Revolutionary Solidarity

There are those who see solidarity as carrying out a social service towards the arrested comrade, and that is the way they carry out their activity, finding lawyers, sending clothes and money, organising prison visits and so on. This purely humanitarian kind of solidarity also expresses itself in the constitution of defence committees and campaigns aimed at influencing public opinion.

Then there are those who see solidarity in a strictly political sense and play at making a whole heap of "distinctions", aimed at not compromising their own image. In this opportunistic way they defend and are in solidarity with anyone who declares themselves innocent, not supporting anyone who claims responsibility for what they are accused of.

Others still, if they see there is something to be gained in terms of political propaganda immediately bring out posters and leaflets formally expressing solidarity with the arrested comrade or comrades. In other words they delare themselves to be in solidarity while there is no trace of this in practice.

Finally, there is solidarity that originates in an idealogical context, as in the case of marxist-leninists in the armed revolutionary party version. They are in solidarity with those who share their positions and against and even hard with anyone who does not share or recognise their particular line or political strategy, not infrequently using censureship and ostracism towards anyone considered undesirable.

What should we mean by revolutionary solidarity then?

1) The first aspect is to consider solidarity as an extension of one's own relations in the social insurrectional practice within the class clash, i.e. as the direct manifestation of actions of attack against all the structures large and small that exist in one's own territory. And that is because these should be considered to all effects responsible for everything that happens in social reality, including the arrest of the comrades. In this framework it seems quite short-sighted to reduce the question of repression against comrades to something linked strictly to action of the State police and judicial apparatus. A comrade's arrest and criminalisation should be seen in the context of the social clash in act, precisely because this is the most hasty means used by the State to discourage radicalization. No matter how insignificant or how mastodontic it might be, each act of repression is a result of the relations withing the social clash in act against the structures of dominion.

2) The second point is that all revolutionary comrades should be defended on principle, no matter what the accusations against them by the State police-judicial apparatus are because in the first place it is a question of snatching them from its clutches, i.e. from the situtation of "hostage" they have been reduced to. It is also a question of not losing an occasion for intensifying the attack on "Justice" intended as the regulating expression of all relationships of dominion within constituted society.

The third aspect is that of never accepting the defensive logic of institutional law concerning the comrade's presumed innocence or guilt. We have every reason to defend constituted social order at every level. Our aim is to destoy it all, from top to bottm. We are not interested in judging it in the way it does us. That is why in our opinion any sentence sanctioned by the State courts is an attack on all proletarians in revolt (all the more so when it is a question of our own comrades, or ourselves), and as such should be avenged by any means whatsoever, according to one's characterial dispositions or personal inclinations.

4) The fourth and final aspect concerns our attitude to arrested comrades, which should be the same as we have towards those not in prison. By this we mean that we must always accompany revolutionary solidarity with a radical critique. We can be and are in solidarity with arrested comrades without necessarily adopting their theories. In showing our solidarity we are not in any way engaging ourselves concerning their opinions or points of view, and the same goes for them as far as we are concerned. We actively support imprisoned comrades in all and for all, but up to the point where nothing we do for them comes into contrast or contradicts our revolutionary insurrectionalist way of operating. And the same goes for the imprisoned comrade. Ours is simply a relationship between social revolutionaries in revolt, not a relationship speculating over postions. We are not sacrificing any part of ourselves, just as we are not asking anyone else to do the same.

We see solidarity as a way of feeling oneself accomplice, of deriving reciprocal pleasure and in no way do we consider it a duty or sacrifice in the name of the "good and sacred cause" because it is not of our cause, but of our selves.

It is in starting from these essential points in developing one's insurrectionalist anarchist action that revolutionary solidarity acquires a meaning, because we would give simple material support to any friend in prison quite simply in the name of our friendship alone.

Revolutionary solidarity is an integral part of our social insurrectionalist anarchist action, and as such should be treated precisely in this dimension, unyieldingly, because it costitutes for us a widening of what we are doing already, not an abandoning, a way out or a reduction in our field of intervention.

