surrealist activity in Britain. In March 1994, the Leeds Surrealist Group was formed by Kenneth Cox, Bill Howe and Sarah Metcalf, stimulated by exchanges with surrealist groups and individuals with whom we had come into contact. Ours was perhaps the first significant attempt at establishing a collective surrealist presence in Britain since the group around the magazine Melmoth, which broke up in 1981. The Leeds Group was formed, or rather came into realisation, after an invitation from the Stockholm Surrealist Group to participate in their game, The New Man, which involved the exploration of urban spaces in search of poetic evidence of utopian vision. Games of dérive (chance meanderings through our city streets) and explorations of place have continued to be a dominant feature of the activities of the Leeds Surrealist Group, with the Game of Slight Disturbances (1996), Explorations of Absence (2000-01) and Two Heads (2005) being pivotal to our development, advancing new researches into surrealist objects and their relation to place, and not least to the inter-subjectivity of the players involved. Our researches into place are currently being extended into sound, using field recordings that will be investigated through their synaesthesic possibilities. Many of the group’s early games and experiments were recorded in the ten issues of Black Lamplight (1995-98), an internal quarterly journal distributed solely within the international surrealist movement, as well as in albums dedicated to some of our more-extensive games.
Our first foray into the public sphere came in the autumn of 1994, when we programmed a major season of films, Surrealists Go To The Cinema, at the National Museum of Photography, Film & Television, in the nearby city of Bradford. We participated as a group in the exhibition, Curiouser & Curiouser: les surréalistes et leurs amis en Grand-Bretagne depuis 1967, held in the Hourglass Gallery in Paris during April 1995, under the direction of Peter Wood, an event significant to the development of surrealism in Britain over the past decade. This exhibition drew together a number of individual surrealists, strengthening the ties between us, and leading to further exchanges. Since then, collective games amongst many of the exhibition’s participants have defied geographical distance and an identifiable surrealist presence has evolved. We cannot, of course, speak about the present and future of surrealism in Britain without expressing our indebtedness to those surrealist comrades who sadly are no longer with us and who, through their support and friendship, have had an enormous influence upon us, notably, Anthony Earnshaw, Conroy Maddox, Philip West and Peter Wood.
In 2004 we welcomed the formation of the London Surrealist Group, who announced their presence through their inaugural declaration, Collective Adventure, and who, in January 2005, published the first issue of their magazine, Arcturus.
More recently, in September 2005, we held an important exhibition, Profane Revelation: the Surrealist Movement in Britain, at the Granell Foundation in Santiago de Compostela, with over 80 works by twenty-three surrealists, including that of seven members of the Leeds Group. Profane Revelation, the most high-profile public event that we have organised, was undoubtedly a landmark in the recent trajectory of surrealism in Britain, drawing upon current, rather than ‘historical’ work, all selected from the previous five years of activity. What also characterized our exhibition was that many of the works had resulted from collective visual games, in some cases taking a ‘found’ image which was then interpreted by each of the players.
Internal collective research has always been a strong focus of the Leeds Group’s projects, but we also regard communication and encounters with other surrealists, both in our own country and throughout the world, as of vital importance. From the very beginning, we were warmly welcomed into the international surrealist movement, and have had close collaborations ever since with, in particular, the groups in Paris, Prague, Madrid, Chicago and Stockholm. Our collaborations and individual contributions have appeared in various surrealist journals throughout the world, including: Analogon (Prague), Intervence (Brno), S.U.R.R. (Paris), Salamandra (Madrid), and Stora Saltet (Stockholm).
The Leeds Group’s own external publication, a broadsheet entitled Manticore/Surrealist Communication – containing short articles, reviews, poems, images and examples of games both from the group and fellow collaborators – appeared in 1997 and ended with its eighth and final number in 2006. We now produce a small occasional newsletter, Prehensile Tail, which is distributed freely, the fourth issue having been published in March 2007. In 2007 we also set up our own imprint, Surrealist Editions, with its first title, Down Victory! by Peter Overton, launched at the Hay Festival Fringe on 27th May 2007, at an event, “Surrealism Here & Now”, which incorporated talks, short films, and poetry readings. A second title, The Bridge of Shadows by Stephen Clark and Bill Howe, was launched on 13th October 2007 in The Cross Keys, Leeds. The first issue of our new surrealist magazine, Phosphor, was published in July 2008.
At present, there are currently twelve members of Leeds Surrealist Group. We meet up on a weekly basis for discussions, surrealist games, enquiries, interventions, laughter, etc., and are open to invited guests who are genuinely interested in surrealism as a living movement.
Contact address: 6 Aberdeen Grove, LEEDS, LS12 3QY
Email: surrealism@madasafish.com
Merci de votre fidélité
Fabrice Pascaud
A 25 year old Pakistani sans papier immigrant succumbed yesterday to woulds inflicted while being tortured in the police station of Nikea, Athens, two weeks ago.
Mohamed Kamran Atif, a 25 year old Pakistani sans papier immigrant succumbed on Friday 9th of October to wounds inflicted while being tortured in the police station of Nikea, an Athens suburb, between the 26th and 28th of September 2009.
Continuing waves of mass police operations in down town Athens set the pace for new era of repression in Greece
Everyone thought it was just a show of power - but it proved to be the Socialist government's plan for "change" after 5 years of brutal right wing rule.
One day after assuming power, the Socialists launched a massive invasion of Exarcheia, the Athens anarchist enclave, with mass detentions and brutal intimidation of locals.
On the early hours of Friday 9 of October, four days after the landslide victory of the Socialists in the greek national elections, and only a day after assuming power, the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (Pasok) proved its intentions towards the social antagonistic movement that has swept the country since the December Uprising: brutal repression.
The blockade of the city hall of Zografou, an Athens suburb in the foothills of Mt Imitos averted the cementing of four squares into parking lots, despite the employment of thugs.
On Tuesday 6th of October, only two days after the national elections that have seen the largest defeat of the right wing in the country's history, 6 local committees and assemblies of Zografou, an Athens suburb in the foothills of Mt Imitos, the east mountain of the greek capital, ruled by a right-wing mayor with chronic hatred of things green, gathered to stop the auctioning of public works that
A new attack and communique by the Nuclei of Fire, targeting the greek PM's central rally in Athens, shatter any reamining credibility of the anti-guerrilla pre-election persecutions.
The already disputed credibility of the anti-guerrilla persecution of three 20 year old boys for their alleged involvement in the urban guerrilla group Nuceli of Fire Conspiracy (NFC), responsible for over 150 storm-attacks against state and capital targets as well as a recent bombing campaign (with no human injuries due to previous warning calls in all cases), has now all but collapsed after the
According to Kathimerini, the famous Italian anarchist Alfredo M. Bonanno was arrested yesterday (October 1) in Trikala, Greece, on suspicion of driving the getaway car for an armed bank robbery by a Greek man named Christos Stratigopoulos. This arrest occurs in the midst of a wave of government repression against anarchists in the name of "anti-terrorism."
The report says a witness informed the police of the car's license plate, and the police stopped them and found the money in the car.
Sofia Papazoglou, a popular folk singer was attacked by members of the Golden Dawn neo-nazi party in Athens after throwing election leaflets handed to her in the garbage. The singer remains hospitalised with serious burns from use of unidentified acid spray and with impaired vision.
Sofia Papazoglou, a popular folk singer of the "entehno" genre known for her progressive politics was attacked on Thursday 1st of October outside the metro station of Katehaki, in Athens, by ten members of the neo-nazi party Golden Dawn when she threw election leaflets handed to her by the thugs in the garbage.
Three of the four accused of involvement in the urban guerrilla group Nuclei of Fire Conspiracy were remanded in custody pending trial, after the state investigator applied the anti-terrorist law to them which permits imprisonment "in expectation of evidence against them".
After two days of a legal marathon, during which hundreds of solidarity protestors gathered in the high court yards, the investigation hearings of the 4 teenagers accused as members of the urban guerrilla group Nuclei of Fire Conspiracy came to an end, with the release of the 20 year old girl and the pre-trial jailing of the three remaining defendants.
The anti-guerrilla fiasco directed by the panicked outgoing government has began to unravel in Athens with bombing victim accusing the police of a setting-up innocent radicals.
It was the right wing government's last stunt and it has already collapsed in widespread public dismay.
The Socialist Party (Pasok) Headquarters in Athens were evacuated when they came under sustained attack by anarchists early on Friday evening. The attack is believed to mark the first reaction to the arrest of the 4 youngsters accused of urban guerrilla activities.
On the evening of Friday 25 of September and as the four youngsters arrested earlier this week now stand accused under the notorious anti-terrorist law which renders any petty crime punishable by 10 years imprisonment, the new and shiny Headquarters of PaSoK, the Socialist Party of Greece, which is preparing itself to head the country's government next week, came under attack by anarchists, who le
L’ULTIMA buona NOTIZIA:
Caso Mastrogiovanni, sospeso dirigente
di psichiatria della Asl di Salerno
Michele Di Genio è indagato con altri sei medici per la morte del maestro elementare nel reparto di psichiatria
http://www.corriere.it/cronache/09_ottobre_10/mastrogi...
Il giallo del maestro «anarchico» morto durante il ricovero coatto (19 agosto 2009)
SALERNO – È stato sospeso dall’incarico il direttore del Dipartimento di Psichiatria della ex Asl Salerno 3, Michele Di Genio. La decisione è stata presa da una commissione d’indagine della stessa Asl di Salerno nominata per indagare sulla morte di Francesco Mastrogiovanni, maestro di scuola elementare di 58 anni deceduto il 4 agosto nel reparto di psichiatria dell’ospedale di Vallo della Lucania. Di Genio, che resta al suo posto di primario del reparto di psichiatria del nosocomio vallese, è indagato dalla Procura di Vallo della Lucania con altri sei medici del reparto dell’ospedale.
LINEE GUIDA – Al centro dell’indagine le cause della morte dell’insegnante, che potrebbe essere deceduto dopo essere rimasto immobilizzato a letto, legato mani e piedi, per quattro giorni. «Tra le motivazioni della sospensione da parte della commissione – ha spiegato Di Genio – vi sarebbe la non vigilanza sull’operato dei medici del reparto e l’assenza di linee guida precise all’interno del Dipartimento. Voglio far presente che le linee guida sono state inviate da me al dottor De Leo, presidente della Commissione d’indagine e direttore del Dipartimento di salute mentale della ex Asl Salerno 2, dunque mio pari grado. A quanto mi risulta, nella relazione della commissione non vi è traccia di esse, nonostante siano state regolarmente formalizzate nel 2006 con apposita delibera».
«MAI CONVOCATO» – «Non sono mai stato presente in reparto nei giorni in cui si sono verificati i fatti – ha proseguito Di Genio – ma, a parte ciò, in questi mesi non ho avuto la possibilità di chiarire le mie controdeduzioni, poiché non sono mai stato convocato dalla commissione». «Le aberrazioni e le stravaganti decisioni della commissione d’indagine verranno impugnate nelle sedi idonee – ha aggiunto Antonio Fasolino, legale di Di Genio -. Certo è quantomeno bizzarro che esse giungano prima di qualunque pronunciamento da parte dell’autorità giudiziaria, che tra l’altro non ha preso alcun provvedimento nei confronti del mio assistito».
Avviso ad abbonati e diffusori. Visto l'alto numero di contatti e domande in tal senso, rendiamo noto che ogni qual volta che viene effettuato un pagamento con bollettino o bonifico servono poi dalle 2 alle 3 settimane affinchè la copia cartacea ci arrivi permettendoci così di segnarla in bilancio, e facendo così partire gli abbonamenti o i rinnovi. Questi tempi delle poste non dipendono da noi e non sono purtroppo modificabili.ri cuori.
Umanità Nova, n. 35 dell'11 ottobre 2009, anno 89
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Quest'anno chi si abbona a 55 euro può scegliere tra:
- Nico Jassies, "Berlino brucia" - Marinus Van der Lubbe e l'incendio del Reichstag, ed. Zero in condotta
- AA. VV., "Igiene mentale e libero pensiero" - Sul controllo sociale della psichiatria, ed Zero in Condotta
- Ana Delso, "Trecento uomini ed io" - Spagna 1936: autobiografia di una rivoluzionaria, ed. Zero in condotta
- Angel J. Cappelletti, "L'idea anarchica" - Dalle origini ai giorni nostri, ed. Zero in condotta
- Bandiera Rossa e Nera
- "Canzoni di lotta e di anarchia" - 1 CD con 241 interpretazioni di canzoni in formato mp3
- "Non possiamo riposare" - Canti di lotta, di lavoro, d'amore, CD di Paola Sabbatini e Roberto Bartoli e DVD sulla canzone anarchica + libretto di 32 pagine
- "Vivir la utopia/Vivere l'utopia" - Documentario in DVD di testimonianze dalla rivoluzione spagnola del 1936
10 ottobre. Filo spinato e silicone: queste due sostanze sarebbero state utilizzate, a detta del quotidiano Torino Cronaca, per bloccare l’ingresso della sede di Mirafiori della Lega Nord, in via Daneo. Sull’asfalto antistante una scritta: «L’invasione siete voi! Lega Nord carogne».
macerie @ Ottobre 10, 2009
| Informazione | |
| Saturday, 10 October 2009 11:42 | |
| Atene: un compagno greco ci fa il punto della situazione politica nel paese dopo le elezioni e alcuni recenti atti repressivi Milano: il processo ai rivoltosi del lager di via corelli si avvia a conclusione. Abbiamo sentito l'avvocato Mauro Straini, uno dei difensori dei 14 imputati Torino: la questura di Torino ha richiesto un provvedimento di "sorveglianza speciale" contro due compagni rei di impegnarsi senza sosta contro il razzismo di Stato; abbiamo sentito Andrea di "Macerie" sul provvedimento in questione e sulla "castagnata" davanti alla sede della lega nord di ieri pomeriggio in San Salvario In conclusione il cordoglio della Redazione per la dipartita del PM Maurizio Laudi scarica il file audio (tasto destro salva con nome)
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Documents produced by the Situationist International or groups the Situationists were involved with during the mass strike and revolt of the glorious May 1968 in France.
1] Communiqué
2] Watch Out for Manipulators! Watch Out for Bureaucrats!
3] Slogans To Be Spread Now by Every Means Telegrams
4] Report on the Occupation of the Sorbonne
5] For the Power of Workers Councils
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Communiqué
Comrades,
Considering that the Sud-Aviation factory at Nantes has been occupied for two days by the workers and students of that city,
and that today the movement is spreading to several factories (Nouvelles Messageries de la Presse Parisienne in Paris, Renault in Cléon, etc.),
THE SORBONNE OCCUPATION COMMITTEE
calls for the immediate occupation of all the factories in France and the formation of Workers Councils.
Comrades, spread and reproduce this appeal as quickly as possible.Sorbonne, 16 May 1968, 3:30 pm
Watch Out for Manipulators! Watch Out for Bureaucrats!
Comrades,
No one must be unaware of the importance of the GA [general assembly] this evening (Thursday, May 16). Over the last two days several individuals, recognizable from having previously been seen peddling their various party lines, have succeeded in sowing confusion and in smothering the GAs under a barrage of bureaucratic manipulations whose crudeness clearly demonstrates the contempt they have for this assembly.This assembly must learn to make itself respected or disappear. Two points must be discussed before anything else:
WHO CONTROLS THE SECURITY MARSHALS? whose disgusting role is intolerable.
WHY IS THE PRESS COMMITTEE -- which dares to censor the communiqués that it is charged to transmit to the news agencies -- composed of apprentice journalists who are careful not to disappoint the ORTF [national radio-television] bosses so as not to jeopardize their future job possibilities?
Apart from that: Considering that the workers are beginning to occupy several factories in France, FOLLOWING OUR EXAMPLE AND WITH THE SAME RIGHT WE HAVE, the Sorbonne Occupation Committee issued a statement approving of this movement at 3:00 this afternoon. The central problem of this evening's GA is therefore to declare itself by a clear vote supporting or disavowing this appeal of its Occupation Committee. If it disavows the appeal it will have put itself on record as reserving for students a right that it refuses to the working class; and in that case it is clear that it will no longer want to concern itself with anything but a Gaullist reform of the university.
