72 papers...
how boring!

 

Freedom in the Age of Networks

by Carlo Milani

It can be done with the digital in the same way it is done with bicycles: put your hands on, dismantle to understand, learn to use and teach others.

At the end of the twentieth century digital tools were commonly used only by few. Within a decade the situation has reversed: everywhere, not just the West overdeveloped, computers, mobile phones, music players, cameras and every conceivable kind of crosses between these devices are essential for daily life. Allow billions of people to connect to telephone networks, and then especially to the Internet, almost fulfilling the dream of ubiquity in telepresence. The distances have not been so reduced.
Inflation of gadgets is regrettable for several reasons. They are an expression of exasperated consumerism, as so-called 'substitution' goods, designed to be quickly replaced by more advanced models. They are anti-ecological, built to last a little (planned obsolescence). Their production requires the exploitation of rare minerals, and fight for causes secure provokes continue conflicts in several particularly poor areas(Central Africa, etc.). It also involves the parallel exploitation of the Asian working masses who make them. Finally, and this is what interests us most here, the constant connection "in network" poses enormous problems to the exercise of freedom.
The networks have a double face: they serve to connect people and things, but also to imprison them. The discussions on control and privacy are symptomatic of a diffused malaise. Do not forget that the Internet is the civil evolution of a military project that during the Cold War, sought to build a decentralized network of autonomous nodes, virtually indestructible to an attack. Autonomy to make war, not to extend freedom. Not surprisingly, today the technocratic delegation mechanisms are becoming increasingly popular. Our mail, photos, conversations, data is on remote machines, completely outside our control. Every action and discussion is archived and listens carefully, not only to accumulate information useful for global control, but above all for pouring out advertising. So we support the free networks: custom objects for all developed consumers.
How to get out? This is not to demonize the technology, but to take a critical and sober style. Avoiding the Luddites, the only way to break free from addiction is to learn to manage independently the technology. The freedom in the network requires radical curiosity and imagination. It can be done with digital as with bicycles: put your hands on, dismantle to understand, learn to use and teach others. To create user-friendly tools, designed to satisfy our desires and to extend the sphere of personal and collective autonomy.

 

The word as a tool of enslavement or liberation

by Carlo Oliva

Even if I changed jobs for twenty years, all continue to call me "professor".

I am getting a little 'in crisis when I happen to have to explain to someone exactly what are my interests. A graduate in classical philology, a former teacher of ancient and modern literature in high schools, an expert on problems of the institution school and youth culture (and everything pretty smooth so far row ...), the author of essays on linguistics, translator from several languages, lover of thrillers and historical, political writer... I am hopelessly eclectic. At almost seventy years of age, I still have not decided what I will do when I will grow up. Bears witness to the variety and diversity of the topics that, I do not even remember for how many years, I have treated on "A" (and "Radio Popolare in Milan, as well as a number of newspapers of greater or lesser stature ranging from "Corriere della sera "to the" Manifesto "and to the fan club newsletter of Agent 007). And the doubt in cases like these, is that the same variety of application areas preclude the capacity to take it one by one. The risk of those who cultivate any eclecticism is to cross over without even realizing it, in the superficiality.
On the other hand, we all know that you never forget the first love. It is thanks to the attendance of the classical world (my first love, in fact) that I discovered the principle that the word is a powerful god who, having a slender body can accomplish great things, making large what is very small and little what is large (as he writes, if I'm not mistaken, Gorgia di Lentini in the Encomio di Elena, more or less in the fifth century BC). Realizing at the same time, that those who know the power of that god do not use, say, for sport, but with the express purpose of controlling others and impose their rule. And vice versa, of course, because the understanding of the verbal mechanisms through which you can enslave your brothers in humanity, in turn, represents an indispensable tool for those who want to break free from every yoke.
There. I could say, with a little presumption that I do this: I use the word as an instrument of enslavement and liberation. Every now and then I summarize the concept writing (in the cuffs, in the back cover, in the bios that someone insists on asking me) that I deal with "the ideology of language." Sounds good, even if it doesn't mean anything definite, and has a reassuring academia tone. Because you can be until you want revolutionary, extremist, subversives and even anarchists - all areas that I attended, while not belonging completely - but on all these good people, the Academy continues to exert a great fascination. So why not? A master's degree and one qualification do no harm ever, and, even if I changed jobs for twenty years, all continue to call me "professor".
Of course, the concept is not original. He has something in common with the Marxist theory of ideology as "false consciousness", but Marxism, while remaining a powerful analysis tool, has been, erected in a system (and most often in the state system), too many ontological bonifications for us to be possible to identify with the necessary serenity. A theoretical basis for more reassuring, I found half a century ago, in the analysis of Silvio Ceccato on "cognitive oversight" (analysis that with Marxism, whatever he thought of it, is not too conflicting), and especially in the development that Accame Felice gave, with whom, since then, I have never ceased to cooperate. Certainly not as good as him, I do not pretend, with my mere presence, to be able to ruin any newspaper, or to write things so dangerous to be ousted immediately. But I do my best to highlight and communicate interest in what others have to hide. Aware that the wider sharing of opinions and points of view is the foundation of the practice of joint decision that we call democracy. Or, if you prefer, anarchy.

