Hemos traducido al español dos interesantes y más que recomendadas publicaciones del pensamiento anárquico e insurreccional italiano, traducidas en más de un idioma y publicadas en más de un territorio, resultado de la inquietud, donde grupos de compañeros han tenido algo que decir sobre la realidad, enfatizando nuevamente la urgencia por destruir aquel entramado tecnológico configura un horizonte cada vez más desalentador para quienes se niegan al progreso y el control.
The former political prisoner talks about his anarchism, the 325 project and resisting the physical and mental jails that surround us all.
~ Interviewed by Elizabeth Vasileva ~
You recently spoke about the importance of solidarity and connections, between prisoners and with their supporters on the outside. Can you give us any examples of this kind of mutual or collective empowerment in the pushback against prison’s continuous repression?
Shortly before I was released in 2024, violent cell searches by a tactical unit of prison guards known as the National Search Team took place on C-wing of HMP Garth in Leyland, where I was being held. The NST took over the wing with dogs and riot gear. Cell by cell the raid took place with a lot of pointlessly brutal drama. In ones and twos we were handcuffed and placed in a locked wet room. Some prisoners were beaten, abused and a lot of our things were trashed. Some of the guys fought back, flooded their cells, banged their doors or played music really loud as a protest. The next day the whole wing refused to go back into their cells after the early morning unlock hour. As a cacophonous and unruly mob we demanded the immediate return of seized items, the replacement of damaged items and denounced the violence. This lead to the screws backing off. There was nothing at that moment that the screws could do because we all acted together, and without any leader. At the end of the lunch period, the stop-out ended.
Similar things happened in my experience when one of the prisoners was killed by depression or hopelessness. Demonstrations outside the prisons where I was held also were a strong experience that had an impact upon the guards and us. Especially when the fireworks exploded across the night sky and the comrades outside were militant. I found other prisoners to be generally supportive of each other in the roughly anti-system and criminal environment. Whenever I was transferred or moved to a different cell, the local guys usually would come to check if I was okay and if I needed anything. I helped other guys with their legal cases or prison admin, and tried to find common points of interest and subversion. We’d try to back each other, and if I had some problem, the guys would be voicing their demands too. There’s refusals and kick-offs being made in most of the prisons around the country each day about conditions and treatment. I lost track of the number of prison labour refusals and walkouts I heard about when I was inside, they are very common, as is getting on the netting that separates the landings to protest about treatment and poor conditions.
When I heard that comrades outside were carrying out revolutionary solidarity, that is when I felt our power inside the prison, I can say. From hearing about the direct actions with the Adream case in Chile, France, Italy, Indonesia and around the world, to the phone-call interventions that I was able to make from inside prison to meetings of comrades on the outside, I could feel the warmth from the comrades. Also knowing about the censored letters and books, the solidarity funds and benefit events, it was great.
For readers who don’t know 325, what can you tell us about the project and its content?
325 is an anarchist network of counter-information and direct action. In November 2020, Dutch counter-terrorist police took down the nostate.net server which held the 325 website, upon request from their German and English colleagues. The website was a long-running information clearing house of general news, reports, communiques, publications, event listings, etc. Mostly the website covered Europe, Latin America and South East Asia. 325 is also a hard-copy magazine which comes out on an intermittent basis, and dozens of publications have been published by the collective, including the newsletter Dark Nights, which has it’s own website.
Over the years, 325 has participated in an evolving participatory international network based on direct action and the support of prisoners, as well as providing space for various tendencies of anarchist, anti-capitalist and anti-civilisation groups. In recent issues of the magazine the analysis has shifted slightly to the profound new industrial changes in production and technology, such as artificial intelligence, life sciences and automation. The archive of the 325 site is an important document of social and armed revolutionary struggle over a number of years in Europe and internationally. The project started in 2003 and continues. Continue reading “UK: Wildfires will begin: An interview with Toby Shone”→
Authentically lived physical experience, rather than the void of social ‘recognition’ media. Down and out in the belly of the South West, filled with ‘propaganda of the deed’, the anger lives on!
Designed to be read easily as a zine or can be ripped, to be paste as A3 posters, which we did already the last year or so, all over the grey walls of Bristol.
In short nationally there’s 5444 people reported arrested from the uprising. 583 are on further investigations. That is the recent report from the legal aid institution [www.lbhbandung.or.id]. On 3rd September the same leftist legal organisation released info that 3337 people had been arrested, so we can see that the repression is building momentum. Hundreds of anarchists are reported arrested.