OCCUPATION COMMITTEE OF THE
PEOPLE'S FREE SORBONNE UNIVERSITY16 May 1968, 6:30 pm
Slogans To Be Spread Nowby Every Means
(leaflets, announcements over microphones, comic strips, songs, graffiti, balloons on paintings in the Sorbonne, announcements in theaters during films or while disrupting them, balloons on subway billboards, before making love, after making love, in elevators, each time you raise your glass in a bar):OCCUPY THE FACTORIES
POWER TO THE WORKERS COUNCILS
ABOLISH CLASS SOCIETY
DOWN WITH SPECTACLE-COMMODITY SOCIETY
ABOLISH ALIENATION
TERMINATE THE UNIVERSITY
HUMANITY WON'T BE HAPPY TILL THE LAST BUREAUCRAT IS HUNG WITH THE GUTS OF THE LAST CAPITALIST
DEATH TO THE COPS
FREE ALSO THE 4 GUYS CONVICTED FOR LOOTING DURING THE MAY 6TH RIOT
OCCUPATION COMMITTEE OF THEPEOPLE'S FREE SORBONNE UNIVERSITY16 May 1968, 7:00 pm
Telegrams
PROFESSOR IVAN SVITAK PRAGUE CZECHOSLOVAKIA THE OCCUPATION COMMITTEE OF THE PEOPLE'S FREE SORBONNE SENDS FRATERNAL GREETINGS TO COMRADE SVITAK AND OTHER CZECHOSLOVAKIAN REVOLUTIONARIES STOP LONG LIVE THE INTERNATIONAL POWER OF THE WORKERS COUNCILS STOP HUMANITY WON'T BE HAPPY TILL THE LAST CAPITALIST IS HUNG WITH THE GUTS OF THE LAST BUREAUCRAT STOP LONG LIVE REVOLUTIONARY MARXISM
ZENGAKUREN TOKYO JAPAN LONG LIVE THE STRUGGLE OF THE JAPANESE COMRADES WHO HAVE OPENED COMBAT SIMULTANEOUSLY ON THE FRONTS OF ANTI-STALINISM AND ANTI-IMPERIALISM STOP LONG LIVE FACTORY OCCUPATIONS STOP LONG LIVE THE GENERAL STRIKE STOP LONG LIVE THE INTERNATIONAL POWER OF THE WORKERS COUNCILS STOP HUMANITY WON'T BE HAPPY TILL THE LAST BUREAUCRAT IS HUNG WITH THE GUTS OF THE LAST CAPITALIST STOP OCCUPATION COMMITTEE OF THE PEOPLE'S FREE SORBONNE
POLITBURO OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE USSR THE KREMLIN MOSCOW SHAKE IN YOUR SHOES BUREAUCRATS STOP THE INTERNATIONAL POWER OF THE WORKERS COUNCILS WILL SOON WIPE YOU OUT STOP HUMANITY WON'T BE HAPPY TILL THE LAST BUREAUCRAT IS HUNG WITH THE GUTS OF THE LAST CAPITALIST STOP LONG LIVE THE STRUGGLE OF THE KRONSTADT SAILORS AND OF THE MAKHNOVSHCHINA AGAINST TROTSKY AND LENIN STOP LONG LIVE THE 1956 COUNCILIST INSURRECTION OF BUDAPEST STOP DOWN WITH THE STATE STOP LONG LIVE REVOLUTIONARY MARXISM STOP OCCUPATION COMMITTEE OF THE PEOPLE'S FREE SORBONNE
POLITBURO OF THE CHINESE COMMUNIST PARTY GATE OF CELESTIAL PEACE PEKING SHAKE IN YOUR SHOES BUREAUCRATS STOP THE INTERNATIONAL POWER OF THE WORKERS COUNCILS WILL SOON WIPE YOU OUT STOP HUMANITY WON'T BE HAPPY TILL THE LAST BUREAUCRAT IS HUNG WITH THE GUTS OF THE LAST CAPITALIST STOP LONG LIVE FACTORY OCCUPATIONS STOP LONG LIVE THE GREAT CHINESE PROLETARIAN REVOLUTION OF 1927 BETRAYED BY THE STALINIST BUREAUCRATS STOP LONG LIVE THE PROLETARIANS OF CANTON AND ELSEWHERE WHO HAVE TAKEN UP ARMS AGAINST THE SO-CALLED PEOPLE'S ARMY STOP LONG LIVE THE CHINESE WORKERS AND STUDENTS WHO HAVE ATTACKED THE SO-CALLED CULTURAL REVOLUTION AND THE MAOIST BUREAUCRATIC ORDER STOP LONG LIVE REVOLUTIONARY MARXISM STOP DOWN WITH THE STATE STOP OCCUPATION COMMITTEE OF THE PEOPLE'S FREE SORBONNE17 May 1968
Report on the Occupation of the Sorbonne
The occupation of the Sorbonne that began Monday, May 13, has opened a new period in the crisis of modern society. The events now taking place in France foreshadow the return of the proletarian revolutionary movement in all countries. The movement that had already advanced from theory to struggle in the streets has now advanced to a struggle for control of the means of production. Modernized capitalism thought it had finished with class struggle -- but it's started up again! The proletariat supposedly no longer existed -- but here it is again.By surrendering the Sorbonne, the government hoped to pacify the student revolt, which had already succeeded in holding a section of Paris behind its barricades an entire night before being recaptured with great difficulty by the police. The Sorbonne was given over to the students in the hope that they would peacefully discuss their university problems. But the occupiers immediately decided to open it to the public to freely discuss the general problems of the society. This was thus a prefiguration of a council, a council in which even the students broke out of their miserable studenthood and ceased being students.
To be sure, the occupation was never complete: a chapel and a few remaining administrative offices were tolerated. The democracy was never total: future technocrats of the UNEF [National Student Union] claimed to be making themselves useful and other political bureaucrats also tried their manipulations. Workers' participation remained very limited and the presence of nonstudents soon began to be questioned. Many students, professors, journalists and imbeciles of other professions came as spectators.
In spite of all these deficiencies, which are not surprising considering the disparity between the scope of the project and the narrowness of the student milieu, the exemplary nature of the best aspects of this situation immediately took on an explosive significance. Workers were inspired by the free discussion and the striving for a radical critique, by seeing direct democracy in action. Even limited to a Sorbonne liberated from the state, this was a revolutionary program developing its own forms. The day after the occupation of the Sorbonne the Sud-Aviation workers of Nantes occupied their factory. On the third day, Thursday the 16th, the Renault factories at Cléon and Flins were occupied and the movement began at the NMPP and at Boulogne-Billancourt, starting at Shop 70. Three days later 100 factories have been occupied and the wave of strikes, accepted but never initiated by the union bureaucracies, is paralyzing the railroads and developing into a general strike.
The only power in the Sorbonne was the general assembly of its occupiers. At its first session, on May 14, amidst a certain confusion, it had elected an Occupation Committee of 15 members revocable by it each day. Only one of the delegates, a member of the Nanterre-Paris Enragés group, had set forth a program: defense of direct democracy in the Sorbonne and absolute power of workers councils as ultimate goal. The next day's general assembly reelected its entire Occupation Committee, which had as yet been unable to accomplish anything. In fact, the various specialized groupings that had set themselves up in the Sorbonne all followed the directives of a hidden "Coordination Committee" composed of self-appointed organizers, responsible to no one, doing everything in their power to prevent any "irresponsible" extremist actions. An hour after the reelection of the Occupation Committee one of these "coordinators" privately tried to declare it dissolved. A direct appeal to the people in the courtyard of the Sorbonne aroused a movement of protests that forced the manipulator to retract himself. By the next day, Thursday the 16th, thirteen members of the Occupation Committee had disappeared, leaving two comrades, including the Enragés member, vested with the only delegation of power authorized by the general assembly -- and this at a time when the urgency of the situation demanded immediate decisions: democracy was constantly being flouted in the Sorbonne while factory occupations were spreading all over the country. At 3:00 p.m. the Occupation Committee, rallying to itself as many Sorbonne occupiers as it could who were determined to maintain democracy there, launched an appeal for "the occupation of all the factories in France and the formation of workers councils." To disseminate this appeal the Occupation Committee had at the same time to restore the democratic functioning of the Sorbonne. It had to take over or recreate from scratch all the services that were supposed to be under its authority: the loudspeaker system, printing facilities, interfaculty liaison, security. It ignored the squawking complaints of the spokesmen of various political groups (JCR [a Trotskyist group], Maoists, etc,), reminding them that it was responsible only to the general assembly. It intended to report to the assembly that very evening, but the Sorbonne occupiers' unanimous decision to march on Renault-Billancourt (whose occupation we had learned of in the meantime) postponed the meeting until 2:00 p.m. the next day.
During the night, while thousands of comrades were at Billancourt, some unidentified persons improvised a general assembly, which broke up when the Occupation Committee, having learned of its existence, sent back two delegates to call attention to its illegitimacy.
Friday the 17th at 2:00 p.m. the regular assembly saw its rostrum occupied for a long time by self-appointed marshals belonging to the FER [another Trotskyist group]; and then had to interrupt the session for the second march on Billancourt at 5:00.
That evening at 9:00 the Occupation Committee was finally able to present a report of its activities. It was, however, completely unable to get its actions discussed and voted on, in particular its appeal for the occupation of the factories, which the assembly did not take the responsibility of either disavowing or approving. Faced with such indifference, the Occupation Committee had no choice but to resign. The assembly proved equally incapable of protesting against a new invasion of the rostrum by the FER troops, whose putsch seemed to be aimed at countering the provisional alliance of JCR and UNEF bureaucrats. The partisans of direct democracy realized, and immediately declared, that they had no further interest in the Sorbonne.
At the very moment that the example of the occupation is beginning to be taken up in the factories it is collapsing at the Sorbonne. This development is more serious since the workers have against them a bureaucracy infinitely more powerful and entrenched than that of the student or leftist amateurs. To add to the confusion, the leftist bureaucrats, echoing the CGT [the Communist Party-dominated labor union] in the hope of being accorded a little marginal role alongside it, abstractly separate the workers from the students. ("The workers don't need any lessons from the students.") But the students have in fact already given an excellent lesson to the workers precisely by occupying the Sorbonne and briefly initiating a really democratic debate. The bureaucrats all tell us demagogically that the working class is grown up, in order to hide the fact that it is enchained -- first of all by them (now or in their future hopes, depending on which group they're in). They counterpose their lying seriousness to the "festivity" in the Sorbonne; but it was precisely that festiveness that bore within itself the only thing that is serious: the radical critique of prevailing conditions.
The student struggle has now been left behind. Even more left behind are all the second-string bureaucratic leaders who think it's a good idea to feign respect for the Stalinists at the very moment when the CGT and the so-called "Communist" Party are terrified. The outcome of the present crisis is in the hands of the workers themselves, if only they succeed in accomplishing in their factory occupations the goals toward which the university occupation was only able to hint at.
The comrades who supported the first Sorbonne Occupation Committee -- the Enragés-Situationist International Committee, a number of workers, and a few students -- have formed a Council for Maintaining the Occupations. The occupations can obviously be maintained only by quantitatively and qualitatively extending them, without sparing any existing regime.
COUNCIL FOR MAINTAINING THE OCCUPATIONSParis, 19 May 1968
For the Power of the Workers Councils
In the space of ten days workers have occupied hundreds of factories, a spontaneous general strike has brought the country to a standstill, and de facto committees have taken over many state-owned buildings. This situation -- which cannot last but must either extend itself or disappear (through repression or defeatist negotiations) -- is sweeping aside all the old ideas and confirming all the radical hypotheses on the return of the revolutionary proletarian movement. The fact that the whole movement was actually triggered five months ago by a half dozen revolutionaries of the "Enragés" group reveals even better how much the objective conditions were already present. The French example is already having repercussions in other countries, reviving the internationalism that is inseparable from the revolutions of our century.The fundamental struggle is now between the mass of workers -- who do not have direct means of expressing themselves -- and the leftist political and labor-union bureaucracies that (even if merely on the basis of the 14% of the active population that is unionized) control the factory gates and the right to negotiate in the name of the occupiers. These bureaucracies are not workers' organizations that have degenerated and betrayed the workers; they are a mechanism for integrating the workers into capitalist society. In the present crisis they are the main protection of this shaken capitalism.
The de Gaulle regime may negotiate -- essentially (even if only indirectly) with the PCF-CGT [French Communist Party and the labor union it dominates] -- for the demobilization of the workers in exchange for some economic benefits; after which the radical currents would be repressed. Or the "Left" may come to power and pursue the same policies, though from a weaker position. Or an armed repression may be attempted. Or, finally, the workers may take the upper hand by speaking for themselves and becoming conscious of goals as radical as the forms of struggle they have already put into practice. Such a process would lead to the formation of workers councils making decisions democratically at the rank-and-file level, federating with each other by means of delegates revocable at any moment, and becoming the sole deliberative and executive power over the entire country.
How could the continuation of the present situation lead to such a prospect? Within a few days, perhaps, the necessity of starting certain sectors of the economy back up again under workers' control could lay the bases for this new power, a power which everything is already pushing to burst through the constraints of the unions and parties. The railroads and printshops would have to be put back into operation for the needs of the workers' struggle. New de facto authorities would have to requisition and distribute food. If money became devalued or unavailable it might have to be replaced by vouchers backed by those new authorities. It is through such a practical process that the consciousness of the deepest aspirations of the proletariat can impose itself -- the class consciousness that lays hold on history and brings about the workers' power over all aspects of their own lives.
COUNCIL FOR MAINTAINING THE OCCUPATIONSParis, 22 May 1968
Address to All Workers
Comrades,What we have already done in France is haunting Europe and will soon threaten all the ruling classes of the world, from the bureaucrats of Moscow and Peking to the millionaires of Washington and Tokyo. Just as we have made Paris dance, the international proletariat will once again take up its assault on the capitals of all the states and all the citadels of alienation. The occupation of factories and public buildings throughout the country has not only brought a halt to the functioning of the economy, it has brought about a general questioning of the society. A deep-seated movement is leading almost every sector of the population to seek a real transformation of life. This is the beginning of a revolutionary movement, a movement which lacks nothing but the consciousness of what it has already done in order to triumph.
What forces will try to save capitalism? The regime will fall unless it threatens to resort to arms (accompanied by the promise of new elections, which could only take place after the capitulation of the movement) or even resorts to immediate armed repression. If the Left comes to power, it too will try to defend the old world through concessions and through force. The best defender of such a "popular government" would be the so-called "Communist" Party, the party of Stalinist bureaucrats, which has fought the movement from the very beginning and which began to envisage the fall of the de Gaulle regime only when it realized it was no longer capable of being that regime's main guardian. Such a transitional government would really be "Kerenskyist" only if the Stalinists were beaten. All this will ultimately depend on the workers' consciousness and capacities for autonomous organization. The workers who have already rejected the ridiculous agreement that the union leaders were so pleased with need only discover that they cannot "win" much more within the framework of the existing economy, but that they can take everything by transforming all the bases of the economy on their own behalf. The bosses can hardly pay more; but they can disappear.
The present movement did not become "politicized" by going beyond the miserable union demands regarding wages and pensions, demands which were falsely presented as "social questions." It is beyond politics: it is posing the social question in its simple truth. The revolution that has been in the making for over a century is returning. It can express itself only in its own forms. It's too late for a bureaucratic-revolutionary patching up. When a recently de-Stalinized bureaucrat like André Barjonet calls for the formation of a common organization that would bring together "all the authentic forces of revolution . . . whether they march under the banner of Trotsky or Mao, of anarchy or situationism," we need only recall that those who today follow Trotsky or Mao, to say nothing of the pitiful "Anarchist Federation," have nothing to do with the present revolution. The bureaucrats may now change their minds about what they call "authentically revolutionary"; authentic revolution will not change its condemnation of bureaucracy.
At the present moment, with the power they hold and with the parties and unions being what they are, the workers have no other choice but to organize themselves in unitary rank-and-file committees directly taking over the economy and all aspects of the reconstruction of social life, asserting their autonomy vis-a-vis any sort of political or unionist leadership, ensuring their self-defense and federating with each other regionally and nationally. In so doing they will become the sole real power in the country, the power of the workers councils. The only alternative is to return to their passivity and go back to watching television. The proletariat is "either revolutionary or nothing."
What are the essential features of council power?
* Dissolution of all external power * Direct and total democracy * Practical unification of decision and execution * Delegates who can be revoked at any moment by those who have mandated them
* Abolition of hierarchy and independent specializations * Conscious management and transformation of all the conditions of liberated life * Permanent creative mass participation * Internationalist extension and coordinationThe present requirements are nothing less than this. Self-management is nothing less. Beware of all the modernist coopters -- including even priests -- who are beginning to talk of self-management or even of workers councils without acknowledging this minimum, because they want to save their bureaucratic functions, the privileges of their intellectual specializations or their future careers as petty bosses!
In reality, what is necessary now has been necessary since the beginning of the proletarian revolutionary project. It's always been a question of working-class autonomy. The struggle has always been for the abolition of wage labor, of commodity production, and of the state. The goal has always been to accede to conscious history, to suppress all separations and "everything that exists independently of individuals." Proletarian revolution has spontaneously sketched out its appropriate forms in the councils -- in St. Petersburg in 1905, in Turin in 1920, in Catalonia in 1936, in Budapest in 1956. The preservation of the old society, or the formation of new exploiting classes, has each time been over the dead body of the councils. The working class now knows its enemies and its own appropriate methods of action. "Revolutionary organization has had to learn that it can no longer fight alienation with alienated forms" (The Society of the Spectacle). Workers councils are clearly the only solution, since all the other forms of revolutionary struggle have led to the opposite of what was aimed at.
ENRAGES-SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL COMMITTEE COUNCIL FOR MAINTAINING THE OCCUPATIONS30 May 1968
Translated by Ken Knabb (slightly modified from the versions in the Situationist International Anthology).
No copyright.
Published in September 2009, an analysis of nationalism, where it comes from, and why anarchists fundamentally oppose it.
Preface
This pamphlet has its origins in a particular time and place, with the impetus behind it coming from the Israeli state’s military campaign in the Gaza strip in late 2008 and early 2009. As the record of atrocities and the death toll mounted, coming to a final stop at around 1,500 dead, large protests took place around the world, with a significant protest movement developing in Britain. This movement took the form of regular street protests in cities, a wave of 28 university occupations around the country and occasional attacks against companies supposedly implicated in the war. There were also, depressingly, actions with clear anti-Semitic overtones.
Anarchist Federation members were involved in a range of ways, being present on street demonstrations and involved in a number of occupations. As anarchists, we are opposed to war, militarism and imperialism, and see a powerful movement against these forces as a vital part of internationalism in action and the process of building the confidence necessary for a social movement against the state and capitalism.
However, we were unimpressed by the way in which support for the ‘Palestinian resistance’ – in other words Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Al-Aqsa Martyrs brigade and the other proto-state forces in the region - became mixed in with the legitimate revulsion felt as the bombs and shells fell onto the heads of ordinary Gazans. These groups - which called on ordinary Palestinians to ‘martyr’ themselves for the nation - have a clear history of repressing workers’ struggles at gunpoint, oppressing women, gays and lesbians, and spreading the virulently reactionary doctrines of nationalism and Islamism. As the war ground on, they showed their true colours by attempting to indiscriminately kill Israelis, settling scores with their rivals through summary executions, and making political capital out of refugees by preventing them from accessing medical aid over the border.[ii] As ordinary Palestinians fled in droves, ignoring the calls from militant groups and their Western cheerleaders to throw themselves upon the pyre and join the ‘resistance’, the true face of that ‘resistance’ became apparent.
As anarchist communists, we have always opposed nationalism, and have always marked our distance from the left through vocally opposing all nationalism – including that of ‘oppressed nations’. While we oppose oppression, exploitation and dispossession on national grounds, and oppose imperialism and imperialist warfare, we refuse to fall into the trap so common on the left of identifying with the underdog side and glorifying ‘the resistance’ – however ‘critically’ – which is readily observable within Leninist/Trotskyist circles. We took this stance on Northern Ireland in the past, and take it on Israel/Palestine today.
Therefore, in order to give context to the text that follows and show our analysis in a practical context, we reproduce as appendices two texts which AF groups circulated as leaflets during the campaign, and which were utilised by other anarchist comrades in the UK, such as locals of the anarcho-syndicalist Solidarity Federation and Organise! in Northern Ireland. We hope that this text will circulate as widely as our original leaflets did, which were translated into Spanish and Polish and reproduced as far away as Central America, and open debate within the wider anti-state communist movement.