Always a right more and
more denied: abortion

by Chiara Lalli

In fact, it is becoming increasingly difficult to safely have an abortion.

The voluntary interruption of pregnancy is morally a very controversial topic. Until 1978 it was illegal in Italy to end a pregnancy and still today in many countries there are very strict rules.
The main reason for the prohibitions is the attribution of the status of person to the embryo: as the subject holder of rights its existence must not be interrupted. The allocation of rights, however, can not be a prerequisite apodictic, but should be supported by strong arguments and the task is not easy. We could discuss at length on other reasons that lead to coercion: the idea of women as mothers, the control over the lives and the decisions of people, a paternalistic and moralistic idea that denies individuals the choice.
To decide to terminate a pregnancy, even if you do not accept the personal vision of the embryo, however, puts in conflict two visions: that of the woman and the embryo. The Judgement 27/1975 of the Constitutional Court clearly expresses the inevitability of conflict and indicate the most reasonable solution, "there is no equivalence between the right not only to life but also the health of those who already own person, like her mother, and protection of the embryo has yet to become that person. "
The decision to have an abortion can be justified on grounds of women's health, from prenatal diagnosis or prognosis of other reasons. Law 194 lays down the criteria in the following way: for the first 90 days, a woman can abort in the case of "circumstances for which the continuation of pregnancy, childbirth or maternity poses a serious danger to her physical or mental health, in report or her state of health, or her economic or social or family or the circumstances in which conception occurred, or forecasts of anomalies or malformations of the unborn. " After 90 days "when pregnancy or childbirth constitute a serious danger to the woman's life, [and] when they are established pathological processes, including those relating to significant anomalies or malformations, which constitute a grave danger of harm to physical or mental health to women. "
While in law women have the possibility to resort to abortions, in fact, abortion is becoming increasingly difficult in terms of security, mainly because of the high percentage of health workers conscientious objector (the latest estimates say 80%). Moreover, the climate of condemnation is very strong and are not uncommon cases of women abused by zealous defenders of life or abandoned without care while awaiting a gynecologist who is the only not objector. This is certainly not the way to fight the IVG!
Neither should we forget that promoting the prohibition of abortion inevitably outlines the use of secrecy - never disappeared entirely and ultimately up just because of the difficulty of resorting to legal abortions - or forced pregnancy, both scenarios are not viable because highly damaging to the rights "a person who already is."
Unfortunately, the discussions in this regard are often characterized by very weak arguments and misunderstandings. One of the more resistant it is to think that being in favor of the legality of abortions is to be in favor of the death, against the defenders of life. Instead it means agreeing with the statement made by the 1975 decision and realizing that there aren't better solutions.

 

Mexico forever

by Claudio Albertani

Fascinated me immediately the violent colors, the powerful volcanic energy …

“I came to Mexico to find a new idea of man," wrote Antonin Artaud. I took us to my companion, Patricia, we were coming from Berkeley, California, and there were met in a restaurant, where she was a waitress and I washed dishes. Patricia, Mexican, dreamed to go to Italy, and I Italian, preferred Mexico, a country which I had always cherished, but of which I knew almost nothing. In the end I had the best, because in Italy those were difficult years, perhaps worst than the current.
Many of my comrades were in jail and those who, like me, had chosen to live abroad because they are contrary to the armed struggle and not willing to ruin their life with heroin, wisely kept their distance. We passed the border into Tijuana October 2, 1979, aboard an old Volkswagen van that served as bedroom, kitchen and library. It was the anniversary of the massacre of students in Tlatelolco Square, a tragedy that in 68 had very impressed we Italian students. We spent a month in Baja California at that time largely untouched, where I had a first taste of Mexican landscapes, so strange and unusual: the Sea of Cortes with its (then) crystal water, deserts, mountains and endless skies. In the Sierra San Pedro Martir, where he camped several days, we saw a Milky Way so white it looked like a cloud. There were no newspapers, but we will follow the adventures of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, the war in El Salvador and the incipient genocide in Guatemala with an old shortwave radio tuning in at night. In the following months, we visited most of the country, from Sonora to Chiapas. It should have been a trip of a few months and have passed more than thirty years we stayed even without deciding it, as a natural consequence of the adventure of life.
Mexico, fascinated me immediately with violent colors, the powerful volcanic energy, the intense and exalted life, the indigenous peoples. But there is more. Mexico is not only a country of "convulsive beauty" (Benjamin Peret), is also a meeting place for vagabonds, poets and dissidents, the last refuge of revolutionaries who, like Victor Serge and many others, came here fleeing from the black plague and also from the red one. But it is above all a great social and political laboratory where it faces thousands of years the powers of life and those of death.
The game is not closed.

