In the early hours of the 28th of April, French police descended upon the residences of 10 exiled Italian political militants of the 1970s. Seven were immediately arrested, an eighth would later turn himself in, and the whereabouts of two others remain unknown.
All were exiled in France and protected under what came to be known as the “Mitterrand doctrine” of 1985. Never accepted by successive italian governments, recent french governments, and now Macron’s government, have ceded to the italian demands for extradition. (Le Monde, The Guardian, la Repubblica)
Those arrested now face life imprisonment in italy, in an active politics – on both sides of the border – of political-historical erasure: to expunge the memory of the “long May of 1968“.
We share below a text by Alessandro Stella, in translation, published by the lundi matin (04/05/2021) collective.
Red Shadows
Is it a lapse in the police unconscious or a perverse joke of the representatives of an Italian State that will never stop demanding payment for the fear that part of its population made it feel at the end of the post-war period? The joint operation of the French and transalpine police forces, which targeted ten Italian political refugees, was codenamed: “Red Shadows”. Or, in the plural, the exact title in French of Cesare Battisti’s second thriller, published in 1994 (1), which had as a backdrop the situation of these survivors of the latent civil war of the 1960s and 1970s. To the need for “anti-terrorist” posturing inherent in a French state incapable of tackling the systemic reasons for individual jihadist terrorism has been added, as Alessandro Stella explains below, the ever-renewed need for the Italian state to erase the red mark of the most extensive and lasting social movement of the post-war period in the West. The war of memory is never more than an episode of the social war. As shown by the beautifully combative and applauded demonstration in Paris on the 1st of May, the fight for the freedom of our comrades has only just begun.
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The 10th anniversary of 15M
What is the strength of the weak? … the strength of the weak passes through the activation of bodies and the interweaving of ties, through the autonomous choice about times and spaces, for the value of equality and plurality. It is from here that the weak have always been capable of challenging the strong: to fight for their own and from their own, to animate networks of complicities, to deploy their own temporality and merge with the territories of life, to trust the intelligence of anyone and the multiplicity of initiatives articulated without a directing center.
Amador Fernández-Savater, Lobo Suelto! (10/10/2021)
The ten years that separate us from the year of 2011, the rebellious year of city square and street occupations, beginning with the “Arab Spring” and moving through cities in Spain, Greece, the UK, and then onto the United States, and elsewhere, seems ever more distant, consequence of the illusion created by media silence, political co-optation and/or repression and the erasure of history and time in the eternal present of life under Capital.
The amnesia though also haunts those on the “left”, whether it be intentional – the “movements” were ineffective, possessed no overarching ideology with which to confront capitalism, failed to take root in the working classes, lacked purpose, organisation, leadership, in sum, they collapsed into reformism or irrelevance -, or not.
So much of the left – of whatever kind – remains trapped in an illusion of perspective, the illusion of ideological hegemony and totality (read retrospectively into past “revolutions”): that the movement must be all and know who it is and where it is going. And yet, if anything could be learned from the rebellions of 2011 – perhaps already since the long May of 1968, or perhaps, always – is that there were never any such movements, and that it is the very concept of “movement” (as something with a coherent beginning and end) that must be abandoned.
The rebellions and revolts that we remember today are not to be commemorated as failed revolutions to be taken up anew with greater foresight and fortitude, but examples of unpredictable and radical social creativity whose power of contagion and opposition could never be mastered or anticipated, as with all “revolutions”.
The spanish 15M was one such moment, which we stubbornly and insistently remember here.
We share below a text published in the spanish anarchist newspaper, Todo por hacer; a text that both chronicles the events and poses questions which remain pressing.
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