Solidarity spaces raided, presses stolen, and homes invaded – anarchists are feeling the full force of Meloni-era repression after police went after a radical newspaper using anti-mafia and anti-terror legislation.
The below article, adapted from a translation of a piece in Alasbarricadas, looks at what happened in the Tuscany clampdown.
“The silence and censorship that power tries to impose on anarchist solidarity does not prevent it from taking place (…), throughout the world, there is a warm longing that surpasses borders and can generate the avalanche that will overwhelm what exists”
Bezmotivny #1
First released in December 2020, Bezmotivny launched as a fortnightly newspaper based in the coastal town of Carrara, around 100km southeast of Genoa. With a focus on direct action and prisoner solidarity, it took a forthright approach to taking on the forces of reaction even as much of Italy’s electorate moved to embrace the far-right. Following 2022’s election of a government led by longtime fascist fellow-traveller Giorgia Meloni, a clash seemed inevitable.
On August 8th of this year, the boot stamped, arriving at the doors of 10 comrades spread across the Italian peninsula who possessed the most dangerous weapon: a printing press. The “anti-terrorist” operation bore a grandiloquent name, “Scripta Scelera,” and the Genoa prosecutor’s office (led by Federico Manotti, a man better known for anti-mafia work), the General Investigations and Special Operations Division (DIGOS) of La Spezia and the Regional Anti-Mafia and Anti-terrorism Directorate (DNA) all participated.
In addition to raids on several private homes, the main target was an anarchist cultural centre and collective, the Gogliardo Fiaschi Anarchist Cultural Circle – a historic venue in Carrara since the 1970s. Magazines, books, pamphlets, posters and computer media were seized.
This is the seventh and last of a short series that we dedicate to the memory of Chile’s revolutionaries on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the 1973 military coup d’état against the Chilean revolution and the government of Salvador Allende.
The “traditional Left” of South America largely inherited a Eurocentric conception of freedom and equality as bound to economic progress. This, in effect, politically marginalised the indigenous populations of the continent, as peoples and/or communities with their own specific ways of living which could not be – and cannot be – simply reduced to the status of (“primitive”, “ignorant”, “underdeveloped”, and the like … the list is a long one) “poor peasants”.
The relationship then between the overwhelmingly European inspired “Left” and native peoples – without wishing thereby to simplify – over time and different territories would be one of encounters and misencounters, thus, often, on the part of the “Left”, perpetuating colonialist and racist ideas and practices towards the indigenous.
There were of course notable exceptions. One only has to think of the Mexican revolution (1910 (or 1906, if one includes the Partido Liberal Mexicano-PLM actions in Baja, California) -1920). Yet this same exception points to the rule, as the tensions between urban and rural, largely indigenous, workers would be instrumentalised to constitute military “Red Brigades” to be sent against the Morelos Commune and Emiliano Zapata.
The Chilean revolution would play out these same tensions, with a local colour. And the efforts of the Salvador Allende government to respond, to varying degrees, to the aspirations of the country’s indigenous peoples reveals the limits of “revolutionary thought and practice” still chained to its enlightenment-colonial past.
This is the sixth of a short series that we dedicate to the memory of Chile’s revolutionaries on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the 1973 military coup d’état against the Chilean revolution and the government of Salvador Allende.
There is a tendency to view the revolutionary process in Chile as limited to the period of the Salvador Allende government (1970-1973). Yet, this is a mistake, a mistake of perspective that limits radical change to state-centred agency. And if anything characterised the events in Chile, it was the relative autonomy of the transformations brought about at the time, an autonomy captured in the slogan, “popular power”; an autonomy struggled for before the Allende government and that would continue after the military coup d’état in 1973.
We share below two articles by the Uruguayan journalist and essayist, Raúl Zibechi, that help to place “Allende’s” revolution in a broader perspective, a perspective that provides a distance from a revolution driven by a leader to a revolution animated, in all of its diversity, from below. And we close with video recorded interviews, with Zibechi, in English and Spanish.
As a person, I pay for what I say. … Refusal has always been a very important act carried out by saints and hermits but also by intellectuals. The very few people who made history are those who said no, not the courtesans and the cardinals’ assistants.
Pier Paolo Pasolini, from an interview with L’Unità interview, 01/11/1975
This is the fifth of a short series that we dedicate to the memory of Chile’s revolutionaries on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the 1973 military coup d’état against the Chilean revolution and the government of Salvador Allende.
The words “there is no revolution without song” are Salvador Allende’s and they point to the profound relationship between what is typically referred to as “political revolution” and “artistic revolution”; or stated differently, any revolution is an eruption of creativity which manifests itself in all spheres of life – spheres whose borders wane and abate in the very process of revolution -, including in what is formally called art.
This is the fourth of a short series that we dedicate to the memory of Chile’s revolutionaries on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the 1973 military coup d’état against the Chilean revolution and the government of Salvador Allende.