 

Spain 1936
between myth and project

by Claudio Venza

There remains a lively debate on the revolution and on self-management on Iberian land.

The Spanish experience has a central role in the history of anarchism and thinking globally. To prove to the unbelievers and the other players that anarchist principles are not only of Utopias (even if positive and encouraging) is often reminiscent of the revolution of 1936-1939.
The anarchist propaganda, logically and rightly, praised the achievements and accomplishments of this period that he represented the best example to show that the society of free and equal was possible and rewarding. Where anarchism has been active - from Japan to Canada, from Argentina to Sweden - the Spain of 1936 was recalled at each anniversary of the July 19, 1936, the date of the winning libertarian response to the coup in Barcelona.

Barcellona May 1937. Barricade in the center against the Communist aggression in Central Telefonica

Remains a lively debate at the international level, the meanings of the various aspects of the revolution and self-management in Spain. For those who have recognized the way into the "magic moment" of the struggle against reaction at all levels, it was a series of valid and undoubted achievements. Thus, the militias have been an example of how to conduct a war on a non-hierarchical and non-militarized, agricultural and industrial communities have made a tangible example of peer organization, federal and independent of production and social life, the break with the patriarchal traditions and progress in the liberation of women have actually witnessed the will to found a new society. Alongside these changes should also be considered successful scaling deleterious influence of the Catholic Church for centuries allied to the oppressors, a champion of moral hypocrisy that drove the people to subordination and superstition. However, over the decades has spread a spirit critical of the contradictions of anarchism and even more anarcho-syndacalism. From an uncompromising anti-authoritarian point of view it was found that the conduct of the leadership of the CNT-FAI had gradually slipped into a kind of politics in which anti-fascism and war, and certain elements were prevalent. Consequently, the instances were virtually revolutionary downsized and marginalized. Collaboration, on behalf of the urgency of war, with the Republican party and the government would be the logical consequence of an involution of organizational anarchism that made her look like a body essentially hierarchical and militarized. Also in May 1937, with the proletarian uprising against the Communist maneuvers to eliminate the CNT-FAI, would end with a defeat following the order of the leading libertarians to abandon the barricades and to suspend hostilities. In short, the strength of the people would be subjugated by the libertarian logic of reconstruction of the Republican State, which aimed, however in vain, on aid from the Western democracies.

Barcellona 1936. Transport in the largest and most advanced Spanish cities, are self-managed by workers of the CNT.

As you can see, positive and negative aspects are highlighted by dispassionate analysis of the events of 1936-1939. The debate is certainly not finished. In fact it has occurred with strength around the resumption of movement after the death of Franco in November 1975. For some years the entire world libertarian, he hoped that there be a robust recovery of the CNT and Iberian anarchism in general. Newspapers and demonstrations, marches and direct actions seemed to announce the full rebirth of the protagonist of the Spanish anarchism. In 1976, forty years anniversary at times resembled the firing 1936 and the large mitines of 1977 encouraged a rampant optimism.
But in the meantime the Franco Spanish society had changed: before 1939, many working class in the countryside and cities, were willing to risk the revolutionary rupture in the name of a culture and a subversive imagery centered on a near future of freedom and justice . Forty years later, the claims are enrolled within the scope of reform (and consumerism) more or less angry. The social context was changed so profoundly, and instances of sacrifice and solidarity, characteristics of the CNT and the FAI of the thirties, turned to a collective environment limited the prospects for a realistic improvement of living standards. According to many disenchanted militants, this was a demonstration of the end of a historical cycle of revolt and head-on collisions.
Some portions of Spain in 1936, despite everything, still can be traced. The Spanish society, and the Catalan in particular, are expressing a high level of secularism and cultural openness. The sensitivity to the anti-authoritarian education is widespread, anti-militarism is a fact almost taken for granted in many youth areas. Moreover, the anti-globalization movements are rooted in intellectual circles, not only, and assume organizational models not top-down similar to traditional anarchism. Again: a constant ferment of anti-authoritarians are many alternative places to live like squats and social centers. So the libertarian spirit is alive.

