Libertarian Home?
Ecological and self-made
by Adriano Paolella
Uniformity in production has
dispossessed communities and individuals
of the technical capability of building
and define specific solutions.
The current shape of the common home of mankind is the specialized solution, and guilty in part to human needs. Working with industrial standards of uniformity and standardization of requirements, maximum profitability and minimum cost, the outcome of centralized morphology of the house is a box alienated from the context of culture, activities and environment. In all parts of the world, the contemporary house is made up of rooms with the same functions, structures and relationships in the same way in real estate units in the aggregate amount and the density driven by speculation.
Yet the environment and creativity determine how different life and the combination of many places, people, cultures should bring countless building solutions.
But the standardization of production, has snatched the community and the people the technical capacity to build and define local solutions. The product is standardized, culturally inferior, inadequate energy and environment, is supported by a chain of production of materials, techniques, equipment and organization of processes of economic strength such that enslaves the government and imposed solutions to the community. Homes with poor materials and techniques of environmental quality with reduced time horizons are consistently filled with furniture, tools, goods of the same quality, are huge temporary accumulations of waste.
In case we are sleeping, eating, resting, but in general we do not work, not create, do not relate with the environment, the aberrant logic of division of functions, there are other equally specialized areas. Thus the life of the house is cheated by the fundamental activities such as, for example, maintenance and adaptation of the same or the production, processing and food preservation.
The house is devoid of activity, the time is devoid of internal actions and filled with acts alienating the house is one of the containers of the time lost (see television, web, etc).
So the house is in a condominium or single-family, is so alien to the community as the environment. Private green spaces try a relationship with nature, but this is set up so badly that the results are sweetened sublime character of nature and natural impoverishment of forms in a rigidly controlled and managed context.
The libertarian house is self-built, or at least highly participatory, with mostly natural and local materials, it places priority attention to reducing the "weight" of environmental, morphological, energetic and social, meets the specific requirements of the dweller, tends to be the place of the complexity of everyday functions and not fragmented relationship with the environment and other units.
The libertarian city?
Lightweight and small
by Adriano Paolella
Every small town can be revived
with new autonomy.
The settlements of today are the result of simultaneous actions, even when they mediate land and real estate interests with those of individuals, do not have as an end the welfare of the community.
The work of engineers, designers, planners, experts in general, to make up the space of the community should be to support the requests of the same, but today takes the form of a total delegation used also too frequently to suit the interests of the powerful and speculators. The resident, dependent on the shape and spatial organization of places, struggles to fit a situation of which he is neither hero nor a participant.
City mandated by interest and incurred by the community, leave no truce and bend the people to rules of an aberrant living behavior prejudicial to their health and harmful to the environment, city that should be closed, declared unsafe for the conditions of extreme environmental and often social degradation, a city by the powerful force of attraction which are concentrated economy, market relations, the possibility of "success." Increasing the size of settlements reduces the relationship with the land and resources, centralizing services and supplies, eliminating the ability of independent survival of communities and enslaving them more and more to monopolies and private management. In a city no individual can directly transform the space, or change the landscape, or produce their own food, or access to water or other resources essential to his existence. In no public park, an individual can plant a tree, or place a nest or breeding hens, nor modify, adapt, maintain, rehabilitate. The spaces are designed to perform a specific function which is also provided regulatory use are an abstraction of the needs of individuals, a simplification of the complexities of living, a limitation of being. Public-private dichotomy in each space has its own function and its regulation, but the whole does not meet the needs and enjoyment of the community.
Modern cities are the concrete image of a social organization, are representation of an cultural, economic and social authoritarianism best hidden elsewhere.
A community should be able to define the places in which to live and being able to do so should seek their own welfare as a priority based on the stable and enduring balance between actual needs and availability of local resources.
The libertarian city tends to be light, soft, with a population and size directly related to the available resources, stable non-growing city, neither demographic nor space, where communities are reclaiming a delegation on addressing the selection of administrators, directly managing the activities, mending the relationship with the resources, in pursuit of economic autonomy, adapting to the environment and adapting it without breaking its structure.
Every small town can be revived with new independence, each city can be fragmented into smaller pools through direct action and pressure exerted on the "technical" for an urban and social environment in which widespread prosperity can not find compromises, in which the plans are not supporting and mediators of interest, in which communities control and manage the space and, through them, their existence.
The signornò
of the non submissive
by Agostino Manni
Senzapatria was the main anarchic magazine to support our ideas.
The first time I was arrested in January '88, there were three large military prisons in Italy: Peschiera del Garda to the north, Fort Boccea in Rome and Santa Maria Capua Vetere for prisoners in the South. There was some barracks minor, as the prison Bari Palese, where they were mainly held in solitary confinement awaiting trial, and where I was transferred from the civilian San Vittore in Milan, after my arrest in the same city.
The population of a military prison - in addition to the cops guilty of some offense, which generally were in a separate department of the prison - was largely composed of hundreds of Jehovah's Witnesses to which were added several dozen a year of insubordination, especially deserters conscripts often illiterate, lacking any legal support, politically and economically. Then we were there, the 'total objectors' or 'not submitted', a name borrowed from the 'insoumis' of Spain, where hundreds of comrades every year rejected the draft, including the alternative civilian service required.
