Class Struggle

We receive and disseminate:

You take away his voice, we give him back his word! A flyer not to forget the words Alfredo has always expressed and for which he is in 41 bis!

CLASS HATRED AND THE MYTH OF AVENGING ANARCHY.

Comrades, now in the FSB building in Arkhangelsk there will be an attack, for which I take responsibility. The reasons for this are clear to you. In response to the FSB repressing, building frames, and torturing people, I have decided to strike it. Most likely, I will die from the explosion because I will trigger the bomb manually. Therefore, I request you to disseminate information about the attack: who carried it out and the reasons. Well, that is it. I wish you to go firmly and uncompromisingly toward our goal. Bright is the future of anarchist communism!

Mikhail Zhlobitsky

(October 31, 2018 attack claim against the FSB in Arkhangelsk, Russia)

It is also absurd to think that the class struggle is over; we are immersed in it up to our necks but unlike yesterday, the barbarization due to technological isolation (which each of us carries with him or her) deprives us of the real per- ception of the phenomenon as a whole. This barbarization entails a return to primordial, savage (thus purer) forms of class conflict. Mediating figures such as “unions” and “parties” are skipped. In the most technologically “advanced” part of the world, the social subject that once characterized the class of the oppressed, the “proletariat,” has been replaced by an undefined and desperate class that has no self-awareness. Meanwhile, hatred, anger have accumulated saturating the air, making it unbreathable and ready to explode at the first spark of the right intensity. This is well known by the powers-that-be, who despite having less good cards in their hands than ours, play them to their best by fueling conflicts among the poor. But they are only palliatives, only barely effective. Unions and leftist parties no longer work. Their firefighting role has been replaced by weapons of mass distraction such as racism and patriotism. But how long can this last? The strategy of pitting poor against more poor is out of breath, time counted. General impoverishment due to the technological wave and resulting unemployment will defuse racism and patriotism, but only if we play our cards right. In the time it takes for us to readjust and to guarantee citizenship incomes (real and not truf faldini1 like those of the “5 stars”2) to everyone, the system will be exposed almost helplessly to our attacks. In that time, hatred will reach its peak and perhaps it will be the good time that anger in this unfortunate country will be directed toward the real perpetrators of misery: the state and the bosses.

Moreover, the popular madness over sovereignism is weakening parliamentary democracy by undermining it from the ground up. This sort of “populism” produces conflicting and irrational drives that are difficult for the very people who unleashed them to manage. Today the possibility that our action can open a breach becomes real. We must have clear ideas, conviction and tenacity to turn hatred from the field, to open the eyes of the exploited. Will and determination can turn back the clock of history, making us start again where we began to lose those two irreplaceable qualities. A century ago, we were overwhelmed by the force of an authoritarian “communism” that poisoned us with its fruits, “social democracy” and “dictatorship of the proletariat,” which with their brutality brought the “myth” of the social revolution of the “sun of the future” and anarchy as concrete prospects for total liberation to a sunset. We claimed in our “modernity” that we did not need “myths,” but in this way we killed utopia, the greatest weapon we had to subvert this world. Historically, we have focused too much on rationality, on science while neglecting the instincts of revolt, the feelings, the passions underlying the human. Continue reading “Alfredo Cospito: Class hatred and the myth of avenging anarchy” →

We republish an excerpt from the CCF’s (Conspiracy of Cells of Fire) book New Urban Guerrilla on the occasion of “World Workers’ Day”, one of the few days when leftists remember to take to the streets, hold their ritual marches and speak their faded slogans. The left has never been able to fully recover from the consequences of the rise of neoliberalism and the fall of the USSR, and it never will as long as it clings to outdated and anachronistic theories and practices that struggle to cope with the rapid developments of the last few decades. The concept of ‘worker’ and ‘class struggle’ that they so glorify no longer have the same clarity and meaning that they had a century ago. The third industrial revolution, the automation it brought about and globalisation have led to the expansion of the tertiary sector at the expense of the primary and secondary sectors. For the average young worker who works in hotels and cafes, the ‘occupation of the means of production’ does not make as much sense as it would to a bachelor worker, especially when the rusty leftist rhetoric has not even managed to prevail against neoliberal standards, the doctrine of ‘there is no alternative’ and the false promises of social advancement and enrichment. The so-called class consciousness is now almost non-existent. We cannot even imagine how much more fossilized the left will look like with the arrival of the fourth industrial revolution, which is already just around the corner, and which will bring even more radical socio-economic transformations, changing and blurring even more the class dynamics and the meaning of ‘worker’.
With all that has been said about the left, it is therefore not surprising either why a ‘movement’ such as that of the a/a space, which tends to become increasingly leftist, is so alienated from population groups it is supposed to support, such as workers and minorities.
Or May Day is not the worker’s right.
May Day is sabotage, memory and consistency in the workers’ hellhole
Action and attack on the mechanisms of oppression
For anarchy and nihilism
– IO EIF

So here it is necessary to talk about society and the individual. We declare ourselves anti-socialists and have referred extensively to our conception of society. However, because we find that confusion remains in many mouths and ears producing distorted ideologies of revolutionary elitism, we for our part persist in striking down this misunderstanding.

First of all, by the term society we do not in any way exclusively define the numerical population of people. We characterize as a whole the majority framework of attitudes, traditions, morals and customs within which the processes of power are accepted. For example, the concepts of property, patriotism, religion, are pervasive social values deeply rooted in <> without the need for law enforcement and state surveillance.

Of course, the majority of society, beyond the common belief shared in the necessity of power, is at the same time divided into classes. Social classes that are not entrenched from one another, as in past centuries when natural exclusion from the upper echelons of power prevailed (pyramidal morphology based on descent and hereditary rights), but constitute categories of people based on their fluid position in production and their economic surface. Today, therefore, people are in constant class mobility due to the structure of the modern system. The participatory form of capitalism and the real or fictitious opportunities for professional development form a fluctuating scale on which petty bourgeoisie can become bosses (self-made professionals and careerists) and bosses can fall into petty bourgeoisie (company bankruptcies, failed investments). Continue reading “‘III) Class war is outdated’ – Conspiracy of Cells of Fire” →