September 2009
[i] A Tesco Metro supermarket in Stepney had its windows smashed and the words ‘kill Jews’ were daubed on the wall
[ii] Hamas prevented Gazans from reaching a field hospital on the Israeli side of the border at Erez at the end of January. See Dozens believed dead in reprisal attacks as Hamas retakes control, The Guardian, 30/01/09
Against Nationalism
The nation and nationalism
Whenever we involve ourselves in everyday life, we find ourselves defined in national terms. When we use our passports, when we apply for a job, when we go to hospital or when we claim benefits, we come up against our national status and the possibilities or handicaps that follow. When we travel, turn on the television, open the paper or make conversation, the categorisation of people into one of several hundred varieties of human being looms in the background, often taking centre stage. We are all assumed to belong to a national group, and even those people who can claim multiple national identities are still assumed to be defined by them. The division of the world’s population into distinct nations and its governance accordingly is a given, and seems as straightforward as anything occurring in nature. When we say, for example, that we are British, Polish, Korean or Somalian we feel that we are describing an important part of ourselves and how we relate to the world around us, giving us commonality with some people and setting us apart from others
Bureaucracy makes this intuition more solid. Nationality is its most fundamental category – determining what rights and privileges we have access to, whether we are inside or outside the community of citizenship which nationalism presumes, and ultimately whether we are a valid, ‘legal’, person. When we come across bureaucracy, the various definitions assigned to us by it loom large: gender, nationality and race in particular. These things seem to be as obvious a part of ourselves as eye colour or blood type, and more often than not go unquestioned.
But despite appearing a fundamental attribute of ourselves and others, the principle of nationality is also fundamentally problematic. On one level, it defines itself. To a bureaucracy nationality just is. You have the right passport, the right entitlements, or you don’t. However, as with all social questions, we are dealing not with some ‘natural’ aspect of the human condition, but with a form of social organisation which has both an origin and a rationale. So we come up against the question, ‘what is a nation?’
Common sense seems to provide the usual answer: a ‘people’ share a culture, a history, an origin, a community, a set of values, and, usually, a language which make them a nation. People within the nation share a commonality with one another which they lack with foreigners. From this point of view, the world is made up of such nations; it always has been and always will be. But the ideology of nationalism, regardless of which ‘nation’ we are discussing, is a political one, describing the relationship between ‘the people’ and the state. The nation-state is seen as the outgrowth of the national community, its means of conducting its business and the instrument of its collective will and wellbeing; at the very least a one-on-one correspondence between nation and state is seen as the usual, natural and desirable state of affairs, with any international co-operation, business and organisation progressing from this starting point . This rhetoric is assumed even in states which do not bother to claim legitimacy through representative democracy.
But when we attempt to uncover the qualities which make some collectivities of people a nation and others not, we encounter problems. When we attempt to articulate what ‘Britishness’, ‘Gambianess’ or ‘Thainess’ might be about, we are in trouble. Nationalist partisans will offer suggestions, but these are always fashionable banalities, whether they are ‘honour’, ‘loyalty’, ‘liberty’, ‘fairness’, or whatever else is current. A handful of iconic national institutions will be pointed to, and a great many more ignored. Nationalisms on this level are unlike political ideologies, there is no definite model for the organisation of society, and there is no unity of principle or program; the unity assumed is an arbitrary one.
There are no observable rules to clearly define what makes a national ‘people’, as opposed to other forms of commonality. The usual prerequisites are a shared language and culture. But this shared, culture is difficult to define, and we often find as much cultural variation across populations within nations as between them. Two Han Chinese are assumed to share a commonality as ‘Chinese’ and a natural solidarity on this basis even if they speak mutually incomprehensible ‘dialects’. Likewise, understanding continuity between the historical ‘national culture’ and what actually exists requires some dubious reasoning – for example, how is someone in Athens who speaks modern, Attic-derived official Greek expressing the same culture which built the Acropolis, (itself a Greek culture which lacked a Greek nation)? This ‘nation’ must often incl¬ude many who do not meet its supposedly defining attributes; regional, linguistic, cultural, religious and sometimes ‘national’ minorities. This fact that nation-states often exhibit as much variation within their geographic bounds as across them is obvious in many postcolonial African states or in Indonesia for instance, and even in less exotic locales such as Switzerland.
Nonetheless, nationalists often reduce the question down to a narrative of ‘human nature’, in which ‘peoples’ simply cannot mix without conflict, making the natural state of affairs the ‘self-determination’ of nations through their sovereign states. Such thinking is usually mired in the pseudo-science of race, making an appeal to historical just-so stories and misplaced naturalistic myths. To assume that ‘peoples’ are defined by their antagonism to other ‘peoples’, but that they are antagonistic because they are different ‘peoples’ is circular thinking. There is still no clear reason why certain groups deserve national status and others don’t. Antagonism between particular metropolitan areas has a longer pedigree than supposed national antagonism does, but the population of such areas are not assumed to have access to national status on these grounds.
Moreover, there are countries, such as Madagascar, and areas, such as large swathes of Latin America, where the ‘race’ of the population is a mixed one. In Madagascar, the ‘Madagascan people’ is in fact a localised mix of populations of African and Austronesian settlers. The same applies to less exotic locations too. The ‘English people’ are a mix of waves of conquest and settlement, their supposed ‘national culture’ even more mongrelised than their genetic ‘race’.
Nationalism, then, is a strange thing that is everywhere, intuitively ‘common sense’ but impossible to precisely describe, a basic principle of structuring the entire population of the world but a principle which doesn’t stand up to much scrutiny.
However, things weren’t always this way. For most of history people didn’t have a particular nationality, or overlapping claims on them, which defined their person in such fundamental but elusive ways, let alone any nationalism to accompany it. Though ‘common sense’ tells us that national divisions are a thing as old as humanity, the reality is rather different. Nationalism is a creation of the modern world, and is bound up with the development of a certain kind of society, which today is worldwide and total in its reach – capitalism.
The origins of nationalism
Capitalism and the modern nation-state developed at the same time in the same place, in Europe in the 16th to 19th centuries. The evolution of the nation-state and capitalism were bound up, each catalysing the development of the other. Capitalism took hold in a certain time and place not by accident but because the conditions were right to breed it; it required a fragmented arena of competing states with embedded mercantilist interests (though they were not for a good time the ‘nations’ we’d recognise), and for that reason evolved in Europe rather than in the Ottoman Empire, Manchu China or any of the other land empires that dominated much of the world.
Like capitalism itself, the idea of the modern nation-state didn’t appear from nowhere, but developed out of pre-existing conditions. However, capitalism as a total economic system and the world of sovereign nation-states are historical novelties, standing in contrast to a long history of feudal and imperial state forms. The modern nation-state is a product of the revolutions of the Eighteenth century which marked the decline of the feudal period and the rise of capitalism as a world system. But the phenomenon did not fall from the sky upon the storming of the Bastille[1], it was nurtured and developed as capitalism itself evolved and matured.
The technological innovations associated with the earliest developments of capitalism laid the foundation for the subsequent evolution of nationalism. The production and circulation of printed books was one of the very earliest capitalist industries. Once the initial market of Latin-speaking Europeans was glutted, the production of books in localised languages oriented towards the small but growing literate strata in Europe would have an important role in creating a language of administration and high culture, and the foundations of what could be claimed as a ‘national culture’ in later centuries - with significant nation-building implications in the cases of what would become Germany and Italy. The reformation[2] (its own success deeply associated with that of the printing industry) combined with the rising power of the merchant class in imperial states - whose own success at exchanging commodities acted as a beachhead for the capitalist social relations in Europe - would lead to the establishment of several states which were neither dynastic monarchies nor city-states. They were not the nation-states of developed capitalism, but were significant steps towards them.
The merchants, traders and bankers which had previously operated at the fringes of feudal economies played an increasingly central role as European empires spread around the world. Their trade in the plunder of the colonies – both riches and slaves – would make them vital to the workings of their economies, and the progressive dominance of European imperialism swelled their numbers, wealth, and political significance. Their density in the Seventeen Provinces in the Low Countries would spur the rebellion there, and the subsequent creation of the Dutch republic in 1581 was a portent of what would follow. The commercial successes of the merchants of the empires would lead to their influence redoubling into the societies that launched them. In Britain the enclosure of common land[3] , the development of industry under the pressures of commerce and the outcompeting of small producers by industrial capitalist pioneers would create a dispossessed working class with no choice but to labour for private employers – in other words it would lead to the establishment of capitalism proper. The industrial capitalist would replace the merchant as the leading player of the bourgeois class.
Concurrently, with the beginning of the end of the feudal world, and the transition to a world centred on the interests of the ascendant capitalist class, the state was redefined. The era of monarchs and subjects was replaced by the era of ‘citizens’. A period of competing dynasties gave way to the modern period of competing nations. Following the revolutions in France and America, the liberal conception of the state which laid the basis for nationalism solidified. It wasn’t programmatic, and didn’t need to be, as it wasn’t conjured into reality from the minds of intellectuals but from the needs of a developing class society to create the conditions for its own perpetuation.
The idea was articulated in French Declaration of Rights[4] of 1795 as follows:
“Each people is independent and sovereign, whatever the number of individuals who compose it and the extent of the territory it occupies. This sovereignty is inalienable”.
This understanding of the role of the state stood in contrast to the absolutism of earlier periods. Now it was the ‘people’ who were sovereign, not the person of the divinely ordained ruler. But during this period there was no clear definition of what made a ‘people’. It was circular, and relied on the territory and population of existing states, as at this point there was little in the way of attempts to define national citizenship or ‘peoples’ on linguistic, cultural or racial grounds. It was nearly always a question of practicality. The ‘science’ and library on national definition would not explode until a century later.
When attempts at definition did occur at this stage, such as during the second half of the Eighteenth century, nations were understood on the basis of their domination by specific states. The French Encyclopédie, a work usually understood as encapsulating enlightenment thought prior to the revolution and published in volumes in the 1750s and 60s, defined nations in such a way. There was no assumption of ethnic, linguistic or cultural homogeneity – to the enlightenment theorists, a nation was nothing more than a great number of people defined by proper borders and all subject to the same regime of law.
The revolution would build on this nation of subjects to create the nation of citizens; the nation became those capable and willing of the conditions of citizenship, expressed through the state. This understanding is still preserved in the rhetoric - if not the practice - of the nationalism of one of the nations created in the revolutions of the late 1700s: Americans are those who sign up to ‘Americanism’ and aspire to be Americans. For the bourgeois revolutionaries, the theoretical community of ‘citizens’ - however it was defined - represented the sovereignty of the common interest against the narrow interests of the crown, though of course this was not the reality of the class society they presided over.
The understanding of nationality in terms of ethnic, cultural and linguistic distinctiveness came later, in the course of intellectual debates about what made a nation, and what ‘nations’, however defined, deserved expression through a nation-state. Once the principle of the state as the expression of the sovereign ‘people’ was established, the process of definition of ‘peoples’ intensified throughout the Nineteenth Century. The political theorist John Stuart Mill mulled over the criteria of common ethnicity, language, religion, territory and history. But even as thinkers were debating where the ‘people’ came from, the issue was mostly understood in terms of practicability. Which ‘peoples’ should make nations was a question of viability, and the nations which were viable were often actually existing ones. Eligible new nations needed the economic or cultural basis to make them sustainable, as was the case with the creation of Italy and Germany in the second half of the Nineteenth century. The difficult question of turning populations into peoples, and peoples into nations only produced vague answers, but largely relied on the size of the population, association with a prior state, having a viable cultural elite (as with the Germans and Italians) and most importantly, a history of expansion and warfare, which has the virtue of creating an outside to unite against. Ireland was exceptional in possessing a national movement of the kind that would appear later much earlier on – indeed it would provide the archetypal model to nationalisms manufactured in later years, such as those of the Indians and Basques. However the viability of this movement was regularly dismissed on practical grounds.
Nonetheless most of the ‘peoples’ who would come to form ‘nations’ later on still did not see themselves in national terms, and did not see a moral aberration in rule by elites who spoke a different language, for the main reason that there were no unified national languages in a world of local dialects and widespread illiteracy. Even the role of the ‘official’ languages had little in common with the status of modern national languages. They were the product of expediency, and had nothing to do with any ‘national consciousness’. This had been the case for some time. In England, for instance, the elite language progressed from Anglo-Saxon, to Latin, to Norman, to the hybrid product of Norman French and Anglo-Saxon that was early English. The language spoken by elites remained an irrelevance to an illiterate subject population. Even in later periods the picture was the same – in 1789 only 12% of the French population spoke ‘proper’ French, with half speaking no form of French at all. Though a shared Italian-speaking elite culture was essential to the formation of an Italian state in the Nineteenth Century, the Italian language was only spoken by about 2.5% of ‘Italians’ on unification; the population at large spoke a variety of dialects which were often mutually incomprehensible.
There had been occasional and limited attempts at telling national origin stories in earlier centuries – such as the stories circulating in Sixteenth century France about the descent of the French (i.e. its elite) from the Franks and from Troy. However, these were limited to small literate circles and functioned to rationalise royal and/or aristocratic rights, rights which were defended much more frequently, effectively and popularly by claims to divine orders or to Roman precedent. These stories were the consequence of a small literate elite sharing the same language and institutional privileges communicating with each other, a starting point for the nationalism of later centuries. They in no way indicated a modern, popular ‘national consciousness’. They lacked the popular motive force of nationalism, the understanding that the state should express the wellbeing of the nation as a whole, and the constitution of this nation on a popular level. When the old dynasties attempted to reconcile themselves with modern nationalism in the age of its dominance they did so at their own peril: Kaiser Wilhelm II, though increasingly marginalised during the First World War, positioned himself as the nation’s leading German, therefore implying some form of responsibility to the German people and national interest - and thus the conclusion that he had failed in this responsibility, the very conclusion which led to his abdication. Such ideas would have been unthinkable in earlier years where the right of the Kaiser was inviolable and accountable to no-one.
As the Nineteenth century progressed, so too did the idea that all peoples had a right to self-determination, irrespective of questions of viability. The Italian Nationalist and philosopher Giuseppe Mazzini would pose the formula ‘every nation a state, and only one state for each nation’ to resolve ‘the national question’. This way of thinking consolidated towards the end of the century, at the same time that nationalism had gained a common currency amongst the masses. The proliferation of nationalist and ‘national liberation’ movements in the late 1800s is striking – the birth of Zionism alongside Indian, Armenian, Macedonian, Georgian, Belgian, Catalan movements, along with many others occurred in this period, though whether these specific movements had any traction among the wider population is another matter. Though in earlier periods there had been some ethnic or linguistic groups which understood themselves as in some way distinct from their neighbours, the translation of this into the need to have a nation-state of each and every grouping was a new phenomenon. And even prior to this, the ‘commonality’ which was used to define the nation, however it was understood, was something produced by the modern period – modern printing, education, transport and communications led to the erosion of local linguistic variation and a public culture which would allow for the idea of the nation to take hold. This wouldn’t have been possible in earlier periods where this infrastructure for breaking down cultures which could be specific from one village to the next didn’t exist. The national language, often a prerequisite for functioning nationalism, was a contemporary invention, requiring increased literacy, circulation of people and the erosion of parochial, feudal social relations, as we have seen. Contrary to the fantasies of nationalists, who see the shared language as the basic bond on which the nation-state is based, a common national language was the creation of the developing modern state.
By the last decades of the Nineteenth Century, the idea that each ‘people’ had a moral right to their own nation-state was solidly established. The concerns about viability which defined earlier debates had disappeared. It was now a right of ‘peoples’, defined in whichever way, to a state of their own. To be ruled by another nation or its representatives was abhorrent (in theory at least – imperialism had its own logic). It was during this period that the ethnic and linguistic definition of the ‘nation’ came to dominance over earlier forms. The competing imperialist nation-states of contemporary capitalism were fully-formed, and movements advocating resistance to and secession from them understood their activity and ultimate aims in terms of creating new nation-states.
The development of modern nationalism was bound up with the fact that the modern capitalist state, with an exploited population educated to a higher level than its feudal predecessors, required more from its citizens than the passive peasantry of earlier periods. It required a socially unifying force, and to integrate the working class into the state regime – it needed the active allegiance of the population, rather than the immiserated passivity of the peasants. The invention of patriotism filled this need. A consciousness of and allegiance to the ‘fatherland’ or ‘motherland’ was developed became commonplace through the European nation-states of the final third of the Nineteenth century. The development of the term ‘patriotism’ tells us all we need to know. The ‘Patrie’, the ‘homeland’ which forms the basis of the term, was defined prior to the French revolution as simply being a local area of origin, without national implications. By the late Nineteenth century, it was the imagined community of the nation, which demanded mass participation. Combined with the new pseudoscience of race, which had become so important in replacing paganism as the justification for imperial dispossession of various local populations, the ideology of national supremacy was born.
This principle reached its apogee in the First World War and the period following it. Late nineteenth century jingoism was transformed into an ideology of total war, of mechanised slaughter between militarised national blocs. Every aspect of life was subsumed under the ‘national interest’; internal disputes had to be suspended for the sake of the nation’s supremacy and - given every combatant state claimed the war was a defensive one - survival. Following the end of this capitalist bloodbath, the European map was redrawn on national lines. An attempt was made to put the ideal of ‘every nation a state’ into practice, and the ‘Wilsonian idealism’[5] of ‘national self-determination’ was made a geopolitical reality. The break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire into new nation-states was an attempt to solve the problem of ‘oppressed nations’. It didn’t work, for reasons which are integral to nationalism – these new states were not homogenous, and were themselves were full of new minorities.
The principle of ‘self-determination’ of ‘peoples’ once accepted, has no end, hence the rapid diffusion of antagonistic minority nationalisms throughout the world, with few countries untouched by them. The fundamental principle of nationalism is that national collectives of human beings have a right to self-determination in and through ‘their’ nation, but when it comes down to it, it is impossible to define exactly which groups of people are ‘nations’ and which aren’t, and there are always smaller and smaller groups claiming this mantle.
Nationalism, then, is something with a very real history and origin. Its power lies in the way it is presented as a natural state of things, and the assumption that national divisions and national determination are a natural part of human life, always have been and always will be. Anarchists take a very different view. The same period of history which created the nation-state and capitalism also created something left out of nationalist accounts – the dispossessed class of wage-workers whose interests stand in opposition to those of the capitalist nation state: the working class. This class which is obliged to fight in their interests against capital are not a ‘people’, but a condition of existence within capitalism, and as such transcend national borders. This antagonism led to the development of revolutionary perspectives challenging the world of capitalism, and posing a different world entirely. Our perspective, anarchist communism, is one of these.
Why do anarchists oppose nationalism?
Anarchists in the class struggle (or communist) tradition, such as the anarchist federation, do not see the world in terms of competing national peoples, but in terms of class. We do not see a world of nations in struggle, but of classes in struggle. The nation is a smokescreen, a fantasy which hides the struggle between classes which exists within and across them. Though there are no real nations, there are real classes with their own interests, and these classes must be differentiated. Consequently, there is no single ‘people’ within the ‘nation’, and there is no shared ‘national interest’ which unifies them.