Insurrectional anarchist logic

I believe that to clarify the terms of the social clash today means to pose the question of how to find the means to begin the destruction of the existenant right away. We must stop limiting ourselves to denouncing the oppression, exploitation and alienation we experience in words alone.

It is in the reality of the social clash, and only there, that the questions arising concerning the elaboration of the anarchist insurrectionalist project and its putting into practice can be understood. It is in its radicalisation that this becomes real through putting the attack into practice.

The forms of struggle we adopt are the direct expression of the needs of the growing process of proletarian self-organization in the social field and the measure that it is radicalising at all levels of the clash betweeen capital and the State.

(Revolutionary social struggle does not find its fullfilment in theoretical preparations, rather,) it is the expression of a subversive, insurrectional way of acting on the same reality that is the object of proletarian attack. The choice of objectives is never seperate from this condition but is congenital to it in the informal context of the social clash. This is the starting point of the organisational forms in which to express one's intended attack on all the structures of capital large and small that are spread over the social terrritory.

It is in the perspective of an immediate, total journey of self-liberation by each individual and of all, that the insurrectionalist anarchist project should be considered, far from any idealogical formaility.

I think it is clear to everyone today that it is necessary to change the whole of the existant, to refuse to let oneself be bewitched by strategies that involve the sacrifice of the present while awaiting better times. A refusal of all gradualist or reformist strategies therefore, but also of any fixed strategy. Our research and surpassing of limits begins as liberation in the sense of a journey of social war. This is lived by individuals who have already faced the problem of going beyond the logic of political representation that governs the old world, and are demonstrating their revolutionary tension by continually moving towards the radical subversion of the existant, each one a protagonist, pacifically or violently as the sitituation demands. We must never forget that material, moral and intellectual conditions change when one acts with the expolited for the creation of self-organised and insurrectional-subversive forms of struggle capable of radicalising the social clash. as this generalisation it leads to the insurrection that we all desire without waiting for a sudden awakening of consciousness in the wide masses or delegating our own liberation to who knows what, attempting instead to build it ourselves in the immediacy of our daily lives.

Armed social insurrection

Daily life shows us there is no such thing as a legal or peaceful way out from the constrictions imposed by capital and the State. Armed social insurrection remains the only valid road for the realization of hte aims of social liberation: the creation of Anarchy directly.

But the social revolution must not be seen in a logic of building airtight compartments and artificial seperations such as parties and unionised masses. It is not possible to delegate liberation, it being the direct expression of our revolutionary action in the social field. Total liberation from dominion can never be seperated from the way one organises to bring it about.

The problem facing us is how to translate such a critique destructive-positive action in the present. If analysis of the situation must clarify the connexions between the structures of capital and the State and how they operate in the societal order, to be valid, it must also indicate the points we can attack in order to develop antagonism and conflictuality concretely, and avoid exhausting oneself in mere socialogical analysis.

The problem of adopting a horizontally spreading project has become a primary necessity. Especiallly as it is a question of a hypothesis of the total destruction/transformation of society today, capable of tracing its way through the development of the proletarian struggle, calling for autonomy and self-organisation.

(Armed social insurrection, therefore, must develop from a logic of direct reappropration of everything denied us - the immediate) satifaction of needs and desires - to conquer more living space, room for movement, freedom snatched from the enemy in the light of continuing revolutionary action.

It is therefore necesary to know how to link different situations of struggle from work to school, from social precarity to unemployment, homeless, etc., and translate them into generalising moments of the social clash as a whole (From work to school, from social precarity to unemployed, homeless, etc).