Catalogna summer 1936. A group of Durruti Column en route to the Aragon front.

The rediscovery in recent years of the "damned memory", that of the defeated, beaten and slandered by the generals coup (and not only), has led large segments of public opinion and grassroots movements to recall what had happened during the revolution and the war. And to make the most of the generous and desperate resistance anti-Franco guerrillas since 1939.
In this context have been published in the last five years, hundreds of books and essays on the history of the anarchists before, during and after the fateful 1936-1939. This is another symptom of attention to libertarian assumptions and self-management. But not always detect the full knowledge of the role of a movement that, from the First International, has sought to give substance to the utopian aspirations.
Certainly explicitly anarchist organizations now do not have membership comparable to those of the past. However libertarian ideas and projects are significantly present in the movements of opposition to this authoritarian system and establishment of alternative human development.

 

 

Gioia, Innocenti tubes
and anarchy

by Colby

We should take up mutualism and cooperation, to think a joyful and inclusive practice.

“The debris we do not fear" Buenaventura Durruti wrote.
Do not you fear, no, we are always ready to ratchet wrench to tighten the clamps 20/21/22 of the tubes "innocenti" and do it yourself a roof under which to make sociality and self-management.
We are ready to connect wires, threading pipe, for DIY, in a laboratory collective solar panels that will give us hot water at no cost. In one hundred and fifty within a month we have pulled up our sleeves and made accessible a social space that we call Libera. It was July 2000 and after 3 wonderful years and five years of resistance, equally wonderful, against the construction of a racetrack it was immediately evacuated and demolished, it was August 8, 2008.
Libera was inclusive, an anarchic space that was frequented by thousands of people. Libera was testimony that self-management was possible and wanted that everyone to come and taste it and touch it with his hand. One of our long march against the eviction, with 3000 participants, 3 women at a window exposing a handmade sign on which was written "We are with you" and is to be noted too that the Citizens Committee for Marzaglia wanted to appear on the manifest in our solidarity.
Joy and inclusion.
In September 2010 in Rio Torto (Piombino) was held on the feast of USI and in Massa "Anarchia in festa", two very successful and participated initiatives where I reiterated some of the concepts dear to me and tested in practice in action "policy" of Libera history. Enough with the cry on ourselves because we are constantly repressed by the state: it is clear that we must support those affected by repression, but we live with joy and solidarity relations between comrades and fill of mutuality, solidarity, cooperation and happiness of our projects.
We are not missionaries, we are not for the suffering, but to build a free world that we enjoy and to live now. At the USI party were presented two excellent projects such as the People's Clinic of Genoa and the Zapatista coffee roasting in Lecco. Usually motivate projects explaining that part of the needs and instead I would have more courage and speak of the joy of building projects and to build together with the comrades and the common people.
In Massa in the debate on the crimes of state I have confirmed the concept that if we want stories like that of Stephen Cucchi or one of the anarchist Francesco Mastrogiovanni not happen again, ever since the laws will protect the State and its servants, we should create a network of supportive relationships with people, we should take up the mutualism and cooperation, to think of a practical inclusive and joyful, just like the "Libera Officina" is continuing to do.

 

I have never forgotten

by Corrado Stajano

I and other "bourgeois" journalists we rebeled against the official truth.

Dear Paolo,
you were 18 when we met and I was almost 40. Now you are, what they say, a grown man and I an old man. How many things have happened since that December 12, 1969.
I was not and am not an anarchist, you know. Anarchy, though, I always had curiosity. I knew the origins and stories, I knew especially Bakunin, Malatesta, Kropotkin, I knew the Spanish Civil War, a great passion: the anarchists, for the first time in history, entered a government in Catalonia, the bloody conflict with the Communist Party, the POUM, the massacres of Barcelona, the hundreds of victims..