A story is told of Salvador Allende, and by him, that as a young man and student in Valparaíso, Chile, he would seek the company after school of an old Italian anarchist and shoe maker, Juan Demarchi, from whom he received his first political education. However fanciful the story is, it does reveal the significance of anarchism and the anarchist movement in the country’s political imaginary, so much so, that it has even been suggested that anarchism was the source of Allende’s own understanding of “popular democracy”.
Human cost: Political prisoner executed after the coup
We share below anarticle debunking myths about Chilean dictator General Pinochet’s supposed “economic miracle.”
This is the third of a short series that we dedicate to the memory of Chile’s revolutionaries on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the 1973 military coup d’état against the Chilean revolution and the government of Salvador Allende.
From Black Flag 216, published in 1999and shared by libcom.org.
Anatomy of an Economic Miracle
With the arrest of General Pinochet, the usual slime of the right pronounced that his dictatorship created an economic “miracle.” We will ignore the “ends justify the means” argument along with the question of why these defenders of “liberty” desire to protect a dictator and praise his regime. Here we concentrate on the facts of the “miracle” imposed on the Chilean people.
Each government is supported by the armed men, ready to execute its will by force, – the class of people, raised to kill everybody who their superiors order to kill. They are the police and, primarily, the army. The army is nothing more than a collection of disciplined killers. Its training is the training of its murderers; its victories are murders. The army always stood and now stands at the heart of the power. The power was always in the hands of those who commanded the army; and always all rulers, from the Roman Cesar to Russian and German Emperors, are preoccupied chiefly with the army. First and foremost, the army supports the outer power of the government. It does not allow the power to be taken from it by another government. War is nothing more than a dispute between several governments about the authority over the subordinates. In the sight of such meaning of the armies, each state is brought to the need to increase its troops; and increasing the troops is contagious, as already one hundred and fifty years ago noticed Montesquieu. But when people think that the government keeps the army only for the protection against external attacks, they forget that the troops governments need primarily for self-defense against their own suppressed and enslaved citizens.
Leo Tolstoy, Superstition of the State (1910)
There’s no new revolutionary subject whose emergence had eluded observers. So if it’s said that the “people” are in the streets it’s not a people that existed previously, but rather the people that previously were lacking. It’s not the people that produce an uprising, it’s the uprising that produces its people, by re-engendering the shared experience and understanding, the human fabric and the real-life language that had disappeared.
The Invisible Committe, To our friends (2014)
This is the second of a short series that we dedicate to the memory of Chile’s revolutionaries on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the 1973 military coup d’état against the Chilean revolution and the government of Salvador Allende.
Patricio Guzmán’s film The Battle of Chile, a three part portrait/chronicle of the revolutionary process that swept the country both before and during the presidency of Salvador Allende’s government and the military coup that destroyed it in 1973, is an extraordinary testimony of the political creation of a people. As Allende is filmed saying, before a massive demonstration in Santiago in defence of his government: “Aqui se siente la historia”/”Here one feels history”. And yet this “history” was never (and never is) singular; it was shot through with tensions, conflicts, that were addressed and worked through, always with uncertainty, in multiple ways.
This September 11th marks the 50th anniversary of the military coup d’état against the government of Salvador Allende. We mark the event in memory of all of those who both within and outside the political institutions of Allende’s “democratically elected”, “socialist” government heroically endeavoured to create a more free, equal and just society, a society in which power was to be exercised by the workers, against the desires and interests of the ruling classes.
If the meaning and achievement of “workers’ power” would be disputed and contested throughout Allende’s reign, within the “Left” – and for those of the omniscient, ideological “Left”, Allende’s errors and his final fall could have been predicted immediately and was perfectly explained in hindsight -, the passion and dedication with which so many embraced a “revolution” was and remains exemplary.
Such enthusiasm cannot be filtered through any ideology, or explained away and evaluated by measures of success and failure, or reduced to cartographies and plans for successful revolutions, however flawed or blind it may reveal itself to be. It was in that enthusiasm that people gave themselves over to create “popular power”/”criar poder popular”.
After the coup, many of those who had given so much would be arrested, tortured, disappeared and killed in the subsequent violent repression of the “revolutionary process”.
The decade we have left behind, the 2010s, was described by the British journalist Paul Mason as a time where “it’s kicking off everywhere.” What began with the Arab Spring protests in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and elsewhere, against the dictatorial regimes that ran those countries and in favor of democratic reforms, then followed with anti-austerity protests in Greece, Spain and Portugal, and in the form of movements like UK Uncut or the 15M in Madrid.
One historical re-telling might then say there was an ‘electoral turn,’ as these movements helped pave the way for the success of Left populist parties and candidates: from Podemos and Syriza to the campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn. We can also speak of a wave of climate protests, from the youth-led school strikes to the movement for a Green New Deal. Most recently, there was another wave of Black Lives Matter protests, which mobilized over twenty-five million people across the United States, with many solidarity protests around the world.