Critique of reformism

As well as coming up against all the structures of dominion every day we also clash with a myriad of organizations claiming to support the cause of proletarian liberation. These are trade unions, parties, small avantguardist parties and groups which all come from one single idealogical matrix: the socialist/marxist one ranging from the most stupid reformist social democratism to the inquisitorial dictaririal ultra-revolutionism of the authoritarisn communists. According to their political credo, orthodox or revisionist as it might be, they all consider themselves to be proletarians, or the bearers of the latter's revolutionary consciousness, and act accordingly.

no matter what guise they present themselves in - reformist or revolutionary - they cannot be of any use to us (even if they wanted to) and their actions do nothing but damage us as has been seen clearly in the past. It should be noted that anyone who supports the idea of the guiding party in either words or deed, is an enemy of the self-liberation of the proletarianised as they deny them the process of direct appropriation of their conditions of life in the global sense. The proletarianised are those who have no real power of decision over their living conditions, having been expelled from the structure of dominion which administers, therefore governs, the present. Their struggle cannot but be aimed at the complete cessation of such a condtion: the proletarian one to be precise.

It is enough to observe how in their reformist or so-called revolutionary action, these reformists aim at subordination, discipline, and the lifelong subbmission to the social struggle against the development and rationalisation and the planning of State control in structures similar to those they claim to be fighting. In substance such expressions are the negation of any autonomy or real independence of the proletariat.

These politicians are brilliant apologists of the State. they exhalt proletarian conditions and raise them to the level of social relations aimed at realising that penal colony they cal "socialism".

Are they not the ones who say capital's development is indispensible for the realistaion of "communism", thus becoming supporters of the productive needs of this society? Yesterday it was a question of industrail develpoment, today it is post-industrial technology. According to them the idealology of work and permanent self-sacrifice will make the proletariat free. On the contrary I believe the only freedom any proletarianised person can conquer is that which comes through revolt, a direct attack on everything they formerly supported.

Yesterday was the era of machinery, instruments used by capital in its industrial phase, the proletarians in the factories which were gigantic prisons of forced labour. (In the current reality, it is a technological apparatus which traps the proletariat into the) global cycle of production-distribution-consumersim which is transforming each proletarianised person into periferal appendice.

Critique of parties and unions

Parties and trades unions are politically and socially mobilised structures of control and detention, wardens of proletarian strength. The first act as gendarmes filtering and dampening social conflict at political level to guarentee through institutions in agreement with the police (in exchange they are given privileged places within their public administration); the second carry out the same service at the economic and social level, bartering proletarian struggles with capital which in exchange supplies miserable jobs and just as small and miserable privileges enjoyed by the "bonzes", better known as trade union bureaucrats. All this happens daily on the flesh of millions of proletarianised people who are lying docilely betweeen these load-bearing structures of dominion.

The left-wing parties and unions were born as instruments of proletarian emancipation and define themselves as such. Then, at the end of each social struggle, in order to conserve themselves rather than perish under the blows of reaction, they find it more comfortable, at the end of each social struggle, to take over the struggle itself and turn it into a means of negotiating with the bosses and the government who give a few concessions in exchange.

They are the parasites, the bloodsuckers who drain the proletarians' rebellious energy and from concession to concession, compromise to compromise, strangle radical social struggles and become the closest and most active collaborators of the dominant system. Their progressive integration is done through claiming better conditions, contractualism, mediation and social constructivism, all roads which lead to the death of social revolt. What prevails in each working class party or union is the myth of quality.

In spite of the revolutionary phraseology often aired in demonstrations, parties and unions have never been revolutionary structures in the real sense but have always adopted an idealogical form of apparatus.

The more the social clash radicalises the more the control exercised by and adhesion to these structures slackens. In fact they even become objects of attack in the same way as all the other structures of dominion do. Parties and unions only count in periods of low social tension. They are in fact structures for a conservation against worsening living conditions, organisations, organisms for maintaining the miserable privileges that have already been gained.

The essential conditions of the autonomous unions (e.g. the COBAS) in the schools, the railways and now the factories, just as consumers', small proprietors', tennants', handicapped, etc.'s defence structures, are corporatism and economism. The greater the level of unionism within the various social strata, the greater the control exercise by capital and the State who benefit from the constructivist availablity of these organisms. Each social class or strata negotiates this or that guarentee or privilege for itself, to the detriment of other classes and less guarenteed strata.