Anarchist communists do not simply oppose nationalism because it is bound up in racism and parochial bigotry. It undoubtedly fosters these things, and mobilised them through history. Organising against them is a key part of anarchist politics. But nationalism does not require them to function. Nationalism can be liberal, cosmopolitan and tolerant, defining the ‘common interest’ of ‘the people’ in ways which do not require a single ‘race’. Even the most extreme nationalist ideologies, such as fascism, can co-exist with the acceptance of a multiracial society, as was the case with the Brazilian Integralist movement[6]. Nationalism uses what works – it utilises whatever superficial attribute is effective to bind society together behind it. In some cases it utilises crude racism, in other cases it is more sophisticated. It manipulates what is in place to its own ends. In many western countries, official multiculturalism is a key part of civic policy and a corresponding multicultural nationalism has developed alongside it. The shared ‘national culture’ comes to be official multiculturalism itself, allowing for the integration of ‘citizens’ into the state without recourse to crude monoculturalism. If the nationalist rhetoric of the capitalist state was of the most open, tolerant and anti-racist kind, anarchists would still oppose it.
This is because, at heart, nationalism is an ideology of class collaboration. It functions to create an imagined community of shared interests and in doing so to hide the real, material interests of the classes which comprise the population. The ‘national interest’ is a weapon against the working class, and an attempt to rally the ruled behind the interests of their rulers. The ideological and sometimes physical mobilisation of the population on a mass scale in the name of some shared and central national trait have marked the wars of the Twentieth and Twenty-First centuries – the bloodbath in Iraq rationalised in the name of Western democratic culture and the strengthening of the domestic state in the name of defending the British or American traditions of freedom and democracy against Islamic terror are recent examples.
Ultimately, the anarchist opposition to nationalism follows a simple principle. The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. This is not just a slogan, but the reality of the world we live in. Class antagonism is an inherent part of capitalism, and will exist irrespective of whether intellectuals and political groups theorise about its existence or non-existence. Class is not about your accent, your consumption habits, or whether your collar is blue or white. The working class – what is sometimes called the proletariat - is the dispossessed class, the class who have no capital, no control over the overall conditions of their lives and nothing to live off but their ability to work for a wage. They may well have a house and a car, but they still need to sell their ability to work to an employer in return for the money they need to live on. Their interests are specific, objective and material: to get more money from their employers for less work, and to get better living and working conditions. The interests of capital are directly opposed: to get more work out of us for less, and to cut corners and costs, in order to return a higher rate of profit and allow their money to become more money more quickly and efficiently. Class struggle is the competition between these interests. Even non-productive workplaces are shaped by these rules, as they are the fundamental principles of capitalist society. The interests of capital are expressed through those with power, who are likewise obliged to maintain these interests in order to keep their own power – owners of private capital, the bosses who make decisions on its behalf, and the state which is required to enshrine and defend private property and ownership rights.
The ‘national interest’ is simply the interest of capital within the country in question. It is the interest of the owners of society, who in turn can only express the fundamental needs of capital – accumulate or die. At home, its function is to domesticate those within a society who can pose antagonism with it – the working class. This antagonism, which is inherent to capitalism, is one which anarchists see as being capable of moving beyond capitalism. We have to struggle in our interests to get the things we need as concessions from capital. This dynamic takes place regardless of whether elaborate theories are constructed around it. Workers in China or Bangladesh occupying factories and rioting against the forces of the state are not necessarily doing it because they have encountered revolutionary theory, but because the conditions of their lives mean they have to. Similarly class solidarity exists not because people are charitable but because solidarity is in their interests. The capitalists have the state - the law, the courts and prisons. We only have each other. Alone we can achieve very little, but together we can cause disruption to the everyday functioning of capitalism, a powerful weapon. Of course, class struggles are rarely pure and unsullied things, and they can be overlaid with bigotries and factional interests of various kinds. It is the job of revolutionary groups and anarchist organisation in the workplace to combat these tendencies, to contribute to the development of class consciousness and militancy and to complement the process by which divisions are challenged through joint struggle which takes place within struggles of significant magnitude.
The ruling class are fully aware of these issues, and are conscious in acting in their interests. Solidarity is the only thing we can hold over their heads, and for that reason the state takes great care to get us to act against our own interests. Nationalism is one of their greatest weapons in this regard, and has consequently served an important historical purpose. It lines us up behind our enemies, and demands we ignore our own interests as members of the working class in deference to those of the nation. It leads to the domestication of the working class, leading working class people to identify themselves in and through the nation and to see solutions to the problems they face in terms of it. This is not terminal as we already know; circumstances can force people to act in their interests, and through this process ideas develop and change. To take a dramatic example from history, workers across the world marched off to war to butcher one another in 1914, only to take up arms against their masters in an international wave of strikes, mutinies, uprisings and revolutions from 1917 onwards.
Nonetheless, nationalism is a poison to be resisted tooth and nail. It is an ideology of domestication.
It is a weapon against us. It is an organised parochialism, designed to split the working class - which as a position within the economic system is international - along national lines.
Ultimately, even if we lay aside our principled and theoretical opposition to nationalism, the idea of any kind of meaningful national self-determination in the modern world is idealism. Nations cannot self-determine when subject to a world capitalist market, and those who frame their politics in terms of regaining national sovereignty against world capitalism, such as contemporary fascists and their fellow travellers, seek an unattainable golden age before modern capitalism. The modern world is an integrated one, one where international ‘co-operation’ and conflict cannot be readily separated, and which are expressed through international institutions and organisations like the UN, WTO, World Bank, EU, NATO, and so on. The nationalist fantasy is an empty one as much as it is a reactionary one. Anarchists recognise as much in their opposition. We will return to this point later.
Before we go further, it is necessary to pre-empt a common and fallacious ‘criticism’. We do not stand for monoculture. We do not seek to see the rich diversity of human cultural expression standardised in an anarchist society. How could we? The natural mixing of culture stands against the fantasies of nationalists. National blocs are never impervious to cultural influence, and culture spreads and mingles with time. The idea of self-contained national cultures, which nationalists are partisans of, is a myth. Against this we pose the free interchange of cultural expression in a free, stateless communist society as a natural consequence of the struggle against the state and capitalism.
The anarchist communist opposition to nationalism must be vocal and clear. We do not fudge internationalism. Internationalism does not mean the co-operation of capitalist nations, or national working classes, but [i]the fundamental critique of the idea of the nation and nationality.
The left and the ‘national question’
The contemporary sight of leftist groups supporting reactionary organisations and states is something frequently criticised by a number of voices for a number of reasons. The revulsion at the sight of self-proclaimed socialists cheerleading organisations like Hamas, chanting “we are all Hezbollah” at ‘anti-war’ demonstrations, and supporting regimes which repress workers’ struggles, imprison and execute working class activists, oppress women and persecute gays and lesbians is entirely justified. But the manner of thinking which allows for this to happen has a long pedigree. The way in which Marxist movements accommodated to nationalism, and in many cases functioned as the midwives of nationalist movements and nation-states every bit as objectionable as their western counterparts is the foundation of contemporary ‘anti-imperialist’ nationalism, and understanding the relationship between the workers’ movement and nationalism is vital to understanding modern ‘wars of national liberation’ and the response to them.
Marx himself, as on so many questions, did not provide any one clear position which we can accurately attribute as categorically ‘his’. The Communist Manifesto, despite comprising a patently non-communist program, concluded with the famous call, ‘workers of the world, unite!’, expressing the internationalist opposition to the domestication of the working class by nationalism. At the same time, Marx and Engels shared the standard liberal-nationalist view of the time that the principle of nation-building was consolidation, not disintegration. Engels famously remarked that he did not see the Czechs surviving as an independent people for this reason. For some time Marx and Engels supported the ‘national liberation’ of Poland (and consequently a movement for independence led by aristocrats) for strategic reasons – striking a blow against autocratic Russia and, in their view, defending capitalist development and therefore the preconditions for socialism in Western Europe. His attitude to Ireland was marked by similar tactical considerations. Discussing the rights and wrongs of this approach in a period of developed world capitalism is academic, and beyond the remit of this pamphlet. But it is clear that in many ways Marx was reflecting the widespread views of the early to mid 19th century liberal nationalism as it has been outlined above.
The leftist demand for national self-determination as a right was current at the same time it became so more generally and debates over the ‘national question’ animated the second international, with the conflict on the question between Lenin and the Polish-born Marxist Rosa Luxembourg becoming notorious. Lenin’s positions were typically contradictory, though in the main he argued on similar grounds to Marx on the matter – national liberation should be supported in as far as it advanced the development of the working class cause and the preconditions for socialism. Nonetheless, the Bolsheviks were vocal in their support of ‘the right of nations to self-determination’, following the passing of a resolution by the second international supporting the ‘complete right of all nations to self-determination’.
This view was opposed by Rosa Luxemburg. Luxemburg recognised that the matter of ‘national independence’ was a question of force, not ‘rights’. For her, the discussion of the ‘rights’ of ‘self-determination’ was utopian, idealist and metaphysical; its reference point was the not the material opposition of classes but the world of bourgeois nationalist myths. She was particularly vocal on this point when arguing against the Polish socialists, who used Marx’s earlier (tactical) position as a permanent blessing for their own nationalism.
Nonetheless, it was the Bolsheviks who seized power in Russia, leading the counter-revolution in that country. Following the civil war, their support for the ‘right of nations to self-determination’ led to some curious experiments in ‘nation-building’ which stood in parallel with the efforts of Woodrow Wilson and the Versailles Treaty in Europe a few years previously.[7] The creation of ‘national administrative units’ for various non-Russian ‘nations’ within the newly proclaimed USSR was a result of the assumptions of Soviet bureaucrats, not due to some will to nationhood of the Uzbeks, Turkmen and Kazakhs. Of course, with the crushing of the Russian revolution by the state-capitalist regime under the control of the Bolsheviks, who systematically destroyed or co-opted both the organs of self-management the working class had developed for themselves and the revolutionaries who defended them (such as the anarchists), the question was rendered null, as the Bolsheviks’ sole consideration was their own power. Like its Western rival, the USSR used the rhetoric of ‘self-determination’ and ‘independence’ to expand its own sphere of dominance.
Still, the principle that nations had an inherent right to self-determination against ‘national oppression’ had gained a commonsensical dominance amongst the workers’ movement, as it had amongst the wider population.
National Liberation Struggles
Following their consolidation of power during the civil war, Bolshevik policy swiftly took on the nationalist character that could be expected. In 1920, the Bolsheviks granted support to the bourgeois nationalist movement in Turkey under Kemal Pasha for the blow its victory would strike to British imperialism. This was the first stage in the use of support for ‘anti-imperialist’ ‘national liberation struggles’ as Bolshevik geopolitical strategy. For the working class in Turkey, it was disastrous, resulting in the vigorous crushing of strikes and demonstrations by the new Turkish republic. Similarly the Kuomintang – the Chinese nationalist movement - were extended Soviet support, leading to the slaughter of insurrectionary workers in Shanghai. The new ruling class in Russia extended their support to such anti-working class forces in the name of defending the revolution. Some of these forces would paint their nationalist state-capitalism in the colours of communism, but nonetheless represented movements to establish a viable nation-state with an exploited working class and a commodity producing (state-) capitalist economy.
The influence of this development on the left throughout the world was profound, compounding the place of support for ‘national liberation struggle’ as a basic part of the ‘common sense’ of the workers’ movement. This did not just apply to the various breeds of state-socialists – the Trotskyists, Maoists and Stalinists, but also had its effect on some anarchists.
For the Stalinists, whose politics in any case had nationalism in its blood, ‘national liberation struggles’ were seen to undermine US machinations, to the benefit of the USSR - which supported such struggles materially or politically in pursuance of its own imperialist objectives. For the Maoists and those influenced by the Cuban revolution, smashing western imperialism through national liberation was necessary to allow the peasant-worker movements of those countries to rapidly develop their economies to (in their claims) the benefit of the population. For the Trotskyists, various historical schemes were developed explaining why imperialism was, as described by Lenin, the highest form of capitalism, and why the defeat of imperialism by national liberation forces was in the interests of the socialist cause.
This was joined and compounded by the wave of Third-Worldism in the 1960s which was in many ways a reflection on the failure of the unrest of that period to materialise into a revolutionary movement, happening as it did at the same time as the decomposition of Western colonialism. Building on the ground laid by Lenin’s writings, the Western working class was seen as dominated by a ‘labour aristocracy’ based on the extraction of wealth from the victims of imperialism, and the hope for socialism lay with the ‘self-determination’ of non-Western peoples. The relativistic support of exotic movements for their opposition to ‘imperialism’, reduced down to US imperialism, continues to this day, and can be seen in the enthusiasm of Western leftists for reactionary Islamists.
This view is of course fallacious and reactionary, placing national antagonism before class antagonism. But in the post-war period, the international, postcolonial left had an effective monopoly over national liberation movements. Stalinism had long since accommodated itself to flag-waving nationalism, in many instances being indistinguishable in its rhetoric from fascism proper. The left had taken a leading role in the anti-fascist resistance movements in Europe during the war, allowing for these groups to claim the nationalist mantle upon liberation and to act as the leading representatives of the liberated ‘will’ of the nation. A striking example is the leading role in the Greek resistance during the second world war of the Stalinist and patriotic EAM-ELAS , who were not above publicly decapitating anarchist militants and murdering rivals in the resistance and workers’ movements[8]. In the post-war period, this consolidation of leftism with patriotism determined the left character of various colonial national liberation movements, making nationalism a key component of the left internationally, and the left the midwife of nationalist movements around the world.
Unfortunately, anarchists are not impervious to such views. Many anarchists have managed to defend struggles for ‘national liberation’ - that is, struggles for one form of the state against another - in terms of the struggle against oppression, the basic currency of anarchist politics. By their reasoning, as anarchists oppose the various oppressions of the contemporary world; the exploitation of the working class, the oppression of women and sexual and ethnic minorities, we must also oppose the oppression of one nation by another. There is some basis for this in the classical anarchist tradition, such as in Bakunin’s notorious statement: “every nationality, great or small, has the incontestable right to be itself, to live according to its own nature. This right is simply the corollary of the general principal of freedom”. More recently, Murray Bookchin claimed in Society and Nature that “no left libertarian ... can oppose the right of a subjugated people to establish itself as an autonomous entity -- be it in a confederation . . . or as a nation-state based in hierarchical and class inequities."
Similarly, leftists often conflate opposition to imperialist war with support for national liberation, or at least muddy the waters of conversation enough to make the confusion inevitable. This is to turn the justified horror felt against such wars on its head, and to move from a position against war to a position for war – as waged by the underdog side. History is replete with examples, from some anti-Vietnam war protestors chanting the name of North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh to some leftists proclaiming ‘we are all Hezbollah now’ during the protests against the bombing of Lebanon by the Israeli state.
This support of the underdog state or state in waiting must be opposed. There is no essence of national resistance, no essential oppressed national spirit which is being channelled by the national liberation forces. They are real organised forces with their own aims and goals – to set up a particular form of exploiting state, with particular factions in control of it. The nation is not something primordial to be repressed, but a narrative constructed by the capitalist state in the course of its development. Though the imperial structure comes to be part of the apparatus of exploitation over the working class in the territory affected, the rearrangement of this exploiting apparatus in favour of a ‘native’ state is a reactionary goal. As we have seen, the logic of nationalism is an inherently reactionary one, in that it functions to binds together classes into one national collectivity. Moreover, simply in practical terms, the principle of nationalism has no end; the new, ‘independent’ states always contain minorities whose own ‘national self-determination’ is denied. Secondly, the forms of exploitation set up by ‘native’ rulers after struggles of national liberation are in concrete terms in no way preferable to the methods of the ‘foreigners’. Workers in North Korea are oppressed by a native ‘communist’ state comparable in brutality to the European fascist dictatorships of the 20th century, workers in Vietnam are exploited by an capitalist export-led economy, workers in Zimbabwe, free of British imperialism, are now preyed on by a gangsterish ‘native’ regime. Many more examples are not difficult to find. All these countries experience class struggle of a greater or lesser intensity. Class struggle is part of the fabric of capitalism, including despotic state-capitalism of the Bolshevik model, and this will be the case irrespective of whether the ruling class faced at any particular time are drawn from ‘native’ ranks or not.
Moreover, these ‘liberated’ states, once freed from the national oppression of Western colonialism, have proven to be fully capable of launching brutal wars of their own. The case of Vietnam is instructive. Immediately after re-unification in 1976, which came following the withdrawal of US troops in 1973, Vietnam was embroiled in a series of wars across the Indochinese subcontinent. This started with a brutal territorial war with the Khmer Rouge, who had come to power following the savage US bombing of Cambodia, resulting in the occupation of that country by Vietnamese troops. This led to Vietnam’s domination of the region, supported by Soviet imperialism. Laos was effectively a client state of Vietnam, which maintained military bases in the country and forced the Lao government to cut its ties with China. In 1979, as a consequence of Vietnam’s war with its Cambodian client, and various border incidents and conflicting territorial claims, China invaded the country, leading to tens of thousands of deaths and the devastation of Northern Vietnam.
The ‘liberation’ of nations from the yoke of imperialism has led to further cycles of war in other parts of the world, with many 20th century national movements being directed against new, post-colonial states rather than Western powers. Sri Lanka is an example of the lingering scars of Western imperialism conjoining with the power plays of communalist ruling classes, leading to a downward spiral of war and ethnic-nationalist violence as competing national movements throw ‘their’ working classes into conflict with one another.
The British imperial administration in Sri Lanka instituted a system of communalist representation on the Island’s legislative council from the mid-19th century, establishing antagonism between the minority Tamils and majority Sinhalese which continues to this day. After the introduction of universal suffrage, and eventually the granting of independence after WW2, the access of Tamils – who before this point had been over-represented in government - to privileged positions was squeezed, deepening separatist sentiment alongside increasing discrimination against the Tamil minority. The colonisation of Tamil-speaking areas by the Sinhala government, the establishment of Sinhalese as the official language, and the banning of Tamil books, newspapers and magazines imported from Indian Tamil regions all lay the foundations for the rise of Tamil militant groups and the Sri Lankan civil war.
The growth in size of militant groups such as the notorious Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) was fuelled by the real grievances faced by Tamils, especially after the Black July pogroms in 1983 in which hundreds of Tamils were massacred. However, the idea that the LTTE is the guardian of Tamil national self-defence fades when it is remembered that among their earliest targets were rival Tamil nationalist and Communist groups, such as Tamil Eelam Liberation Organisation, which was effectively wiped out by the LTTE in 1986. After the LTTE became the de-facto government in a number of Tamil areas, it turned on the new minorities – Sri Lankan Muslims, who were ethnically cleansed from the region through evictions, intimidations and eventually massacres, including the machine-gunning of men, women and children who had been locked inside a mosque. Significant numbers of Sinhalese workers who remained in LTTE-controlled areas suffered similar fates. Nationalism, even that of ‘oppressed nations’ offers nothing but further rounds of violence and conflict, the division of the working class on national lines, and their sacrifice to the ‘national interest’, whether that of the existing state or those of states in waiting.