The Indonesian anti-terrorist unit ‘Densus 88’, are basically a death squad and have been activated by the government. ‘Densus 88’ are now hunting the insurrectionary anarchist, nihilist and egoist circles and they focus on the arrested. They will try to charge the comrades already arrested and those wanted with terrorism, which will be hard to prove in court but the repression could be bloody and we ask for international attention and revolutionary solidarity. The anti-terrorist unit is officially hunting the same circle in Makassar. This is the way that the Indonesian state try to make a paranoid climate which is not that really successful.
Tosca and black
Anti-terrorist unit labelled the insurrectionists as the “Toska item chaos network”, which refers to a flag used by those to separate themselves from anarcho socialist who at early times still allied with underbelly of mainstream leftist. But now red and black and tosca always unite in the streets. So most of the comrades who used the individualist flag are also running with the flag of the chaos star also. Now the dynamics are different, insurrectionary red and black also affiliated with tosca, because of how many comrades are fed up with the NGOs and the leftists too. However five years ago if you go to the street and carry the individualist flag, the “civil anarchist” leftists and union members will block you and gave you to the police. After all this, the leftists and unions, NGOs, started to stink, and there’s no more infighting. In fact those three days were complete coordination with the red and black.
The intense riot of three days was the most spontaneous uprising in modern day Indonesia.
In early September, the 4th issue of the international anarcho-nihilist/insurrectionary newspaper “Blessed Is The Flame” has been published. As always, along whith the counter-information of July and August, we have also collected texts on counter-surveillance, counter-repression and direct action. The newspaper is available in both digital and printed form. If anyone is interested on printing it themselves, the best way is either to print it as simple A4 with a stapler, or as A3 in booklet format.
As prisoners known to be opposed to order, we feel it is our duty to send our love and fond memories to three individuals who are no longer with us on this earthly plane, and to their loved ones: Tortuga, Lupi, and Belén.
We were fortunate to have known all three of them.
Tortuga, in countless days of insurrectionary expansion of the anarchist seed, giving precious moments of propaganda, music, and questioning.
Belén, in the heat of the same struggle and direct action. We all knew how she bravely and fiercely put her words into practice, and she was always greatly respected for it.
And Lupi, when we went to welcome him with our comrades from Carreta Anárquica in Santiago 1, when he was imprisoned. We tried to give him a warm and supportive welcome: bringing him delicious food and warm clothes, laughing for a while in the face of misfortune. Seeing firsthand how, despite the nervousness and fear that comes with entering prison for the first time, he maintained a stoic and proud consistency in his words and actions. We met him in prison and will never forget his innocent and beautiful energy, the light he carried above his head despite the dire circumstances.
For all of them, honor, fire, gunpowder, and flames! To remember them without these elements would be disrespectful.
Let’s bring theory into conflict: let ideas set fires.
In our colorful and dangerous hearts live the comrades who are no longer with us physically. But we, the masterless, know that they walk beside us in danger and calm.
Last night, our friend Pem got snatched by the pigs, and we still don’t know what charges they’ll throw at him. This morning, they’re out there in the media, trying to make a spectacle of mass arrests, calling us “provocateurs” and “outside agitators.” And they’re naming names—our names.
The usual traitor of this post-indrustrial capitalism such as “leftists,” the NGOs, and even the so-called anarchists have betrayed us by becoming the echo chamber of State narratives. They’re dancing in the state’s echo chamber, spreading their lies and slander. They’re parroting the ruling class narrative, blaming the rioters, blaming anyone who dares use insurrectionary tactics to tear down this civilization. The same people who once claimed solidarity now help the state track us down, label us as criminals or outside agitator, and destroy everything we’ve fought for. They even parroting the same narrative of “rioters caused the death of several people”. Yes this you Page Against the Machine. Are you glad now for the massive arrest? YOU ALSO DONT DO SHIT WHEN THE POLICE KILLED HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE IN A FOOTBALL STADIUM. YOUR ILLITERATE ARGUMENT CLEARLY SHOWS THE LIMITATION OF YOUR NANO BRAIN.