The social clash disappears to make room for the commercialisation of everyone and everything in the condition of their lives. Racism and anti-racism, North against South, are effects of this mechanism of supply and demand between social strata or classes and capital and the State's structures of domination.

Technological restructuring through a decentralisation of the structures of production and control, is leading to a loss in bargaining power for the unions and parties. The technological organisation of the State and capital no longer requires to use the mediation of the parties and unions to manage and control the social clash as they did in the past. They now do so through the media which we recognise today as the real communications network of the system that has been implanted in society.

Insurrectional action

Once the impotence, even at a purely reformist level, of the worker's parties and unions is understood it is a question of focussing our thought. It is no longer possible to formulate the struggle in a dimension of defence or of claiming better conditions. It is necessary to pass to action, both subversive and generic action capable of having continuity. This means acting in a projectual way, a way that is projectually insurrectional.

We are talking of an insurrectional process, not simply one final insurrectional act. Insurrection is a movement of rebelion composed of acts of revolt, which by generalising lead to the total demolition of all exisiting institutions of dominion. This is the condition that is absolutely necessary to open the way to the immediate realisation of what we want. It is not a question of a dream of utopia of the kind imagined by Marx as some would like to believe. What we want to give ourselves is the possibility to put into practice that which makes it possible to live freely and enjoy everything without finding ourselves subjected to anyone else in the process.

If we are for insurrection we are not so by chance but because it does not lead to heirarchy but demolishes it along with all the institutions one rises up against. Insurrection is a non-mediated act in that it is the direct expression of the single individuals who with their action of revolt shrug off dominion, without erecting any other in its palce. It comes forth from associating with another to increase one's strength. That is to say each person sees in others a means of expanding their own potential, or rather their own freedom, and vice versa, other. Starting off from this base the concept of revolution finds its original dimension of movement-transformation, freed from the fixation of an imperative social order. By insurrection we mean permanent movement against any attempt to formalise or institutionalise a given social order. For us each social order is transitory, just as the passing of our life is. Anarchy is not and never could be a kind of existence that is guarenteed and adminstered in a particular way once and for all. If it were it would turn into a new form of domination.

This has not been understood by either the authoritarians or the idealists. It is not possible to close life within a model of perfect society no matter how equal and free it might be. Anarchy is a field of desirablity which gives each individual the possibility of creating their own situations of free life along with other individuals in an eternal qualitative contestation of everything.

For this reason our way of organising ourselves becomes liberatory when it is done informally precisely because this is an expression of our own needs. If we organise starting from what we want, i.e. on the basis of the objectives to be reached, organisation will be the expression of these needs, and ready to change as soon as its structures are no longer adequate to our new ones. All the organisational structures we give life to must possess these indispensible requisites, precisely because they must reflect the needs of our liberation in act. This way of organising cerainly goes beyond other organised forms which as we have seen have always given very bad results. Our insurrectional anarchist project begins from this way of self-organising and it is certainly more interesting and richer in unforseen results than other kinds of attempts of the past.

Each model should be worked out in one's own field of intervention and take into account of the plalce one is operating in. We can work out a logic to start , but are not trying to export revolutionary organisational model because it would be contrary to our way of seeing and living reality. This is what we mean by direct mass attack and the possibility of a development of insurrectional mass organisms through the creation of autonomous base nucleii which are not necessarily linked to the world of work. In any case, it is always necessary to structure the intervention, in realitiy itself, adapting the conditions therein.

-- by Pierleone Porcu

I need to point out that the above text was found in an enveolpe with no reference to its origin. On the copy I have, the top sentence (or more) is cut from the top of the text, so passages above that are in italics and parenthesis are words I've added to lend an air of continuity to the overall text. My apologies to the author for butchering his excellent essay thus, but I wanted to post it while I have the opportunity and hope to correct the text as soon as I am able.

I found another copy of this essay, but it was a different translation, so I tried to make the above mentioned edits a little more true to the orignial. So, the above is as close a translation of the original as I'm likely to get. - Rob