In Italy, the phenomenon involved only a few individuals, four or five a year, almost all anarchists, who were serving for the refusal of prison of about a year, to which could add months because of other convictions for the frequent protests and insubordinations. Senzapatria was the main anarchist magazine that supported our ideas, publicized our struggles, alleged cases of deserters and unruly, informed on the processes, raised money, printed books and brochures, organized demonstrations ....
In fact the whole anarchist press supported us: on almost every issue, and in the year and more of my prison, A-Rivista has published some of my letters, some of my complaints, some of my scream absurd hole world. At the time the Communist Party in Italy was opposed to the abolition of conscription: the pretext that the elimination, there was insufficient as a bulwark against the risk of a coup d'etat by the right and the military, it legitimized a score in which the course 'Party' ran to the big votes and business.
Even within the anarchist movement, the positions were not consistent: some supported the need for an opposition inside the barracks, between the 'proletariat in uniform', practiced by some organizations an strategy of some organizations of the extreme Italian left in the 70s.
The non-submission started instead from another premise, argued that the construction of a new world could not disregard the clear rejection of the dominant system, in all its forms: the patriotism, the army, church, factory, family, school. The rejection of all these institutions was considered an essential and necessary basis to build a society of free and equal. With these ideas in their head and these dreams in their heart, so many young anarchists in those years were locked in a military prison.
The music,
where was the music?
by Alessio Lega
We need a vigorous research of the purest and most profound roots
In the glazed living rooms as servants in the venerable secret concert from the secrets laces in temples aged from fucking memories. That's where the music fades, it is there that aborts the Music... We want the music to the streets. And we will. And we will have the music.
He said - or rather sang - Léo Ferré, the most prophet and libertarian of songwriters. Bringing music and poetry in the streets is the goal that has set some song, the one to which I work, the one against which some supporters of pure art and minimalism are hurled.
Hard job to make the songs stand up to the streets as a witness, cast as a revolt in the face to those who want to understand and who will not, without the "Vaseline of violins" (to quote a great a bit too much forgotten, Herbert Pagani). As a tool of resistance to power, oblivion and death.
Even we evaluate ourselves at times with this little tool: how many of us have approached certain ideas because we have heard them sang? Freedom is an idea that sings.
How many people have become anarchic for "addio Lugano bella / gli anarchici van via" (certainly not from the ear, since this song is sung for a hundred and more years), for:
They are not one percent but believe me they are there.
They have black flags on their hope
and the melancholy dance company
knives to cut the bread of friendship
and clean blood to wash the dirt.
or for:
Of course we must make way for a gymnastics act of obedience to a much more humane to give you a sense of violence but we must make to become as much balls as they are unable to understand that there aren't good powers.
Then he goes on, study, deepens ... but the first flea in his ear (it's appropriate to say it) is often put by a song. A song may not make revolutions - as many have said - but without the songs memory loses one of blocks which to stand.
 |
Leo Ferré |
I write these notes in September 2010. In July of this year's there is the fiftieth anniversary of the tragic events of Reggio Emilia: July 7, 1960 five unarmed demonstrators were killed by the police who opened fire during a demonstration. Fausto Amodei wrote a song dedicated to those victims which became famous. Fausto was recently presented to the public this way: "This is Amodei, for those who do not know him, the one who made the deaths of Reggio Emilia."
"Actually it was the government Tambroni to make them," he annotated immediately "I limited myself to celebrate them." The story is funny and shows how well the memory of certain events relies on the songs. Today, the dead have become their song. It is not a disrespectful thing, more alive than a book that handful of verses carries the historical memory of the five of Reggio, to vibrate the indignation of their grandchildren, like it vibrated that of brothers, like it vibrated that of children.
Of such things, so many bloody crackdown, with too many stories to lead the crowd, and some nice time happy claim we lack sung evidence. And it's bad.
Today, when mass communication eats and immediately destroys any news, is more necessary than ever to write our own songs and to do that we need a vigorous search of roots deep and pure, because many of our words are tired and we need to renew, find new ways to sing the same story.
Sing like Woody Guthrie, who lived on the trains in America in the '40s and had written on his guitar "this tool kills fascists." Like Lluis Llach, Catalan in exile for writing L'Estaca. As Jacek Kaczmarski that translated that song in Polish and had become the anthem of Solidarity. As the pasionaria Chilean Violeta Parra who was singing as she painted and who committed suicide after composing Gracias a la vida. As Victor Jara, her spiritual student, murdered by the military during the coup of 1973. As Zeca Afonso whose song Grandola was the signal for the beginning of the Carnation Revolution of April 25 '74. And then the two French Ferré and Brassens, libertarian and opposed for nature and poetry, as opposite as two poets as different as two anarchists.
This is the research behind the book "E compagnia cantante" to sing this, writing a love letter to men to come.
All Translations by Enrico Massetti ("The other Fabrizio" + "Pinelli-Piazza Fontana")
anno
40 n. 358
