Poetry is a dissociating and anarchic force which through analogy, associations and imagery, thrives on the destruction of known relationships.
Antonin Artaud
I always believed that by the beauty of words, one could change the world.
Armand Gatti
His weapon was the word, and his horizon utopia. Armand Gatti, who died on Thursday, the 6th of April at the age of 94, lived his life fighting with words made weapons, first as a journalist, then writer, poet, film director (in 1960, he films L’Enclos, a drama set in the world of the concentration camp and in 1963, El Otro Cristobal, a reflection on the Cuban revolution), then in theatre, where, with those without name, those at the margins, the forgotten, those without voice and the excluded, collective stories were forged, stories that created new worlds. His passion and energy made him nomadic, multiform, prolific, but always engaged in resistance against the arbitrariness and violence of power.
Revolution is everywhere: House occupations in Rome
The understanding that capitalism is more than a form of economic organisation-exploitation, that the exploitation of labour presupposes the creation and reproduction of the conditions of that exploitation, and that today the production of those conditions is itself a source of profit, renders any radical or anarchist anti-capitalism that focuses exclusively on industrial labour and the factory as the centre of Capital, irrelevant. As labour was never the lynchpin of the system of social relations constitutive of capitalism, a radical politics confined to the organisation of labour was condemned to failure. In the end, it could but offer more of the same (an improved management of labour) or concede that the capitalists in fact do it better.
The necessity of re-producing the social relations of capitalism force a broadening of perspective, a change viewpoint that reveals a total system that permeates, ever increasingly, every facet of daily life. The struggle against, or to create something beyond, capitalism, must then critically embrace the many concerns and needs of people, and push towards responding to those concerns and needs through autonomous forms.
The example of the struggle for housing in Rome, and in Italy more generally, is in this respect of fundamental importance. Refusing to respect the norms of private property and its protective State laws and apparatuses, defending and fighting to make real autonomous forms of collective self-organisation that transgress the divisions of race, ethnicity, sex, and the like, the house occupation movement in the country’s capital, under the banner of the Coordinamento Cittadino di Lotta per la Casa, animates a revolutionary politics of autonomy. If not unique to Italy, its depth, scope and longevity offer lessons to all.
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