Italian Anarchists Call for a Month of Action and Solidarity

On September 6, 2016 the Italian state raided 30 houses and arrested 5 people in an investigation of Informal Anarchist Federation (FAI) attacks, in what’s been called “Operation Scripta Manent.” The FAI, being not a real organization but rather a tendency of attack, has been claimed in many actions around the world throughout the last decade including numerous incendiary attacks, arsons, and the kneecapping of an Italian nuclear firm CEO.

In a letter written from prison by Anna Beniamino, one of the arrestees from the raids, they argue that this is a trial not just against the defendants, but against anti-organizational Anarchism itself:

“The framework gives shape to a repressive-Manichean vision of a ‘social anarchy’, a good and harmless one, and an (anti-social and anti-classist) ‘individual anarchy’, violent and palatable to repression, whose method is the ‘anti-organization model’. By making the necessary distinctions, this framework aims to define a specific camp, to create a cage, so that from a generic ‘insurrectionism’, (a sub-product of the anti-organization model), always violent and liable to punishment to varying degrees, sub-species can be pulled out to form different strands of the investigation for Italian cops: ‘classic insurrectionism’, ‘social insurrectionism’, ‘eco insurrectionism’ and the ‘informal anarchist federation’.”

In light of this repression, anarchists in Italy have put out a call for international solidarity actions during the entire month of June. Rather than allowing timidity and fear to follow from state repression as our enemies wish for, comrades in Italy are calling for courage and attack. For this reason, we in the June 11 crew feel this call overlaps with our project, and we are glad to give it a signal boost here in the United States & Canada.

Note: This is a new translation of the call, click here for the original English translation posted to Act For Freedom Now.

For a Dangerous June

A summary of ideas expressed during the convergences on the theme ‘With our heads held high’

State repression is the most important part of the system of domination and one of its most disgraceful expressions; it doesn’t surprise us that those who are struck most are historically those who don’t let themselves be recuperated by the system of power, i.e. anarchist, revolutionary and rebel individualities.

The latter respond to the physical, psychological, moral, social and economic repression unleashed by all the components of democratic power and to the brutal indiscriminate violence of its armed hands and the judiciary. This they do with direct action aimed at those responsible for repression, with the creative and liberating destruction of the places of domination and the sabotage of its infrastructures, so as to put an end to, or at least hamper, the causes of exploitation and oppression by human beings against  other human beings, the earth and animals.

From the perspective of total liberation, passively watching the reproduction of domination means being complicit with it, so there are those who continue to hold their heads high and rebel.

As a consequence, power activates all its strategies and the trials and proceedings still continue against comrades for actions, episodes of conflictuality, and writings. Next month there will be an appeals trial concerning the so-called Operation Shadow, in which a number of comrades are accused, among other things, of criminal instigation following the publication of the paper KNO3. [1]

These judicial proceedings are an expression of the war that the authorities are waging against the bond between thought and action, which is the foundation of anarchism’s dangerousness. Beyond individual and specific struggles, this police operation aims at striking the cardinal concepts of anti-authoritarian ideas and methods such as direct action, refusal of delegation and solidarity.  Starting from these reflections during the meetings that developed after the arrests in Operation Scripta Manent, we felt it necessary to not reduce solidarity to the technical support of those who are in prison, not dwelling on the strategies of repression, but widening the spectrum of our analysis.

In this respect, we discussed how solidarity is a fundamental element of our anarchist action and relations of complicity aimed at the destruction of domination. This form of solidarity goes beyond repression’s attacks, and is capable of not letting itself be suffocated by the specificity of the trajectories of struggle when we recognize ourselves in a common tension of attack. In particular, active solidarity is an essential instrument to respond to state violence, refusing to take its blows passively but maintaining a stance of attack, so as not to develop attitudes of victimization which is what repression wants. The risk of isolation can be reduced and one of the enemy’s most important goals can be made ineffective by thinking in offensive terms, keeping in mind permanent and internationalist conflictuality beyond each one’s specific path.