The absence of Western imperialism does not bring peace, and national liberation does not lead to self-determination, an impossibility in the capitalist world. This is due to the very nature of the nation-state, which is imperialist by nature.
All nation-states are imperialist
‘Imperialism’ has a long history, with its forms and varieties stretching back as far as the forms and varieties of the state and class society. As the word describes many different projects by many different states in various periods, we have to clarify what it means in the context of advanced capitalist society. The Roman Empire was different to the British Empire; contemporary imperialism is different still. This does not mean imperialism isn’t something we can identify. Still, we have to define more precisely the phenomenon we are describing.
The power of the classical empires of the ancient world stemmed from the conquest of land and the mobilisation of its resources. The continuity between state control of land and Imperial power made their imperialism the archetype; its most basic and transparent form.
The ‘foreign policy’ of contemporary capitalist nation states seems a world away. But in the modern world, imperialism is as embedded in the working of states as at any time in history. The functioning and nature of imperialism changed along with the economic organisation of the society it was part of. As the form of the state in an agrarian slave society is different to that of a developed capitalist society, so too is the imperialism of that state. But despite the multitude of changes the world has since undergone, the state remains the actor of contemporary imperialism. This may seem a strange comment in a world where the leading powers are liberal democracies which send innumerable functionaries to innumerable meetings, summits, forums and international organisations. Nonetheless, imperialism is absolutely vital to the functioning of capitalist societies, and its success is inseparable from the success of leading powers.
The pressures of capitalism transformed the imperialism which preceded and nurtured it. The wave of speculative investments which flooded out of Europe from the 1850s as capital sought profitable investment led to an intensification of imperialist activity, with states impelled to protect and regulate the interests of capital within their national bounds. This would intensify after the 1870s. The direct British government of India after the mutiny put its interests in jeopardy is one early example (previously it had been ruled by a British company), and the ‘scramble for Africa’ from the 1880s to the First World War represented the definitive transformation of the ‘informal Imperialism’ of earlier decades to a system of direct rule in which Imperialist powers carved up the world between them.
As we know, this system broke apart following the Second World War and during the period of decolonisation through the second half of the Twentieth century. However, the essential dynamic by which states act to the benefit of capital within the country in question by the manipulation of geopolitical inequalities remains as an essential part of the makeup of the capitalist world.
The state must act to further the interests of the capital – what is often called the ‘business interests’ – of the country over which it has jurisdiction. Within the country in question it nurtures capitalism, it enshrines the property laws it requires in order to exist, it opens spaces of accumulation for capital, it rescues capital from its own destructive tendencies (sometimes against the protests of particular capitalists) and manages class struggle through the combination of coercion and co-option: it can and does smash strikes, but it also grants unions a role in managing the workforce and thus creates a pressure-valve for class struggle. The state is the ‘collective capitalist’; it is the guarantor and underwriter of the capitalist system.
This function also extends to ‘foreign policy’. The state negotiates access for domestic companies to resources, investment, trading and expansion abroad. The success of this process brings profits flowing back into the country in question and by enriching its business and the ‘national economy’, the state secures the material basis of its own power: it increases its own resources, wealth and ability to project itself. It is therefore not simply a puppet of ‘corporate interests’, but is an interested party in its own right.
At the same time the state must seek to avoid its own domination, it must marshal its resources – military, diplomatic, cultural and economic – to maintain its own international position. There is constant struggle - whether at the roundtable with ‘international partners’ discussing trade policy or at arms in international ‘hotspots’ and ‘flashpoints’ – to ensure that the ‘national interest’ is advanced abroad and defended at home. These interests are furthered by maintaining, defending and manipulating inequalities which exist within capitalism across geographical space. For example, these asymmetries are today often expressed through phenomena such as regional monopolies, unequal exchange, restricted capital flows, and the manipulation of monopoly rents. Imperialism is about the mobilisation of these differences to the benefit of the economy of the state in question – meaning the capital within it. This is the normal functioning of the world economy, and is visible for example in US mobilisation of the International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organisation to the benefit of US financial industries or in Chinese manoeuvres in sub-Saharan Africa. States must participate in this system of constantly shifting balances of power irrespective of intentions, as those unable to ward off or manage these pressures will be totally dominated by them.
War comes to have an obvious function. Imperialist interventions can occasionally be motivated by specific quantitative gains, such as the exploitation of a specific resource. More often, however, the question is one of geopolitical strategy and outflanking other power blocs in order to maintain regional or international power. Resources are usually seen in strategic terms, not in terms of simple exploitation. If exploitation of Iraqi oil had been the US’ sole aim in the Persian Gulf, it would have been far cheaper and easier to leave Saddam in power and negotiate access. The question was one of militarily controlling this strategic resource, hence the invasion of Iraq. Control of Middle Eastern oil, which has a continued shelf-life beyond that of rival reserves, would grant the US effective control over the world economy, and specifically the economies of China, Russia, Japan and Europe, with their rival financial and manufacturing industries.
Similarly, the occupation of Afghanistan had little to do with exploiting particular resources, and everything to do with controlling a strategic point in the Caucasus and projecting into the spheres of influence of Russia and China. Afghanistan was occupied by the British and Russians for similar strategic reasons. The war in Vietnam ran the risk of damaging short – term capital accumulation, but nonetheless formed part of a grander imperial strategy which stood to benefit the interests of US capital by securing the leading global role of the US and making the ‘free world’ safe for investment and exploitation.
However, when faced with these practices, leftists often draw questionable conclusions. Following the logic of support for national liberation struggles, and the need to discover a proxy to support, leftists will often cheer-lead the regimes of states which are subject to the machinations of Western Imperialism. However, ‘national oppression’ has nothing to do with class struggle, and the support for regimes which are active in the suppression of ‘their’ workers and the persecution of minorities in the pursuit of ‘anti-imperialist’ politics is completely reactionary. It also fails to understand imperialism, which is a consequence of a world capitalist system. States and national capitals which have an uneven relationship with larger powers will also have different asymmetric relations with other powers. The ‘victims’ of Western Imperialism have their own agendas, and imperialist policies of their own. Iran and Venezuela, for instance, certainly do; Venezuela in advancing its interest by expanding its sphere of influence around Latin America, and Iran in doing the same in Iraq, Lebanon, Africa and elsewhere.
Imperialism does not simply emanate from a handful of big powers, oppressing smaller countries and extending their reach across the world. Undoubtedly there are imperialist policies that are much more successful than others. But the nation-state has imperialism in its very blood. Even if a state wished to stay ‘civilised’ and avoid the dynamics of imperialist competition and conflict, it would be forced to defend itself against attempts to prey on this weakness by other powers, using methods of greater or lesser directness. As a result, states with less capacity to project themselves align with those with more, using a logic that a child could understand.
After nationalism
A common question remains however. If anarchists do not line up alongside the left in supporting national liberation struggles, and in demanding national self-determination, what is it that we support? What is our alternative?
On one level, the question itself should be rejected. There are many things we do not support on principle, and are never required to offer an alternative to. Refusing to support something actively reactionary in its aims is preferable to ‘doing something’ which stands against our fundamental principles. Nationalism can offer nothing except further rounds of conflict, which look set to increase in number and severity as national competition over the world’s dwindling energy resources increases. When conflict is framed in national terms – understood as the conflict between an oppressed and an oppressor nation – the working class necessarily loses out.
Internationalists are familiar with the hysterical response with which interventions can be met. To many, ‘Resistance’ to Imperialist warmongering is beyond question and criticism – antagonists to specific imperialist projects cease to have agency, aims or objectives as the capitalist faction they are; they are simply ‘the resistance’ and as such are beyond criticism. Leftist support for the ‘Palestinian resistance’, for instance, follows such a logic – it extends even to groups such as Hamas, which repress workers’ struggles, break up pickets at gun point, oppress women and brutalise and kill gays and lesbians. But all this is forgotten once Hamas are subsumed into ‘the resistance’, and to criticise ‘the resistance’ is beyond the pale. To bring a class perspective to the issue, to publicise the fact that the forces of national liberation act exactly like the capitalist forces they are and defend the interests of capitalism, the state or the state in waiting against any independent working class struggles, or even the threat of them, is tantamount to siding with imperialism. Refusing to side with one faction by this logic is effectively the same as siding with the other.
The problem is that the tendency to see the world in national rather than class terms is deeply engrained in the psychology of the left, as much as it is in wider society. Though leftists may be capable of criticising nationalism in their own back yard, they are incapable of doing it when faced with exotic foreign movements.
This reflects the powerlessness of the left. When faced with brutal war and the slaughter of populations in distant parts of the world, a proxy is sought in response to their own lack of agency. Supporting the underdog side - the ‘resistance’ - forms a substitute.
However, when faced with wars in other parts of the world, we must face the reality that there is little we can do to stop this or that particular war. Boycotts of the goods of one of the antagonist nations (for example in the repeated calls for the boycotting of Israeli goods) have little effect, despite the positive feelings that ‘doing something’ might entail. Class struggle, in the arena of war and in the antagonist nations is the only strategy we can support if we seek a world without wars – of national liberation or otherwise.
Struggling from a class position – advancing the material interests of the working class, rather than fighting on the terrain of nationalism, is what stands to break free of the binds of nationalism. All national forces share an interest in preventing independent workers movements, and ‘national liberation’ forces share a history of suppressing independent workers action – the IRA for example acted to maintain cross-class unity behind Irish republicanism by breaking strikes during the class struggles of the 1920s. More recently Hamas has broken up strikes by teachers and government employees. Nationalism is to be opposed because it binds workers together behind it; class struggles are supported because they pose the possibility of severing this bind, and the risk of this severance strikes terror into nationalist movements.
The principle of taking a class line, rather than a national line, must also inform our politics in the countries we reside in. Nationalism is a powerful force, and it holds a strong influence over the working class around the world. In Britain, where identity and communalism are constantly marketed and mobilised in official discourse, the need to belong to a people, community or cultural group fills a powerful function, and offers dispossessed, powerless people something important to belong to, something above and beyond the dreary monotony of daily life. Nationalism is packaged and sold as another commodity, it is a spectacle of participation in a society that is defined the separation between our needs and desires and the reasons for our day-to-day activity. The idea of being part of a community, having a heritage to claim and something above and beyond immediate reality to take pride in is very powerful.
As a result, nationalism can overlay and distort class struggles; material struggles can become struggles in the defence of the national interest, struggles for the reorganisation of the nation through the application of a different form of government and against other sections of the working class defined on national, racial or sectarian grounds. There are plenty of historical examples of racist strikes against black workers, against immigrants or to other reactionary ends, from dock workers striking in defence of Enoch Powell to the loyalist Ulster workers’ council strike against power-sharing in Northern Ireland.
Even day to day struggles can be infused with nationalism, through the deployment of nationalist myths in discourse, and through the nationalism of the unions. The appearance of national flags at demonstrations, pickets and rallies around the world is not uncommon.
However, consciousness develops in the course of struggle. Revolutionary consciousness does not gain a leading position in society as a result of the conversion of the entire population to anarchist positions – it does not come about as a result of winning the ‘war of ideas’ in the arena of democratic debate. Propaganda is useful and necessary, but its purpose is to build political minorities which can join in struggles, winning respect for anarchist ideas and applying them in practice. Revolutionary consciousness comes about as a result of mass struggle, and class struggle is immanent to capitalism.
It is through mass struggle that consciousness develops. Under capitalism, ‘pure’ struggles rarely exist. It is through struggle in the defence of material working class interests, related to material demands – more pay, less hours, access to services, eventually against work and capitalism altogether – that the bonds of nationalism can be severed by posing the incompatibility of our needs with the needs of capitalism to stay profitable. The separate interests of classes become apparent in such struggles, and the ability to draw the conclusion that the capitalist system itself must be destroyed can and has spread like wildfire.
Internationalist political groups and organisations have an important role to play in agitating against nationalism, and in countering nationalist tendencies in struggles as they develop. We must stand staunchly against militarism, nationalism and war, and agitate on a practical basis accordingly. We must counter nationalism within the working class, offering solidarity around class interests as the practical course through which working class people can defend their own interests. Against the left, and its proposed reorganisation the capitalist world of nation-states, we stand firmly for a world without borders, without nations and without states, for a world based on free access to the products of human activity, for the satisfaction of human needs and desires; a co-operative, stateless world in which human beings can realise their full potential as creative beings. In the struggle towards that ultimate aim, we are firm in our stance that workers have no country, that the working class must unite across all divides, and that solidarity of all workers is the principle on which any future victories rely.
To conclude, we here make some suggestions for the activities of anarchists when faced with nationalism in the countries they operate, and when faced with nationalism when engaging in anti-war activities.
Firstly, class struggle anarchists should be organising in the workplace wherever possible, and engaging in the support of strikes and other actions which aid the development of class consciousness. Anarchists should network with other libertarian militants, and in the workplace they should be arguing for libertarian tactics such as mass meetings and direct action. Anarchists in the workplace in the course of maintaining a class perspective should also argue against the division of the working class along lines of race or nationality, and should advocate solidarity across all boundaries, a solidarity which has the tendency to develop as workers of different backgrounds come together in struggle.
Similarly, anarchists should counter the nationalist myths which hinder practical working class solidarity; lies about immigrants stealing jobs and housing should be opposed with the reality of the situation, that the reasons for our day-to-day problems lie in the fact that the capitalist system does not function to meet our needs, and isn’t supposed to.
Secondly, anarchists have always been involved in anti-militarist and anti-war activism. This is no different today, and anarchists are to be found on the street in protests against the wars which imperialism entails. When faced with national liberationist arguments and nationalist responses to war, we should be engaging with the justified revulsion felt when faced with war, but opposing nationalist analysis with an internationalist, class perspective.
These are not small tasks, but they are vital ones, and must be central to the activity of the anarchist movement in the here and now.
Appendices: Statements on the Gaza War
NO STATE SOLUTION IN GAZA (20th January 2009)
One thing is absolutely clear about the current situation in Gaza: the Israeli state is
committing atrocities which must end immediately. With hundreds dead and thousands
wounded, it has become increasingly clear that the aim of the military operation,
which has been in the planning stages since the signing of the original ceasefire in June,
is to break Hamas completely. The attack follows the crippling blockade throughout the
supposed ‘ceasefire’, which has destroyed the livelihoods of Gazans, ruined the civilian
infrastructure and created a humanitarian disaster which anyone with an ounce of
humanity would seek an end to.
But that’s not all there is to say about the situation. On both sides of the conflict, the
idea that opposing Israel has to mean supporting Hamas and its ‘resistance’ movement
is worryingly common. We totally reject this argument. Just like any other set of rulers,
Hamas, like all the other major Palestinian factions, are happy and willing to sacrifice
ordinary Palestinians to increase their power. This isn’t some vague theoretical point –
for a period recently most deaths in Gaza were a result of fighting between Hamas and
Fatah. The ‘choices’ offered to ordinary Palestinian people are between Islamist gangsters
(Hamas, Islamic Jihad) or nationalist gangsters (Fatah, Al-Aqsa Martyrs brigades).
These groups have shown their willingness to attack working class attempts to improve
their living conditions, seizing union offices, kidnapping prominent trade unionists, and
breaking strikes. One spectacular example is the attack on Palestine Workers Radio by
Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, for ‘stoking internal conflicts’. Clearly, a ‘free Palestine’
under the control of any of these groups would be nothing of the sort.
As anarchists, we are internationalists, opposing the idea that the rulers and ruled within
a nation have any interests in common. Therefore, anarchists reject Palestinian nationalism
just as we reject Israeli nationalism (Zionism). Ethnicity does not grant “rights” to
lands, which require the state to enforce them. People, on the other hand, have a right to
having their human needs met, and should be able to live where they choose, freely.
Therefore, against the divisions and false choices set up by nationalism, we fully support
the ordinary inhabitants of Gaza and Israel against state warfare – not because of
their nationality, ethnicity, or religion, but simply because they’re real living, feeling,
thinking, suffering, struggling human beings. And this support has to mean total hostility
to all those who would oppress and exploit them –the Israeli state and the Western
governments and corporations that supply it with weapons, but also any other capitalist
factions who seek to use ordinary working-class Palestinians as pawns in their power
struggles. The only real solution is one which is collective, based on the fact that as a
class, globally, we ultimately have nothing but our ability to work for others, and everything
to gain in ending this system – capitalism – and the states and wars it needs .
That this seems like a ‘difficult’ solution does not stop it from being the right one. Any
“solution” that means endless cycles of conflict, which is what nationalism represents, is
no solution at all. And if that is the case, the fact that it is “easier” is irrelevant. There are
sectors of Palestinian society which are not dominated by the would-be rulers – protests
organised by village committees in the West Bank for instance. These deserve our support.
As do those in Israel who refuse to fight, and who resist the war. But not the groups
who call on Palestinians to be slaughtered on their behalf by one of the most advanced
armies in the world, and who wilfully attack civilians on the other side of the border.
WHOEVER DIES, HAMAS AND THE ISRAELI STATE WIN
SOLIDARITY WITH THE VICTIMS OF WAR (25th January 2009)
The atrocity in Gaza
As the dust settles, the extent of the atrocities which the Israeli state has committed
against the population of the Gaza strip has become clear. Thousands are dead,
killed in the savage bombing of one of the most densely populated places on earth. Israel
has used banned white phosphorous munitions in civilian areas, shelled aid convoys,
schools, shelters and mosques full of people. It has destroyed aid stockpiles with white
phosphorous shells. Over 90,000 people have been displaced. Gaza’s economy and infrastructure,
already devastated by the blockade, have been destroyed. With the ceasefire
signed, the continued blockade will mean further war against the civilian population by
other means.
A two state solution?
As the bombs rained down every party and group put forward their vision for ‘fixing’
the problem and their vision of the future for Palestinians. But understanding what we
can’t do is the first step to understanding what we can. We have to be clear about the
ways we can stop such atrocities happening.
A ‘two state solution’ based on 1949 or 1967 borders isn’t going to come about except
through a massive change in the global balance of power. This will inevitably lead to
more conflicts elsewhere. Two states with borders as they currently stand would create a
Palestine as dominated by Israel as the territories are now. Even if the ‘one state solution’
became a reality, the Palestinian working class would remain an underclass of cheap
labourers. It would be like the end of Apartheid in South Africa. The colour of those in
charge changed but left the vast population in the same dreadful state of poverty and
hopelessness as before.
