It is in the context of a social fabric that we struggle to recognize as an interlocutor, “neutralized” by those apparatuses of domination that are committed to the distortion of their image in order to justify the arms race and the achievement of technological sovereignty, that we try to recognize ourselves as elements of anarchist subversion.
We are trying to understand and clear those massive clouds of smoke in the eyes of those around us who, in accordance with the narrative canons of political society, are coming ever closer to a vision of their identity based on reactionary and sovereignist rhetoric. This is the emergent feeling on which the actions of governments are based. By instrumentalizing widespread phenomena or circumstantial events, they persist in a process aimed at establishing the spectre of generalized insecurity, of a “criminal drift” of social marginality, thus laying the foundations that ensure tacit acceptance of continuous repressive reforms. On the other hand, the voices of dissent appear to us to be weak, at least those based on a structural and total irreconcilability with those States that, while silently dusting off the robes of a colonial-extractivist imperialism, are meanwhile performing choral acts, cloaked in “wills” directed towards an illusory collective welfare.
To trained ears, this is the unsettling dissonance of a fumbling performance, of an Atlanticist front continuing to drowse people with fairy tales of non-violence while arming the Ukrainian conflict to the teeth and supporting the genocide of the Palestinian people; of a European fortress that alternates between humane and charitable faces (bulwark of a now outdated democratic model) and muscular and compact postures, ready for any eventuality in the face of the newfound external enemy. The acceleration of the repressive machine, which in recent years has abandoned associative crimes and is now rediscovering itself by concentrating on “ink crimes”, is proportional to the degree of credibility that the state apparatus can afford to lose at such a moment in history.
We find, for example, an Italian state that, as in the case of Alfredo’s transfer to 41BIS, aims at suppressing propaganda that sheds light on its own actions, at silencing and rendering harmless the “troublemakers of the pen”: deviant and deviating “instigators of the masses” of the anarchist movement… a movement that, we will agree, is currently having difficulty instigating even itself, which leads us to reflect on the reasons for our current ineffectiveness and our enormous contradictions.
The swelling ranks of an army of alleged anarchists, the gap established by the responses given to that experiment in totalitarian control called pandemic, and the timeless reactionary obscurantism of the anti-feminist current (rediscovered queer-transphobic where accompanied by the – more than ever necessary – anti-technological critique) are just some of those antinomies that stand as a warning to remind us that perhaps there is no oxygen for all in this muddy swamp.
There is not and cannot be an a priori imposed commonality that does not reduce us to being subjects of a repressed tension, dismantled of its destructive ecstasy, or mutilated of the joy of complicity. The reasons for our ineffectiveness in this present, in which the world assumes the all the more real (and all the less grasped) guise of the techno-militarist capitalist disease, must also be sought in this, even and above all by turning our gaze inwards, to our contradictions, to our feeling as part of a revolutionary movement, and to our questioning of for whom, today, we should answer the call to action. For ourselves first and foremost? For those we feel as comrades? For those we recognize as oppressed? For the sole love of our world of rage, basis of our affinity in converging to attack this society?
It is in order to answer these questions, to consolidate, create and rediscover the paths of affinity that make us perceive ourselves as consciously united (or deliberately divided), that we believe a bookfair is important. Without discussions and debates about our ideas, our history and our dreams, we risk becoming just another part of the antagonistic world: sectarian, ideological, identity-based,
definitively harmless because subjugated by political thought. A book, a debate, and a language that, through our editions, becomes collective by promoting conspiracy, is a necessity aimed at destroying the future that is before us in order to speed up the hatching of action from that chrysalis we call word.
Our goal is to create a moment of encounter between comrades from different backgrounds, that seeks to break down boundaries (including cultural and linguistic ones) and that aims for qualitative growth in the sharing of analyses and experiences that transcend our territorial horizons, thus giving new impetus to our desire for subversion.
Let’s take back in our hands the tool of anarchist solidarity, in order to break the isolation into which the prisoners are forced and to intertwine with the proposals of struggle that are underway elsewhere, with the aim of multiplying the potential of our intervention in terms of a concrete projectuality that knows no borders.
A meeting that we hope will also subvert the categories on which this society is based. Rejecting specializations, the insidious forms of authority, and the division of tasks that often lead to delegate, we will try to create moments of discussion that abandon as much as possible the frontal dynamics of presentation, building multi-voice, circular debates that contaminate each other in the embrace of ink-
and-flame perspectives.
Let’s weave the webs of complicity in order to trace the paths of liberation, once again, among the dark shades of the existent!
2025/01/25