To express solidarity with specific contexts and projects doesn’t mean one must conform to the discourses and practices of those who have been struck, nor does it mean to necessarily follow in the wake of a given struggle or practice: if we recognize ourselves in a common horizon we can act in solidarity according to our own individual tension. Creating of relations of solidarity on a local and international level is a strategic objective which we should give ourselves in order to face the strengthening of repression’s means and will against anarchist, revolutionary and rebel individualities.

We think it necessary to address our proposals, projectuality and objectives towards the destruction of the system, which organizes social relations of domination by flattening dissent through recuperation, and wherever this is not possible, by eliminating it through repression.

In this respect, we recognize the importance of multiform actions and practices within anarchism. Precisely because the more differences that exist in a context, the stronger the possibility of not getting stuck on pre-arranged dogmatic positions, provided that any specific struggle and attack is part of the wider view of tension towards subversion. To recognize the value of this diversity also means to lay the foundations for opposing all centralizing and dominating tendencies within anarchism.

This is only possible through an attitude of constant self-criticism and critique between the different approaches, an attitude that moves towards qualitative growth of both an analysis of what surrounds us and of the various possible ways to organize the destruction of what oppresses us.

By refusing to classify or make it possible for others to classify our different tensions into identity categories, we think that any attack on authority interacts with social mechanisms and relations and at the same time acts against society itself.

From a strategic point of view the existence of multiform practices is useful for nourishing the complexity of the forms of organization and attack, and enhances the discussion on means and ends within the different anarchist projectualities of action. It is absolutely necessary to understand how to give value to this diversity without diluting its contents in the view of a common project of total destruction of the system of domination.

It is important to consider different proposals and projectualities not as being antithetical and static but as being instruments, resources and possibilities at anarchists’ disposal, provided that they have certain characteristics that we believe are fundamental, such as permanent conflictuality, attack, independence from institutional hierarchically-organized political structures, and informality as a tool of organization.

By permanent conflictuality, we mean a tension towards the irrecuperability of our practices and discourses, the refusal to submit our action to opportunistic evaluation. This doesn’t exclude the possibility of developing a strategy referring to modalities and objectives, but this cannot be a justification for wait-and-see attitudes or the watering down of our own content for the sake of a quantitative broadening.

From this point of view we reiterate the refusal of any collaboration with power or that lends itself to recuperation. By the latter we intend power’s strategy of absorbing experiences and behavior that is potentially dangerous to itself and of directing them towards its goals. In democracies the mechanism of recuperation is complementary to the harshest face of repression and has the goal of perpetuating the system of exploitation and oppression: the attempt at inclusion and integration of some forms of dissent is meant to increase participation in the political game, thus creating divisions in order to more easily attack those who don’t want to participate in the spectacle of society. Anarchist action for the destruction of society and domination responds to the tension that refuses authority, and therefore doesn’t negotiate with the latter but wants to overthrow it with violence, and a wider strategy that starts off from the awareness that we will never live free by creating islands inside mass society.

It is therefore beyond question that the struggle, in order not to be reformist, has to contemplate direct attack as a practice. Following Operation Scripta Manent: Alfredo, Nicola, Danilo, Valentina, Anna, Marco and Sandrone are being held in high security units, subjected to restrictions and censorship of communication with the outside.

Some anarchists find themselves in prison in Italy and in the rest of the world, while others here and elsewhere are undergoing various restrictive measures, such as house arrest and compulsory residence orders.

We call for mobilization in the month of June in solidarity with anarchist, revolutionary and rebel individualities struck by repression, as an occasion for coordination between initiatives and practices.

Rome, 30th April 2017

Anarchists

[1] Operation Shadow is a procedure based on article 270bis, which Perugia prosecutors started in 2008. The crime of association was dropped in the first grade trial, and in the 2015’s appeal trial it resulted in a sentence of 3 years against two comrades, a third comrade being investigated for article 302 with the aggravating circumstance of terrorism following articles published in KNO3, and sentences against other comrades for attempted sabotage on a railway line and car theft.