It is also true that we cannot call on ‘our’ state to reign in Israel. Firstly, the state will
not concede anything to us unless the working class – the vast majority of us who can
only live off our ability to work for others – is in a confident enough position to force
those concessions through collective action. Secondly, it is madness to expect Britain to
impose ‘civilised’ behaviour on an ally such as Israel. Britain has taken part in the occupation in Iraq which has resulted in the deaths of 1,033,000 people. The only state which
has any ability to reign in Israel is the US. The US will only do this when Israel’s actions
threaten its national interest. Moral outrage will not win over dominating the region.
Solidarity with working class struggles
We must stand in firmly in solidarity with the victims of state warfare. The terrorised
population of Gaza did not heed Hamas’ call to resist through ‘martyrdom’, or to
undertake suicide attacks. They fled en masse. They showed no willingness to carry out
a ‘resistance’ on behalf of their masters which would have meant certain death. Whilst
Palestinians fled the onslaught, demonstrations were held in Israel by those refusing to
serve the war machine. These refusals to heed the call of the state or the ruling party to
fight deserve our support and solidarity.
We cannot support Hamas, or any of the other factions in Gaza or the West Bank
against Israel, however ‘critically’. Hamas’ record of repressing the attempts of workers
to improve their living conditions is well known. They have escorted striking teachers
back to work at gunpoint, and have closed down medical facilities where staff attempted
to strike. Both Hamas and Fatah have made kidnapping and assassination attempts on
the same trade unionists. Hamas execute those forced by necessity into sex work, and
persecute gays and lesbians. They offer as little to ordinary Palestinians as their rivals in
secular nationalist groups, such as Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, who attacked the Palestine
Workers Radio for ‘stoking internal conflicts’. Real internationalism means recognising
that the rulers and ruled within a ‘nation’ have nothing in common. In this case, this
means supporting the efforts of ordinary Palestinians to improve their conditions. We
support them against either Israel, as in the struggles organised by village committees in
the West Bank, or against the ‘resistance’ movements which police the population.
Our solidarity must be with the victims of war. These are overwhelmingly Palestinian
but also workers, Jewish, Arab and others, killed by mortars and rockets in Israel.
This cannot be because of their race, nationality, or religion, but because they are living,
thinking, feeling and struggling human beings. And we must stand against all those who
would sacrifice them to their own ends. Ultimately the only solution to endless global
conflict and war is for working class people, the dispossessed majority who must sell
their time and energy to those who own and control society, to struggle in our interests
collectively, against their exploitation, and against divisions such as gender and race.
This means struggle against the capitalist system which creates endemic war and which
must exploit us to survive. From this we can set about taking control of our own lives,
and putting an end to a world of warring states and states-in-waiting which has produced
atrocities such as those in Gaza.
_______________________________________________________________
Footnotes
[1] The inhabitants of Paris attacked the notorious fortress-prison in 1789 to secure gun-powder, sparking off the French Revolution. The revolution is often seen as the point marking the transfer of power from the old aristocratic class to the ascendant capitalist classes.
[2] The wave of religious and social upheaval across Europe which established Protestantism and saw the decline in power of the Catholic Church.
[3] The private seizure of the common grazing lands of the traditional village, which was important to the development of capitalism on two fronts: first by laying the basis of the commodification of land in tandem with the market-led developments in agriculture, and secondly by dispossessing swathes of the population who were then forced to become wage-labourers.
[4]The document laying out the universal, fundamental rights of French citizens following the French revolution. These rights were understood to be based on human nature.
[5] Woodrow Wilson, the US president at the war’s end, was instrumental in framing nationality and self-determination as the path to orderly world affairs.
[6] A fascist movement in Brazil which, given its inability to mobilise the masses on racial lines, took up the slogan of "Union of all races and all peoples" while utilising the same rhetoric about communism, liberalism etc as its European relatives.
[7] The Versailles treaty ended the war – with the terms being dictated by the Allies and the redrawing of Europe taking place using principles of nationality where feasible.
[8] EAM’ being ‘Greek People’s National Liberation Army’, ‘ELAS’ being ‘National Liberation Front’ and the organisation of which it was the armed wing. Both were dominated by the Stalinist Greek Communist Party, which attempted to take power after the German defeat.
Continuing waves of mass police operations in down town Athens set the pace for new era of repression in Greece
Everyone thought it was just a show of power - but it proved to be the Socialist government's plan for "change" after 5 years of brutal right wing rule.
One day after assuming power, the Socialists launched a massive invasion of Exarcheia, the Athens anarchist enclave, with mass detentions and brutal intimidation of locals.
On the early hours of Friday 9 of October, four days after the landslide victory of the Socialists in the greek national elections, and only a day after assuming power, the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (Pasok) proved its intentions towards the social antagonistic movement that has swept the country since the December Uprising: brutal repression.
The blockade of the city hall of Zografou, an Athens suburb in the foothills of Mt Imitos averted the cementing of four squares into parking lots, despite the employment of thugs.
On Tuesday 6th of October, only two days after the national elections that have seen the largest defeat of the right wing in the country's history, 6 local committees and assemblies of Zografou, an Athens suburb in the foothills of Mt Imitos, the east mountain of the greek capital, ruled by a right-wing mayor with chronic hatred of things green, gathered to stop the auctioning of public works that
di Luca Barbieri
Qui le precedenti puntate.
c) 2002 - Si consente la riproduzione parziale o totale dell'opera e la sua diffusione per via telematica, purché non a scopi commerciali e a condizione che questa dicitura sia riprodotta.
Il Ritorno
Poi passano quasi dieci anni e Negri, nel 1997, decide di tornare per chiudere i conti con il passato. Ancor più di prima è lui il protagonista assoluto. Non c’è un solo riferimento ai suoi compagni di avventura di allora. Il ritorno è raccontato da tutti i giornali. Il Corriere ci descrive un uomo più rilassato, che incute sicuramente meno paura:
Venti anni fa, tutte le volte che si calava il passamontagna sul volto “sentiva il calore della classe operaia”. Questo raccontava il professor Toni Negri, docente di dottrina dello Stato all’università di Padova, Magister maximo di sovversione prima in Potop (Potere Operaio) poi in autonomia. Oggi ultimo giorno di esilio parigino – ben vissuto per sua stessa ammissione in Avenue Danfert Rocherau, ultimo piano, vista su Montparnasse, professore di economia e politica alla Sorbona – il passamontagna non c’è più. [...] L’uomo è rimasto quello che era. Con una capacità, fuori dall’ordinario, di controllare le emozioni. Con la sua risatina improvvisa quanto nevrotica. Con gli occhi che si rimpiccioliscono a comando. Con qualche primavera in più alle spalle. [...] Il professore veste come vestivano gli intellettuali del Sessantotto. I jeans, la camicia senza cravatta, la giacca. Forse sono diverse le scarpe. Oggi da vela. Allora non così di moda. La montatura degli occhiali è cambiata. Il fisico è sempre asciutto.
I comprimari
Nel caso 7 aprile, che non a caso a volte viene chiamato caso Negri, non c’è spazio insomma per altri attori. Tutta una storia, quella di un gruppo della sinistra extraparlamentare dalla vita travagliata e contraddittoria, viene presentata come un percorso diritto e incarnata direttamente in una persona. Potere operaio insomma come “one man band”. E poi tutta Potere operaio in Autonomia (il capo è sempre Negri). Non si possono neanche concepire percorsi personali differenti. Il percorso di Negri diventa forzatamente il percorso di tutti. E’ lui l’unico in grado di attirare l’attenzione dei media. Il cattivo maestro per eccellenza. Gli altri sono comprimari. Gli unici che reggono inizialmente il confronto sono Oreste Scalzone e Franco Piperno, «detto “penna continua”, dopo che dal carcere di Parigi non si stancava di scrivere una se non due lettere al giorno a quotidiani e settimanali» (Corriere della Sera, 22 dicembre 1979). Ma per gli imputati padovani non c’è speranza. O sono “bracci destri” di Negri (come Vesce e Ferrari Bravo che verranno sempre indicati, non si sa proprio perché, tra i massimi vertici della struttura) oppure persone comunque manovrate da lui.
Un’annotazione la merita in questo anche il comportamento di Negri stesso. Il professore sembra ci tenga ad apparire come la “prima donna della rivoluzione”. E come tale merita l’attenzione non solo dei quotidiani ma anche dei rotocalchi e dei settimanali popolare (Oggi, Panorama, Epoca, l’Espresso). Negri sembra l’unico in grado di poter parlare. Eppure, in questo speculare al suo antagonista Pietro Calogero, Negri gioca con le parole e le ambiguità. Mai una parola per i compagni di disavventura che non possono godere della stessa attenzione della stampa. Solo attenzione e esaltazione al proprio percorso, un sottile (e incomprensibile ai più) gioco teorico non per svelare l’infondatezza delle accuse, bensì quella del diritto dello Stato Italiano a giudicare. Un narcisismo che sicuramente ha contribuito a oscurare casi clamorosi completamente dimenticati in cella dalla stampa.
10. I Garantisti, i fiancheggiatori
Come abbiamo già potuto vedere altrove, la categoria dei cosiddetti “garantisti” viene tirata più volta in ballo. In sostanza, soprattutto per il PCI, ma anche da come viene interpretato il termine, ad esempio, da Ferrari (si veda l’intervista in appendice), garantisti è spesso sinonimo di fiancheggiatori. Nel 7 aprile, secondo i quotidiani, è un titolo che si autoattribuisce chi è contro l’inchiesta. Un modo per “mimetizzarsi”, con la scusa delle garanzie appunto. Una categoria che appare tutta interna alla sinistra.
Il garantismo è forse una delle vittime eccellenti del 7 aprile, schiacciato tra il disprezzo dell’Autonomia («Per noi Garantismo significa disarmo di fronte al nemico»), la sua svalutazione teorica (come ipocrisia della finta democrazia liberale) e la chiamata alle armi di comunisti e apparati dello Stato. Sarebbe interessante un confronto dell’uso che della parola viene fatto in questo caso e in quello di Tangentopoli.
Il ragionamento sottostante è tipico dei momenti di emergenza: un pericolo enorme minaccia la democrazia, chi non lo capisce e continua ad invocare le garanzie della difesa rischia di fare il gioco dei terroristi.
Infatti se è un nemico tanto pericoloso quello attaccato attraverso l’inchiesta, allora tutte le richieste che andranno contro i magistrati padovani altro non saranno che tentativi di reazione. E’ sempre Valiani, il 15 aprile sul Corriere, a parlarne. La richiesta delle prove è solo un tranello in cui i magistrati padovani fanno bene a non cadere:
Nell’attesa, diffidiamo delle proteste dei sostenitori o apologeti dell’eversione e delle smentite interessate, specie se provengono dai latitanti che, qualora fossero innocenti, si costituirebbero. […] Liberi i giudici di condannare od assolvere, secondo coscienza, secondo le prove che hanno o non hanno. Devono sentirsi liberi, altresì, dai ricatti. Non possono liberarsi invece, del rispetto del segreto istruttorio. Si devono respingere perciò gli ultimatum ricattatori coi quali gli estremisti ed i loro simpatizzanti fanno pressione sugli inquirenti.
Una specie di “nemico interno” (con tutte le conseguenze che ciò determina: infidia e sospetti) dal quale difendersi. Un insieme di singoli che con la continua e pressante richiesta di garanzie e di esibizione delle prove non fa altro che mettere in difficoltà l’inchiesta, ostacolare il lavoro dei magistrati.
Ma chi sono i garantisti per la stampa? In genere sono intellettuali che si possono dividere in due categorie. Ingenui, che credono veramente a quel che dicono ma non si accorgono di essere strumentalizzati, e i veri e propri fiancheggiatori, intellettuali che non credono affatto alla democrazia liberale e quindi usano strumentalmente il tema del garantismo per difendere persone che questa democrazia e questo sistema di garanzie vorrebbero sovvertire e sicuramente non per creare un sistema maggiormente garantista. Quindi il dilemma di fondo, detto poche volte perché in evidente contrasto con qualsiasi teoria democratica, è se si debbano o meno applicare le garanzie democratiche a persone che contro lo Stato e contro questa democrazia (spesso puntualizzata come “imperfetta ma pur sempre democrazia”) insegnano e agiscono. Questo è il vero punto. Il resto serve per fare arrivare il dibattito lì in modo non troppo brutale.
In quest’ottica rientrano alcuni “avvertimenti” agli stessi garantisti: la stampa esalta tutte le dichiarazioni degli imputati che dicono di voler sfruttare il garantismo senza crederci veramente (e in effetti, almeno per Negri, il garantismo non è altro che una finzione e una ipocrisia del sistema capitalistico).
L’Unità del 3 maggio 1979 ad esempio riporta alcuni brani di una lettera che Oreste Scalzone ha scritto al procuratore Calogero ed è stata pubblicata dall’Espresso. L’articolo “Oreste Scalzone fa sapere...” non è firmato.
Scalzone conclude dicendo di aver fiducia in un alleato di cui la democrazia, dice, stenta a liberarsi: il “garantismo” e i vincoli che esso impone. Si dice sicuro Scalzone che il “garantismo” è dalla sua parte, svelando con ciò tutta la limitatezza di certe concezioni della democrazia e delle garanzie democratiche. Che non sono un trucco, un incastro, uno strumento di azzeccagarbugli, ma un terreno sul quale la democrazia conta per difendersi, per crescere contestando anche quanti – autonomi o mafiosi – il “garantismo” intendono solo un varco per l’impunità.
Anche i titoli dell’Unità sono costruiti in modo da accostare sempre la parola garantisti a un’altra con carattere negativo: “Garantisti o neutrali?”, oppure “Garantismo o indulgenza?”.
Sull’Unità dell’8 maggio appare un articolo che apre la polemica con il Manifesto per i suoi dubbi a riguardo dell’inchiesta: «Che cosa c’entra con questa battaglia il “garantismo”? Forse che i terroristi che aspettano all’angolo di una strada per spaccargli il cranio con una spranga o i killer che uccidono spietatamente un magistrato o un operaio possono essere oggetto di indulgenza perché per trent’anni i governi democristiani hanno fatto e permesso ogni tipo di intrallazzo?»
Se poi, con la distribuzione di volantini intimidatori la categoria “Autonomi” si dimostra indegna di qualsiasi rispetto (l’Unità li chiama “belve”) allora la rabbia verso questi garantisti cresce ancor di più:
...innanzitutto a coloro che, di fronte all’inchiesta padovana e ora a quella genovese sull’uccisione del comunista Guido Rossa, hanno lanciato i loro strali sdegnati contro la criminalizzazione del dissenso. Da ferrei garantisti dovrebbero sapere che, in uno Stato di diritto, non possono esservi solo garanzie per l’imputato ma anche quelle per le fonti testimoniali. Attendiamo che alzino le loro proteste. Se taceranno, ognuno sarà autorizzato a pensare che, al di là delle chiacchiere li muove solo la speranza che l’intimidazione vada a segno, che la verità vada irreparabilmente inquinata o che, peggio, i meccanismi stessi della giustizia siano tanto ricattati da precipitare entro la logica di una guerra senza regole, proprio come vuole l’eversione.
Insomma i cosiddetti garantisti nascondono, tutti, ben altri fini. Con le scuse delle garanzie puntano invece allo sfascio del sistema. In questo sembrano essere accomunabili quasi alla categoria dei “traditori”, persone meno degne degli inquisiti perché non operano apertamente bensì fingono di stare da una parte mentre invece stanno dall’altra.
Un altro tema importante già emerso è quello delle “chiacchiere”: i garantisti sono in genere avvocati, intellettuali. Gente insomma che chiacchiera. Il Paese brucia per l’azione dei terroristi e questi chiacchierano. Mentre noi siamo in prima linea loro continuano a chiacchierare. Il termine non è sicuramente involontario né innocuo, nasconde invece una precisa concezione della categoria.
Ma la definizione dei garantisti è fatta anche di tante piccole frecciate, riferimenti a eventi che si sono verificati in passato. Come Sartori che il 2 dicembre 1979, nella sua intervista apparsa sull’Unità, fa riferimento all’inchiesta del ’73 sulla Rosa dei Venti. «Di quell’inchiesta – ricorda Sartori – non è rimasta traccia. Tutto a Roma e tutto insabbiato, cancellato. Anche allora si trattava di reati associativi, di un processo a un’organizzazione. Miceli certo non era andato a collocare bombe di persona, non aveva lasciato impronte digitali. Strano che alla magistratura romana sia mancato per quell’affossamento il plauso di certi garantisti». Questi garantisti di sinistra insomma si muovono solo per i “loro” bombaroli.
L’effetto dell’azione dei garantisti è deleterio non solo perché insinua il dubbio che l’azione della magistratura non venga condotta in maniera corretta ma anche perché rischiano di attivare tutte le lungaggini del sistema penale. Non c’è insomma bisogno di finti “garantisti” quando ci sono in campo già tutte le (eccessive) garanzie del nostro codice penale. Come scrive Sartori in occasione della decisione di reincarcerare cinque imputati (Bianchini, Di Rocco, Del Re, Tramonte, Serafini) il 23 aprile 1980: «Il meccanismo giudiziario, in questo caso, è davvero garantista fino in fondo».
11. Palombarini, il nemico interno
Anche la figura di Giovanni Palombarini che emerge dal racconto dei quotidiani si contrappone a quella di Pietro Calogero. Ma si tratta di una sorta di “nemico” interno, quasi di una talpa. L’atteggiamento della stampa nei suoi confronti è ondeggiante, ma raggiunge punte di estrema durezza in particolare sull’Unità. Bisogna ricordare che Palombarini per i cronisti è anche una fonte importante. L’Unità del 5 maggio 1979 riporta una lunga intervista con Nunziante. In realtà l’occasione istituzionale era data dalla conferenza stampa di Palombarini ma il quotidiano comunista decide di spostare completamente l’attenzione ignorandolo e dedicandogli solamente poche righe:
Palombarini ha aggiunto: “Domani depositerò i verbali di interrogatorio. Immagino che la difesa vi informerà sul loro contenuto, e penso che faccia bene. Questo è il tipo di processo in cui il segreto istruttorio è davvero pesante”. Difficile capire se da queste parole emerga un implicito giudizio dubitativo del magistrati sull’istruttoria o se sia solo la conseguenza di un atteggiamento da sempre tenuto da Palombarini nei confronti del segreto istruttorio considerato un elemento dannoso dei diritti a sapere e controllare dell’opinione pubblica. Ma in ogni caso il segreto istruttorio ci sembra un elemento da eliminare con avvedutezza, riformando anche i meccanismi del processo e il ruolo dei protagonisti: tant’è che il giudice Palombarini se n’è giustamente avvalso.