Franco Serantini

Anarchist black flags, after the French May, had begun to fly in the parades of students and workers in Europe. At the rear, some twenty steps from the others, signifying solidarity, but detachment, involvement, but awareness of diversity. A proud voluntarily ghetto.
Piazza Fontana massacre, had to break the hearts of many. That afternoon I walked among the first in the bank, blood, dust, mangled bodies, shattered lives. Images hard to forget. Valpreda was now the scapegoat, chosen wisely, the "monster" to which assign responsibility. (The big room was full of those arrested in police headquarters. Among the others Virgiliop Galassi, exemplary and highly esteemed member of the studies Office of Commercial Bank in Piazza della Scala, where in front of an elevator, was found in a bag with inside another time bomb. Intervened harshly Raffaele Mattioli, President, to free Galassi).
I and other "bourgeois" journalists we rebelled against the official truth that made water from all sides. Prefects and policemen were surprised to be in front of not their accomplices, as had always happened in the recent and distant past, but the people who were doing their job, they asked without shyness, they tried, they wanted to know the truth.
Then Pinelli, an immaculate figure of memory. That night of December 15 came to the police station shortly after midnight, then at the Fatebenefratelli, then landing on the door of the house of Licia, the strong link, a woman of great courage. And again to the police station to take part in the miserable quaestor Guida press conference.
I have never forgotten. We have seen over and over again, dear Paul, in those years. In 1973 we went to Carrara - I wrote for "Il Giorno", then a major newspaper: the occasion were the political and cultural traditions of some Italian cities. We went to the headquarters of the Anarchist Federation, a dusty all mirrors room that smelled of its former glory. A piano on a platform evoking nineteenth-century dances. A nearby room was plastered with posters, the fathers of anarchism, but also Pinelli and Franco Serantini who was killed by police the year before on the Lungarno Gambacorti of Pisa.
When he was murdered I immediately thought that I would write. But I hate instant-book. "The subversive" was released in the spring of 1975 published by Giulio Einaudi. Of that painful history, I had been hit by the two deaths of the young Sardinian decreed that fierce from the police and the, equally fierce, from the institutions that had not done justice, as if he were unable to process as in a democratic state should occur.
To write that book I had been a long time in Pisa. The FAI was located above the garage of the Confraternita della Misericordia, Via San Martino, near the house where lived Luciano Della Mea. I remember the old anarchist who spent their days in that room. Muti, sitting on chairs against the wall. The eldest, 88 years, called Nilo. Serantini brought in there his youth, his desire to do, criticized for its exuberance. It was a natural anti-fascist.
From the life he only had the funeral, great, moving, and mourned by an entire city. Who knows what they know, what they think young people today of that cruel century?
Dear Paul, I also met Alfonso Failla, with great admiration for his generous life of struggle.

 

Union practices of
various kinds

by Cosimo Scarinzi

In this cycle of struggles has been formed
a generation of activists, organizers, agitators, of libertarian orientation.

Recent decades have seen in our area and the development of discussions, and, which I think is more relevant, trade union practices of various kinds.
In a way the other comrades engaged in this area have felt the need to resume the debate on past experience significant varying from the early decades of the century to the IWW, the CNT to the various board movements that have developed in Europe after the Great War, resuming the discussions that they saw in our past, our fellow comrades to discuss the nature, limits the actual activities and prospects of trade unionism. I think, to give just one example, the important comparison between Malatesta and Monatte at the Anarchist Congress of Amsterdam, but also tragic experience of the Spanish Revolution.
For the other end, and do not underestimate the elements of novelty and discontinuity with the equally precious heritage of libertarian syndicalism of past centuries, we have lived since the early 70's, an impressive series of struggles, movements, organizational experiences that have brought us, each according to his training and sensitivity to deal with the struggles of independent works, movements that develop on the territory as, once again making a single example that of NO TAV, languages and practices of the new working class formed in the factory Ford and Toyota in the new areas of work developed in Western societies around the social reproduction such as education and mass health care etc.

In this cycle of struggles has formed a generation of activists, organizers, agitators, of libertarian orientation that weave in defining their identity, a strong reference to the International and the motto "The emancipation of the workers will be the work of workers themselves or it not will be" true and firm definition of the category "autonomy" with the specific terms of the modern class conflict.
This complex history has seen, from the beginning of the 90s, an interesting evolution. The traditional institutional bifurcation between trade unions and grassroots movements who saw the movements themselves develop specific targets without addressing the problem of an organization stable over time, has undergone a significant change with the birth, and in some cases the development of previous experiences, the alternative base unionism.
Obviously the choices were varied and, at least in the opinion of the writer, all worthy of respect. Some have focused on an anarcho-syndicalist option, who made a choice of union membership of trade unions seen as radical, but not in a strong sense of identity, who still considers appropriate to consider the militant minority in traditional organizations.
My experience, for what it's worth, suggests to me that individual choices are certainly related to general beliefs but that should not be underestimated where the other comrades are placed in terms of territory and of work.
It is, in any case an interesting situation and sees the need to put online experiences, ideas, proposals.

All Translations by Enrico Massetti ("The other Fabrizio" + "Pinelli-Piazza Fontana")