However, the years since 2020 have seen a decline of the Left in America. With the election of Joe Biden, there seems to be a lull in more oppositional forms of protest. It’s within this context that I thought it important to return to one of the movements which kicked off the previous decade: Occupy Wall Street.
I recently sat down for an interview with Matt Peterson, a filmmaker, archivist, and political activist with a history across many radical spaces around New York City. He was active in the occupation movements at the New School for Social Research and Occupy Wall Street and is currently a member of the Woodbine collective in Ridgewood, Queens.
A decade after Zuccotti Park was occupied in New York’s Financial District, what does this experience tell us about our current horizons? From all we’ve seen, from Bernie Sanders’s second failed presidential campaign and the explosive George Floyd Uprising, what might the next spontaneous American social movement look like?
To engage with these questions through Occupy, we must first date it properly. While the ‘official’ occupation of the park was evicted in November 2011, the movement had an afterlife. In 2012, the momentum of Occupy would carry through into two events: the attempted May Day General Strike, and Hurricane Sandy’s arrival to the city on October 29th. Each of these affected how the movement was remembered, especially Sandy, which decisively transformed Occupy into a disaster relief platform.
In effect, we can see these events as forming the beginning of a trajectory of a ‘long Occupy’— a horizon far longer and far broader than the initial occupation. We can draw a line from Zuccotti Park to a number of other organizational forms, including the two iterations of Black Lives Matter protests, the Standing Rock occupations in 2016,[1] as well as projects like Mutual Aid Disaster Relief (MADR) and other spontaneously organized response efforts during the pandemic.
It is also important to acknowledge the entrance of ‘Occupiers’ into mainstream politics, through the creation of progressive grassroots projects like the Fight for $15,[2] as well as the elections of activists like Sandy Nurse to New York’s City Council.[3] We could also point to global uprisings like the protests in Istanbul’s Taksim Square or the Brazilian fare protests. In all this we see a continuous thread: a generation developing skills and competencies to build autonomy.
While it began in Zuccotti Park, Occupy had many manifestations, from Seoul to London, and from Oakland to Washington DC. Our interview will focus on the New York Occupy and try to draw out the threads we take to be implicit in these experiences.
We continue to share material by and about the work of Mario Tronti, in the wake of his recent death. We share a short but excellent essay by Mårten Björk on the trajectory of Tronti’s thought (from NLR/Sidecar 25/08/2023).
Embracing Failure
Mario Tronti, who died earlier this month at the age of 92, was best-known as the author of Workers and Capital (1966). Consisting mostly of essays written in the first half of the sixties, his magnum opus was the most influential text of operaismo, the theoretical current that was then emerging in Italy amid a wave of labour militancy and factory occupations. ‘Workerism’, in the approximate translation, placed renewed emphasis on working-class struggle and consciousness. Foregrounding the primacy of labour in capitalist accumulation, the operaisti argued that the principal focus of Marxism should be not the abstract laws of capital, but workers themselves, without whom capitalism cannot function and who ‘push capitalist production forward from within’. In the bold vision of operaismo, workers act and capital adapts. ‘We too saw capitalist development first and the workers second’, Tronti wrote in ‘Lenin in England’, his editorial in the inaugural issue of Classe Operaia, a journal he co-founded in 1963. ‘This is a mistake. Now we have to turn the problem on its head, change orientation, and start again from first principles, which means focusing on the struggle of the working class.’
Chile’s revolution and the Mapuche
This is the seventh and last of a short series that we dedicate to the memory of Chile’s revolutionaries on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the 1973 military coup d’état against the Chilean revolution and the government of Salvador Allende.
The “traditional Left” of South America largely inherited a Eurocentric conception of freedom and equality as bound to economic progress. This, in effect, politically marginalised the indigenous populations of the continent, as peoples and/or communities with their own specific ways of living which could not be – and cannot be – simply reduced to the status of (“primitive”, “ignorant”, “underdeveloped”, and the like … the list is a long one) “poor peasants”.
The relationship then between the overwhelmingly European inspired “Left” and native peoples – without wishing thereby to simplify – over time and different territories would be one of encounters and misencounters, thus, often, on the part of the “Left”, perpetuating colonialist and racist ideas and practices towards the indigenous.
There were of course notable exceptions. One only has to think of the Mexican revolution (1910 (or 1906, if one includes the Partido Liberal Mexicano-PLM actions in Baja, California) -1920). Yet this same exception points to the rule, as the tensions between urban and rural, largely indigenous, workers would be instrumentalised to constitute military “Red Brigades” to be sent against the Morelos Commune and Emiliano Zapata.
The Chilean revolution would play out these same tensions, with a local colour. And the efforts of the Salvador Allende government to respond, to varying degrees, to the aspirations of the country’s indigenous peoples reveals the limits of “revolutionary thought and practice” still chained to its enlightenment-colonial past.
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