L’atteggiamento nei confronti del giudice istruttore non è insomma pregiudizialmente contrario. Si potrebbe definire quasi oggettivo, valuta volta per volta il suo comportamento e le sue azioni. Solo che la base del parametro non è se l’azione condotta sia o meno giusta o giustificata ma se sia o meno contro l’azione di Calogero, che è quindi assunto come parametro e misura della correttezza dell’azione. La stampa comunista non lo vede certo di buon occhio. Scrive Giulio Obici su Paese Sera già il 18 aprile: «Palombarini è oggi il giudice più chiacchierato di Padova. Un giudice discusso perché un anno fa prosciolse un gruppo di autonomi inquisiti da Calogero, tra cui lo stesso Negri». Ci si dimentica, per inciso, che era stato lo stesso Calogero a chiedere quel proscioglimento. Invece bene, molto bene, quando a fine maggio Palombarini nega la scarcerazione di Carmela di Rocco e Alisa Dal Re. Come scrive l’Unità del 19 maggio 1979:
Comunque, dalla decisione del giudice istruttore si deduce che l’istruttoria padovana è “forte”, basata su prove robuste. Il dott. Palombarini, si sa, è un noto “garantista”, per usare un brutto termine di moda..[...] Ora, se dopo questo lavoro la sua decisione è stata ugualmente negativa bisogna proprio pensare che nei confronti delle due donne (arrestate per associazione sovversiva e indiziate di banda armata) le prove esistenti siano realmente solide ed indichino tutto fuorché una “criminalizzazione delle idee”. In più, si può ricavare da questo episodio anche un ulteriore segnale di fondatezza dell’intera istruttoria, visto che la posizione delle due imputate è sempre stata presentata dalla difesa come la più marginale.
Il crollo della popolarità del magistrato avviene tra fine giugno e inizio luglio. Il ritardo con il quale Palombarini risponde alle nuove richieste di Calogero scatena la stampa. Ancora prima che il giudice istruttore decida la scarcerazione della Di Rocco e neghi i nuovi arresti, Pietro Calogero rilascia all’Unità (il 30 giugno) una durissima intervista. L’abbinata Sartori-Calogero crea quasi un mostro. Innanzitutto la chiacchierata con Calogero viene introdotta creando un quadro che faccia risaltare le conseguenze (per Sartori negative) del ritardo della risposta di Palombarini. I mandati di cattura, rivela l’Unità, devono colpire veri e propri killers. «In più, ma con minor certezza, un terzo elemento: la richiesta di mandato di cattura nei confronti di alcuni “killers” del terrorismo diffuso padovano per attentati specifici commessi tra il ’77 e il 78 (soprattutto numerosi ferimenti alle gambe)». Questa ”minor certezza” è proprio una bugia. Innanzitutto perché il processo padovano non ha visto imputato nessuno di omicidio. A meno che. A meno che l’Unità (come si intuisce dalla parentesi) non usi la parola killer non nel suo significato reale (ovvero l’esecutore di un omicidio, meglio se su commissione) ma in un significato più ampio di come uno che spara. Ma l’ambiguità gioca sicuramente alla costruzione del discorso. Ci sono dei killers che girano impuniti per Padova: la colpa è di Palombarini. Un giudice che deve essere anche un tipo scontroso visto che Calogero dichiara: «non c’è alcuna comunicazione con il giudice istruttore se non per iscritto». E poi l’esempio già citato. Palombarini non contesterebbe tutte le accuse ma solo «fatti specifici» omettendo invece il «reato associativo». «Sarebbe come se in un caso di omicidio ad un imputato venisse contestato il possesso dell’arma senza fare riferimento al fatto specifico che con quell’arma è stata uccisa una persona». Il paragone, a mio parere, non c’entra veramente nulla. Ma il discorso è chiuso e si potrebbe parafrasare, traendone le logiche conclusioni, grossomodo così: “ci sono dei killers che girano per Padova, io Calogero, voglio arrestarli, ma Palombarini, anche negli interrogatori, perde tempo: ha davanti degli assassini e invece di contestargli lo sparo contesta il possesso dell’arma da fuoco”. Ovviamente Pietro Calogero questo non l’ha mai detto, ma mettendo assieme i pezzi dell’articolo, questo è quello che il sottoscritto ha capito.
Al seguito di questa intervista il primo luglio il resto della procura si schiera. Repubblica prova a intervistare direttamente il giudice istruttore:
Sul citofono la targhetta dice: “Palombarini – Magistratura Democratica” perché il giudice istruttore è uno dei tre segretari di Md nel Triveneto. Appartamento al piano terra, gran confusione dei cinque figli che giocano a pallone nel corridoio, il giudice lavora sodo con il collega Fabiani e la moglie offre un grappino. Giudice dichiarazioni pesanti quelle di Calogero...”Io dico questo: l’istruttoria su Autonomia la stiamo facendo, stiamo per decidere sulle istanze di scarcerazione e sulle nuove richieste di Calogero”. Non ha aggiunto altro il giudice ma aveva l’aria preoccupata, perplessa, sorpresa, identica a quella di Fabiani. La decisione di scarcerare Carmela Di Rocco Palombarini non l’ha ancora presa, ma le pressioni e gli attacchi preventivi dei suoi confronti sono pesanti.
Sempre nello stesso pezzo, intitolato “Inchiesta su Toni Negri: magistrati in guerra a Padova”, vengono anche riportate le reazioni degli altri magistrati. Il giudice istruttore Nunziante (che immancabilmente nei quotidiani ha come attributo quello di essere stato «il giudice che assieme a Giovanni Tamburino riuscì a scoprire i segreti della Rosa dei Venti e di qualche Palazzo», uno in gamba insomma, un po’ come Calogero) lascia l’incarico perché «come impostazione delle inchieste io ho identità di vedute con Calogero, la penso come lui» e per comunicarlo a Palombarini ha preso carta e penna constatando «un insanabile dissenso in ordine all’impostazione generale del processo nelle sue linee generali e nelle tematiche fondamentali, alle modalità di assunzione di alcuni atti istruttori come ad esempio gli interrogatori degli imputati ed alcune determinazioni relative alla libertà personale di imputati e imputandi». Ma non è tutto:
Come si può capire la lettera di Nunziante non è certo all’acqua di rose. L’ultima mazzata però deve ancora arrivare: è quella che abbiamo appreso quando abbiamo chiesto l’opinione del procuratore della Repubblica Aldo Fais. “Sono molto amareggiato e preoccupato” sono state le sue ultime parole. “Il giudice istruttore Palombarini ha taciuto del tutto l’esistenza delle prove non le ha contestate agli imputati”...Ma queste sono le stesse accuse di Calogero...”Si le sottoscrivo”. E come si comporterà la procura della Repubblica? “Quasi fossimo seduti sulla riva di un fiume, aspettiamo la decisione di Palombarini – è stata la risposta di Fais – Io mi limito ad osservare che Calogero, per iscritto, ha chiesto al giudice istruttore di contestare prove che poi non sono state contestate. In attesa della decisione di Palombarini ovviamente ci riserviamo il potere di impugnarla davanti alla sezione istruttoria della Corte d’Appello di Venezia.
A parte l’accostamento con il Siddharta di Hermann Hesse, Fais colpisce sia per la durezza dell’attacco, sia per il totale appoggio a Calogero. Lo scontro prefigurato, quello del ricorso alla Corte d’Appello di Venezia, sarà un tormentone della vicenda processuale.
Ma anche non citato, Palombarini entra in numerosi articoli. Di fronte al terzo blitz di Pietro Calogero, Michele Sartori ne approfitta per una piccola stoccata a Palombarini. «Certo che stavolta l’imputazione è pesante: per tutti, banda armata (mentre l’ufficio istruzione ha concluso una istanza istruttoria sui “vertici” mantenendo solo il reato di associazione sovversiva)». L’ennesimo blitz è per Sartori la riprova dell’esistenza di una banda armata. L’istruttoria di Palombarini più che essere “stanca”, stanca e basta.
Ma quando il 28 marzo Palombarini contesta a nove persone l’accusa di banda armata l’Unità esulta e cambia registro. Sembra di assistere all’uso di carota e bastone. Se Palombarini fa il bravo allora se ne scrive bene:
Vale la pena di sottolineare che per tutte queste nove persone il PM Calogero aveva chiesto a Palombarini d’emettere mandato di cattura per banda armata fin dallo scorso giugno. All’epoca Palombarini rifiutò il provvedimento (pende ancora un ricorso del PM in Corte d’appello). Pochi giorni fa, stavolta sulla base delle nuove testimonianze e di prove di reati gravissimi commessi dagli stessi imputati, Calogero aveva ripetuto la richiesta; ora il giudice istruttore l’ha accolta. [...] Ora, se il giudice istruttore, come sembra certo, ha aderito per la prima volta a questa impostazione, superando così tutte le sue fortissime remore precedenti (fino a tre mesi fa, quando chiuse il 7 aprile, secondo Palombarini, Autonomia era un’associazione sovversiva sì ma priva di cervelli, scarsamente organizzata, limitata alla sola città di Padova e soprattutto scollegata da qualsiasi livello armato) significa che il materiale raccolto dalla Procura con l’inchiesta sfociata negli arresti dell’11 marzo è davvero forte. E vuol anche dire che il processo 7 aprile, unificato alla nuova istruttoria, potrebbe ricevere quel necessario impulso inquisitorio che finora gli era troppo spesso mancato.
Per Ferrari del Corriere Palombarini è un magistrato onesto. «”L’11 marzo ci ha aiutato a capire meglio la realtà”, dice con onestà, il giudice istruttore Giovanni Palombarini»
Invece per l’Unità Palombarini è una sorta di bestia nera. Le sue tesi vengono esposte (a volte molto succintamente) per poi commentare che esse sono «superate in ogni sede giudiziaria». Nel documento di Palombarini «ovunque ricorrono, oltremodo esplicite e personalizzate, le differenze profonde di analisi e di conclusioni fra il giudice istruttore e il PM» (Unità 10 settembre 1981). Quell’”oltremodo”, di cui si sente tutto il significato letterale, sembra indicare una certa maleducazione. Le differenze, rese così esplicite e poi personalizzate stanno ad indicare una chiara mancanza di stile. Ma se ricordiamo bene è stato Calogero semmai ad attaccare, lì sì esplicitamente (cioè in pubblico con una chiacchierata) e personalmente, nell’intervista del 30 giugno ’79, il giudice istruttore. Sartori non può non saperlo o non ricordarlo. Quell’articolo lo ha scritto lui.
12. Non si vedono ma ci sono. Le prove e il superteste tra fede e indiscrezioni
Non si vedono ma ci sono. Un giornalista solitamente dubita sempre di ciò che non vede. Nel 7 aprile invece sembra che spesso il non aver ancora visto le prove (che solitamente sono tenute in serbo dai magistrati per occasioni più importanti, si veda ad esempio il titolo dell’Unità del 23 aprile 1979: “Non ancora esibite le prove più forti contro Negri”) equivalga a prova certa della loro esistenza.
E poi se non ci fossero le prove, i magistrati sarebbero dei pazzi. Quindi le prove ci sono.
Le prove, ecco il punto. “Ma voi le prove le avete?” è stato chiesto per la centesima volta al procuratore Fais. Risposta: “Si, abbiamo prove”. “Prove testimoniali o prove documentali?”. “Prove, prove, prove. Ci prendete forse per una congrega di pazzi? Pensate veramente che avremmo firmato ordini di cattura con accuse tanto gravi soltanto sulla base degli scritti di Toni Negri? Andiamo, signori. Calogero ha studiato e indagato per anni prima di scoprire chi c’è a capo del terrorismo nazionale. Certo, voi vorreste sapere tutto. Saprete! L’opinione pubblica saprà”.(Corriere della Sera, 13 aprile 1979)
Lo schema è quasi idealtipico. Si espone l’ipotesi accusatoria, si dice che al momento non sono ancora state esibite le prove perché vengono tenute in serbo per chissà quale occasione e si chiude con una frase di circostanza che professa la fede del cronista. Il che porta a formulare affermazioni assolutamente insensate.
«Ma l’ipotesi dei magistrati è evidentemente sostenuta da solide prove» (Unità – 22 aprile 1979).
Martedì 24 aprile 1979 l’Unità apre così: “Gallucci: «Le prove ci sono e ne stanno emergendo altre». Nell’articolo si legge che dalla
“copiosa documentazione sequestrata” continuano ad uscire cose compromettenti per il docente padovano. Anche qui c’è un’implicita risposta ai legali della difesa, i quali fino all’altro ieri hanno ripetuto che le contestazioni a Negri sono di carattere puramente ideologico[...] il giudice Amato ha fatto mettere a verbale questa premessa: “Non si ritiene allo stato di elencare tutti gli elementi di prova per non pregiudicare l’istruttoria”. E’ una facoltà, questa, che gli inquirenti traggono da un articolo del codice di procedura penale (il 367). Da qui sembra di capire che, finora, i magistrati non hanno scoperto le loro “carte” più forti, cioè le testimonianze raccolte durante l’inchiesta svolta a Padova.
Il ragionamento è sempre quello e verrà ripetuto più volte: se i giudici non hanno ancora esibito le prove che inchioderebbero definitivamente Negri come mente del terrorismo italiano è semplicemente per un calcolo strategico. Chi non lo capisce è tutto sommato un po’ “sciocco”, non ha capito il gioco dei giudici e, ovviamente, rischia di fare il gioco degli imputati alimentando un clima di sospetto che non giova all’inchiesta.
Una stampa con molta fede
Tanto che credere o meno nell’esistenza delle prove diventa a questo punto un atto di fede. Lo spiega bene Ferrari sul Corriere del 6 maggio quando riporta il testo di un’intervista rilasciata a Repubblica da Calogero. «I casi sono due: o crediamo al PM Calogero, ingegnere dell’inchiesta sugli ideologi dell’Autonomia e sui presunti capi delle Brigate Rosse; oppure non ci crediamo.[...] Non ha ancora aperto il libro delle prove, dei documenti perché – ha detto – “non è ancora il momento”. E quando cocciutamente, gli è stato chiesto “per quale motivo” il giudice ha risposto: “aspettate e vedrete”». Il titolo del pezzo dal quale sono state tratte queste righe è: “Le prove contro i capi di Autonomia? Aspettate e vedrete, dice Calogero”. Un atto di fede insomma. E sostanzialmente, la stampa è credente. Tanto che, per rimanere con i piedi per terra legati ai fatti, i giornalisti sono costretti all’esegesi delle parole del procuratore leggendoci, inevitabilmente un segno, un accenno, all’esistenza delle prove.
Ad esempio Calogero dice che dell’inchiesta su via Fani «Non tutto tornerà a Padova»? I giornali, tutti, traducono «le prove per il delitto Moro ci sono ma non potete conoscerle ora».
Le prove sulla responsabilità nell’omicidio Moro? «L’elemento delle telefonate -dice Calogero a Repubblica il 6 maggio del 1979 - non è il solo: ci sono altre cose, ben più gravi e importanti».
Insomma si assiste, in mancanza sostanziale di elementi ma con un’incrollabile fede in essi, nell’esaltazione della strategia inquirente che giustifica ex post qualsiasi cosa. A fine maggio ancora non vengono contestate le prove più forti? «A livello confidenziale poi viene data un’altra spiegazione: se ogni parola che contestiamo agli imputati – dicono – finisce sulle pagine dei giornali perché i legali violano sistematicamente il segreto istruttorio è logico che, come minimo, prima di contestare per intero un documento dobbiamo avere il tempo di controllare tutte le implicazioni che esso può contenere, eventuali nomi nuovi, circostanze, date, senza far conoscere in anticipo le nostre mosse» (Unità del 27 maggio 1979). Palombarini non scarcera la Di Rocco e la Del Re. Da questo, scrive l’Unità, « si deduce che l’istruttoria padovana è forte e basata su prove robuste».
Il supertestimone nel cassetto
Si è così convinti della palese colpevolezza degli arrestati che i cronisti si sorprendono spesso della poca fiducia che gli stessi imputati hanno verso gli inquirenti. «Ci sono – e sono evidenti – i tentativi di svuotare di ogni attendibilità il testimone che i magistrati agitano ad ogni interrogatorio. Tutti – forse immaginando di chi si tratta – ieri si diceva che potrebbe essere una donna, ex di Potere Operaio poi militante del PC – negano che i racconti fatti ai giudici siano credibili, bollandoli “come un coacervo di sconnesse e avventurose informazioni”». (Corriere 6 maggio)
Mancano le prove quindi. E sulle accuse iniziali continueranno a mancare. Ma i giornali piuttosto che fermarsi e riflettere, rivedere il proprio orientamento, continuano questa sorta di buffa arrampicata sugli specchi confondendo accuse con indizi, l’effetto con la causa.
«La comunicazione giudiziaria di per sé non prova nulla, questo è ovvio. Ma il fatto che i magistrati inquirenti leghino il nome di Negri a delitti nefandi come l’assassinio di Campanile e il sequestro e l’uccisione di Saronio, sta ad indicare che, per l’accusa, la posizione del docente di Padova si è ulteriormente aggravata» (La Stampa, 23 dicembre ’79).
Le indiscrezioni
Mancano fatti certi è vero, ma in compenso dilagano voci e indiscrezioni. Il loro ruolo è veramente fondamentale se si vuole capire la costruzione della narrazione. I quotidiani le indiscrezioni le riportano fin dall’inizio. Il 1979 è un’indiscrezione continua. L’Unità del 18 aprile 1979, pagato pegno alla decenza, definendo “palazzaccio” il luogo da cui provengono le indiscrezioni ci si getta a capofitto. Le indiscrezioni diventano vere e proprie accuse contribuendo a costruire il ritratto degli indagati.
Gli inquirenti avrebbero in mano scritti di Toni Negri che niente avrebbero a che fare con le sue elaborazioni ideologiche […]; questi documenti sarebbero stati nascosti dal docente padovano una settimana prima del suo arresto, ma sono stati ugualmente rintracciati dalla polizia; c’è un’inchiesta parallela tendente ad accertare chi fu a mettere in allarme Toni Negri, inducendolo a far sparire i documenti più “scottanti”: i sospetti – a quanto sembra – cadrebbero sugli stessi ambienti giudiziari di Padova. […] Una settimana prima che il sostituto procuratore Pietro Calogero dia il via agli arresti, accade un episodio a dir poco singolare. Toni Negri è nel suo studio, alla facoltà di Scienze Politiche di Padova. Riceve una telefonata importante: qualcuno lo avverte che il terreno sta per franargli sotto i piedi. Il docente corre ai ripari: raccoglie in una cassetta metallica un pacchetto di documenti che custodiva in facoltà, va da un conoscente, un professionista padovano e chiede di conservargli tutto senza spiegargli il perché. Questi “aiuti” di cui ha potuto godere il docente padovano sono ora oggetto di un’inchiesta parallela. Secondo alcune voci, i sospetti sarebbero caduti proprio sugli ambienti giudiziari di Padova. E’ un capitolo inquietante ancora aperto. […] Cosa contiene la cassetta? Ancora indiscrezioni: non si tratterebbe di scritti che riguardano gli studi e le elaborazioni ideologiche del docente, sarebbero invece appunti contenenti indicazioni operative, considerazioni logistiche su azioni armate delle Brigate Rosse, progetti che dimostrerebbero – secondo gli inquirenti – il passaggio di Toni Negri, come si dice, dalla teoria alla prassi. […] Ce ne sarebbe una abbastanza sconcertante: negli ultimi tempi, secondo quanto accertato dalla polizia, il docente padovano avrebbe simulato frequenti viaggi a Parigi. Spesso avrebbe addirittura acquistato i biglietti del treno o dell’aereo per la capitale francese, mostrandoli con indifferenza ad amici e conoscenti: ma ogni volta gli agenti che pedinavano da tempo Negri avrebbero constatato che si spostava soltanto sul territorio nazionale.
Per il Corriere «tra i documenti messi in salvo da Negri c’è chi sostiene che ci sia una bozza di manuale operativo delle BR scritta di pugno dall’imputato».
Quasi tutto falso, come dimostreranno le indagini e, soprattutto, tutto rivelato prima che Toni Negri venga interrogato a proposito due giorni dopo. La montagna di indiscrezioni contribuisce però ad aumentare la sensazione che gli inquirenti abbiano in mano prove inconfutabili che porteranno al riconoscimento del professore padovano come la mente delle BR e il suo passaggio alla storia come una delle menti più diaboliche delle forze del male. Ma vediamo una ad una le indiscrezioni per provare a smontarle.
La questione della “cassa” (metallica poi! si scoprirà che si tratta di semplici raccoglitori) in cui Negri avrebbe nascosto le carte più “scottanti” si chiarirà in ben poco tempo. Negri, nell’interrogatorio del 20 aprile 1979, spiegherà così la vicenda:
Le documentazioni in questione furono da me consegnate all’architetto Massironi. Prima le tenevo nella mia abitazione; quando mi trasferii nel ’72 a Milano depositai la documentazione presso la facoltà di Scienze Politiche nell’Università di Padova. Successivamente dato che si verificavano alcune occupazioni, per evitare che si potessero disperdere pregai l’architetto Massironi – che ha lo studio dirimpetto all’università – di conservarle lui. Quando venni a sapere che le documentazioni erano state sequestrate per il tramite dell’avv. Berti di Padova, feci sapere al PM dott. Calogero, che era mia intenzione presentarmi davanti a lui per chiedergli la restituzione del materiale e per dare eventuali chiarimenti. Al riguardo faccio presente che avevo raccolto numerose documentazioni concernenti gli anni 60 e riguardanti la storia di movimenti politici italiani. Quindi avevo fatto donazione delle documentazioni a una fondazione. Avevo successivamente iniziato a raccogliere le documentazioni del periodo degli anni 70 che mi servivano per la “lettura quotidiana” dei movimenti di classe operaia, e che potevano servire per una lettura collettiva. Era anche questa volta mio intendimento effettuare una donazione di queste documentazioni ad una fondazione (27).
Tutto confermato successivamente dal diretto interessato. E i documenti “scottanti” ritrovati nell’archivio Massironi, stando ai verbali degli interrogatori, sono, senza voler entrare nei contenuti, nell’ordine: un documento dal titolo “Potere Operaio. Proposta di documento nazionale sulle scadenze del 72”; dattiloscritto dal titolo “Lama, Benvenuto, Macario” (poi pubblicato su Rosso); dattiloscritto dal titolo “tesi operaia sulla lotta e sulle organizzazioni (poi pubblicato su Rosso); manoscritto dove si accenna allo stravolgimento e all’attacco della rappresentanza sindacale; dattiloscritto dal titolo “Bozza orientativa per la costruzione di un coordinamento operaio” (di cui Negri sostiene di non essere l’autore); manoscritto dove tra l’altro è scritto “la ronda – la brigata – la guardia rossa in scarpe da tennis”; una lettera nella quale il mittente concorda con Negri sulla funzionalità pratica delle ronde – dattiloscritto che inizia con la frase “come nel 77….” (bozza di un articolo poi pubblicato su Rosso n15-16); altre lettere; appunti e volantini etc etc.
Tutto questo per dire che i documenti tratti dall’Archivio Massironi, pur non volendone assolutamente giudicare la validità giuridica, non contengono affatto come indicato dall’Unità «indicazioni operative, considerazioni logistiche su azioni armate delle Brigate Rosse, progetti che dimostrerebbero – secondo gli inquirenti – il passaggio di Toni Negri, come si dice, dalla teoria alla prassi».
Ma l’articolo in questione presenta altri fatti di rilievo dal punto fabulistico. Innanzitutto introduce la figura della “talpa”, un amico fidato di Negri che dall’interno dell’ambiente giudiziario padovano lo avvertirebbe in caso di pericolo. E’ un elemento che accresce ulteriormente la sensazione di accerchiamento, di pericolo reale per gli inquirenti coraggiosi che stanno investigando sul 7 aprile. Il nemico interno anche come sintomo di una struttura terroristica avanzatissima. Ma la talpa, ci dice la stampa, sarà scoperta da un’inchiesta della magistratura. Che fine ha fatto questa inchiesta? L’Unità stizzita, riportando le “smentite ufficiali” nega la sua esistenza. C’era veramente la “talpa”, la spia? Chi interpretava questo spregevole ruolo? La stampa italiana non ce lo dirà mai. Quello che rimane è solo il sospetto.
Un’altra questione, quella dei frequenti viaggi a Parigi. L’Unità innanzitutto evita di ricordare ai lettori che Negri insegna anche in Francia, elemento che farebbe apparire meno stramba la faccenda. C’è poi quel particolare: Negri che mostra “con indifferenza” i biglietti a amici e conoscenti. Evidentemente per seminare, previdente, alibi a futura memoria. Sempre diabolico. Un’ultima osservazione in merito. Non era possibile per redazioni come l’Unità o il Corriere fare una telefonata a Parigi per accertarsi se il professor Negri l’ avesse o meno raggiunta di recente? Era l’unica cosa originale che potessero fare, per aggiungere qualcosa di veramente giornalistico a una serie di indiscrezioni che non trovano nella coscienza dell’articolista nessun argine. Si spinge ancora più in là, sullo stesso argomento, Repubblica che ipotizza un diretto collegamento tra la necessità di un alibi e i giorni del sequestro Moro. «Poiché si parla di Parigi c’è la storia del biglietto aereo. Toni Negri – assicurano – ne acquistò uno per il 16 marzo del 1978 ma non lo utilizzò. Che significa? Nessuno lo dice, tuttavia l’insinuazione è chiara: il 16 marzo di un anno fa, fu sequestrato Moro e il “direttore strategico delle BR” tentò di crearsi un alibi, restando sulle rive della Senna, per guidare al sicuro la “operazione” anche se poi, in quegli angosciosi e disperati 55 giorni, di viaggi tra la Francia e l’Italia ne fece non pochi» (da Repubblica, 19 aprile 1979)
Anche al Corriere, pur se con stile migliore, le indiscrezioni costituiscono una delle maggiori fonti del lavoro giornalistico. Come si riconosce il 19 aprile 1979 «L’inchiesta sul caso Moro all’indomani della svolta padovana, continua ad essere caratterizzata dall’assenza totale di notizie certe. In questo vuoto, come sempre avviene, si inseriscono con estrema facilità, indiscrezioni a getto continuo». Il Corriere insomma dubita, ma non per questo seleziona. Anzi se possibile le indiscrezioni riportate superano per quantità quelle dell’Unità. Tutte riportate salvo avvertite in calce «Impossibile per il momento stabilire quanto ci sia di vero» oppure avvertendo che «anche dando per buona l’indiscrezione, si tratterebbe comunque di una affermazione generica e non dimostrata». E poi dissertare per una trentina di righe su un documento ritrovato a Roma per mettere tra parentesi «(sulla cui autenticità i carabinieri hanno espresso forti dubbi)» e riportare fedelmente che, sul ritrovamento dello stesso, si è subito innestata un’altra voce incontrollata. Insomma, in assenza di certezza, i quotidiani dell’aprile e del maggio del 1979 sono un continuo rincorrersi di voci.
L’unico quotidiano che segue con una certa curiosità fino in fondo queste strambe voci è il Manifesto che riferisce come «i documenti non erano conservati in una cassa, come spesso si è scritto, ma in alcuni raccoglitori che erano nella libreria dell’architetto» e che «anche la contestazione riguardante il biglietto ferroviario comprato il 16 marzo dello scorso anno (quello stesso di Repubblica) si è rivelata inesistente. Negri lo aveva comprato quel giorno e usato il 22 dello stesso mese. Il viaggio era per Aix-en-Provence, dove Negri aveva tenuto una lezione. I magistrati non avevano ben letto il testo francese e così era uscita la voce dei biglietti comprati e mai usati» (dal Manifesto del 24 aprile 1979).
NOTE
(27) Comitato 7 aprile e collegio di difesa, a cura di, Processo all’Autonomia, Cosenza, Lerici, 1979, p.135.
(21-CONTINUA)
9 ottobre. In mattinata una ottantina di rifugiati somali, che dallo sgombero di corso Peschiera vivono nella base della Croce Rossa militare a Settimo Torinese, bloccano per ore l’imbocco dell’autostrada Torino-Milano, sventolando pure uno striscione realizzato con un lenzuolo monouso. Il Prefetto è colto di sopresa, lui che sperava di non dover più sentir parlare di questa storia dei profughi, ed è costretto a mandare un autobus della Gtt per portarli fino in piazza Castello, rimanendo fino all’ora di cena ad ascoltare le loro rimostranze. Il problema, pare, è che nel Centro di accoglienza di Settimo ai rifugiati sembra di essere a Guantanamo.
9 ottobre. Un gruppetto di antirazzisti fa irruzione negli uffici della Camst, in corso Svizzera, ed interrompe il normale tran-tran di impiegati e segretari. Megafono alla mano, in giro per le stanze vengono lasciati un sacco di volantini abbastanze espliciti, proprio come questo qua:
Dieci minuti e via. Giusto per dire anche a loro: “se continuate a far soldi sul Cie non vi passa più”.
Se questo volantino ti piace, scaricalo e fanne buon uso.
8 ottobre. Un gruppo di antimilitaristi anarchici si piazzano intorno alle sei di sera all’angolo tra corso Brescia e corso Giulio Cesare, proprio vicino a dove, da qualche tempo, una camionetta degli alpini usa stazionare ogni pomeriggio. Con sé hanno una mostra, dei volantini, dei tavolini e degli striscioni… bastano queste poche armi a convincere gli alpini a cambiare aria per un po’. Al loro posto un vecchio striscione:
7 ottobre. Verso l’ora di pranzo un gruppo di fascisti di Casapound Torino si è ritrovato davanti alla sede centrale del Politecnico, per fare propaganda: inutilmente, però, perché un bel gruppo di studenti li ha fatti correre via velocemente.
Scarica, stampa e diffondi l’ultimo numero del bollettino (dal 22 settembre al 4 ottobre 2009)
Scarica, stampa e diffondi il numero 1 del bollettino (dal 5 al 18 settembre 2009)
macerie @ Ottobre 10, 2009
Sempre più inviperiti per non poter più guardare la televisione, i reclusi del Cie di corso Brunelleschi a Torino oggi per protestare hanno gettato tutta l’immondizia per terra e hanno impedito l’ingresso agli addetti alle pulizie. Il Direttore del lager, con disprezzo, dice loro di chiedere il decoder “ai vostri amici che vi telefonano.” E Torino Cronaca ironizza sulle “assurde pretese di chi non dovrebbe neppure essere in Italia.” Ma al posto di leggere l’editoriale di Andrea Monticone, leggete la storia di un recluso nel Cie di Torino, tratta dal sito Fortress Europe.
macerie @ Ottobre 10, 2009
Questa mattina, dentro ad un Palazzo di Giustizia blindatissimo, si è tenuta l’udienza per la Sorveglianza Speciale dei due redattori di //Macerie//. Dopo aver sentito un particolarmente sciatto e frettoloso Padalino, la lunga e approfondita arringa dell’avvocato difensore e le dichiarazioni dei due involontari candidati a questa antipatica misura di prevenzione, i giudici si sono presi tutto il tempo per decidere. Giorni o settimane, vedremo.
Ma proprio mentre nell’aula deserta del Tribunale è in corso l’arringa della difesa ai telefoni di Radio Blackout arriva una notizia significativa: nella sede della Camst, in corso Svizzera, sono appena entrati un gruppo di antirazzisti che con megafono e volantini hanno disturbato per un po’ il normale tran-tran dell’ufficio rinfacciando ai presenti (a quanto pare particolarmente insensibili al tema) il brutto affare che ha fatto la loro azienda appaltando la mensa del Cie di corso Brunelleschi. Fino ad oggi, insomma, la minaccia della sorveglianza maroniana non ha spaventato proprio nessuno.
A proposito di Sorveglianza Speciale ascolta un piccolo approfondimento registrato da Radio Blackout insieme ad una compagna della redazione di “Scheggia”, il bollettino bolognese contro ogni forma di reclusione.
Leggi anche:
Sorvegliati di ieri e di oggi
e le dichiarazioni fatte oggi in aula degli imputati
Vi ricordiamo che il prossimo appuntamento contro la “sorveglianza speciale” e il Pacchetto sicurezza sarà domenica prossima, dalle 10.00, in piazza della Repubblica, per un presidio a Porta Palazzo.
macerie @ Ottobre 9, 2009
Una giornata amara per i leghisti di largo Saluzzo. Asserragliati nella loro sede per resistere alla giornata contro la sorveglianza speciale, prima chiedono alla polizia di allontanare una ventina di manifestanti che si erano appiccicati alla loro vetrina. Poi, galvanizzati, si lamentano per lo striscione “sorvegliateci i maroni” che era stato issato tra due lampioni. Dopo mezz’ora di telefonate, probabilmente col Viminale, la polizia chiama rinforzi e decide di sequestrare lo scabroso striscione. Ne nasce un parapiglia, qualche manganellata da una parte e qualche colpo di cavalletto dall’altra, ma alla fine lo striscione viene sequestrato. Poco male, i manifestanti ne tirano fuori un altro simile, ma con la faccia di Maroni un po’ più… flaccida. I leghisti, che invece ce l’hanno sempre più duro, escono allo scoperto e vengono colpiti da una raffica di castagne che li costringe a rientrare in ufficio. Poco dopo, tirano giù la serranda e i manifestanti esultano: ora che la sede è chiusa si legge chiaramente chi c’è dentro: dei “razzisti di merda”. I leghisti tentano di andarsene dal retro, di soppiatto, ma vengono riconosciuti e inseguiti, e se la filano a gambe levate.
Raggiunto l’obiettivo della giornata, è giusto farsi un giretto per San Salvario. Ma la polizia ritiene che non sia opportuno sfilare con un bel cazzone a forma di Maroni in testa al corteo. Allora lo striscione viene sostituito con un più sobrio “contro il razzismo azione diretta” e si può partire. Lungo il tragitto diversi stranieri ascoltano interessati, leggono i volantini, si uniscono alla manifestazione spontanea. E in via Madama Cristina salta di nuovo fuori lo striscione dello scandalo, e con molta intelligenza la polizia ferma il corteo bloccando il traffico per diversi minuti, in modo che tutti vedano per bene il Ministro sul pisello. Terminato lo spettacolo, i manifestanti ripiegano definitivamente lo striscione e ritornano contenti in largo Saluzzo. In via Baretti, si sentono distintamente due carabinieri che si chiedono: “ma perché non va bene lo striscione?”
Lo striscione sequestrato
Lo striscione di riserva
macerie @ Ottobre 8, 2009
Nonostante le porte chiuse dell’aula e di tutto il tribunale un gruppetto di antirazzisti è riuscito ad entrare dentro al Palazzo di Giustizia di Milano in occasione della nuova udienza del processo per la rivolta di via Corelli di agosto. Grande sconcerto della Digos e grosso movimento di truppe - che fino a quel momento avevano presidiato inutilmente l’accesso principale del palazzo -, ma oramai i solidali erano entrati e non c’è stato più niente da fare. Gli antirazzisti sono rimasti sulla soglia dell’aula durante tutta la giornata e a scambiare qualche parola con i detenuti, in particolar modo con i ragazzi che dalla settimana passata sono agli arresti domiciliari.
Dentro l’aula, ascoltati gli ultimi testimoni, è arrivata l’arringa del Pubblico Ministero che ha chiesto al giudice di assolvere uno dei quattordici imputati e di condannare tutti gli altri a pene che vanno dai 2 anni ai 2 anni e 6 mesi di reclusione. Mano pesante, insomma, e non è mancata l’aggravante di clandestinità. Inoltre il Pm ha chiesto alla Procura gli atti che riguardano la vicenda di tentato stupro da parte dell’ispettore capo Vittorio Addesso nei confronti di Joy. Se questa richiesta verrà accettata, sia Joy che la sua compagna di stanza - che in aula ne aveva confermato il racconto - saranno denunciate per calunnia.
La prossima udienza del processo milanese è confermata per martedì 13 ottobre, dalle ore 9.30. Quasi sicuramente sarà il momento della sentenza.
Intanto, dopo tre giorni di alti e bassi, è terminato lo sciopero della fame dei reclusi del Cie di Torino.
Leggi l’appello
Contro le violenze del razzismo di Stato, presidio al processo Corelli!
Continua a pag. 20853
macerie @ Ottobre 8, 2009
LUCCA - Durante il liceo lavoravo come magazziniere in un consorzio agrario, a Porcari, in provincia di Lucca. Ci andavo quasi ogni pomeriggio. Con un ciclomotore Grillo. E spesso mi fermavo a fare miscela dall’unico benzinaio di strada, davanti allo stadio comunale, prima del ponte sul Leccio. Sono passati dieci anni. E confesso che mi ero persino dimenticato dell’esistenza di quel benzinaio. Ma poi stamani ho ricevuto una telefonata da un ragazzo di Agadir. Si chiama H., mi chiamava dal centro di identificazione e espulsione (Cie) di Torino, dove è rinchiuso da quattro mesi. Parlava lento, con la bocca impastata di quando in infermeria abbondano con gli psicofarmaci. Gliel’ho chiesto quasi svogliatamente, in quel momento avevo altre cose urgenti da fare. Dov’è che ti hanno preso? A Porcari ha risposto. Allora ho messo da parte le carte su cui stavo lavorando e gli ho chiesto qualche dettaglio in più.
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