Page Against the Machine? (this self-proclaimed anarchist publisher seems to have more than just personal sentiment towards insurrectionary tactics. You know what? FUCK YOU AND YOUR MORALITY. You’ve become nothing more than state-funded hacks. You’ve lost the plot. You’re not anti-authoritarian—you’re just another cog in the machine, shilling for the status quo. Stop blaming the justified anger of the public—especially when that anger stems from real tragedies, like accidental deaths—not from people attacking each other. Don’t twist the truth to suit your image. Keep selling your so-called radical books and posing as a rebellious musician, saying stupid things on stage—but know this: we’re done with fakes like you. We see through it now.
Now, they’re hunting us down. They’re digging through our words, our actions, and our identities to silence us. They think by naming us, by locking us up, by calling us criminals, they can stop the insurrection. But this is far bigger than them. We’re not here to play by their rules.
Fuck the state. Fuck their cops. Fuck their media. Fuck their NGOs. All of you who sit comfortably in your homes, watching from your screens, pretending to give a shit—you’re part of the problem. You enable this civilization, this industrial system, this death culture, and now you’ve thrown us into the firing line. You don’t get to call yourselves anarchists if you’re backing the very structure that oppresses us.
We are the problem. The pigs are terrified of us because we stand against the very foundations of this system, this world. They want to destroy us? Fine. Let them try. But we won’t stop. We won’t be silent. We won’t go back into the cages they’ve built for us.
August has a black memory. One that is indispensable for those who stand their ground and decide to act against domination. In memory, something from the past merges with the present, even more so when memory ceases to be words and manifests itself accurately in insurrectionary action or in a concrete gesture of solidarity. Thus, black memory manages to transcend the censorship of power and advances without temporal or generational boundaries.
There also come moments when those who kept that black memory alive become part of it. And in diffuse temporal spaces, the present, the now, memories, and memory converge once again.
There are moments when life and death, from a binary understanding, vanish, creating an instant in which nothing and everything exists.
How must those who witnessed the cowardly and despicable trial that ended in the execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti have felt in August 1927?
Despite the insurrectionary actions of comrades, demonstrations, and petitions of all kinds for their release around the world, they were electrocuted by the United States on August 23, 1927, at midnight.
“We must respond to their violence with our violence: revenge. We must oppose their infamous instrument that burned the bodies of Sacco and Vanzetti with our instruments of vengeance,” said Di Giovanni in Culmine, in response to the infamous execution of his comrades. He also made it happen: he blew up the Washington monument and the Ford Motor Company in Buenos Aires…
The physical separation from so many comrades is an experience that weighs heavily on us. Only by breaking free from imposed understandings can we heal the absences and learn to live with them.
Last year, two dear comrades left us physically: Luciano Pitronelo and, a few days later, Belén Navarrete, both close to people we loved very much, comrades in ideas, activists, and supporters of our comrades in prison.
After that blow, after the impact, the actions began. The banners and graffiti with their names, barricades and pamphlets with their faces, incendiary outings and other chem were once again merging the present and the recent past, in violent actions, in fire, in banners, in graffiti.
And just as others remembered and made present their comrades almost a century ago, confronting cowardly and pacifist positions, today’s actions serve the same function.
Belén Navarrete lives in the explosion that blew up the door of the Abbott Recalcine laboratory on the stormy night of May 19 this year. The cells that bear her name made her present in an act of revenge for the distribution of contraceptive pills that forced an as yet undetermined number of women and pregnant bodies into pregnancy.
In every gesture, in every action, memory and action, a mixture that fuses the present and the past, in August when the renewal of the trees reappears, when the buds are about to burst, the black memory opens the portal where we make our comrades present… every gesture… every action.
May actions thin the veil that separates life from death.
Belén Navarrete and Tortuga live in insurrectionary action.
For our comrades who transcended the earthly plane.
London is a disneyland for the world’s dominators. The scientific and economic elites and their armies of technicians rule here unopposed – without having to fight against any idea which could challenge the foundations of this society. For this reason, they are free to use this city as a stable base to plan, launch, and profit from one-sided slaughters which subdue the lands where ‘critical resources’ are to be found, whether in Congo (cobalt), Yemen (Saudi oil fields) or Gaza and the West Bank (water and land).
But London is not spared from the relentless sacrifice of life to the economy. The bosses and their enforcers have us exactly where they want us: our time and life sucked dry in forced pointless activity called work and school, made sick by toxic materials in order to sustain addiction to useless objects. This city of exploitation and control is an endless ‘opportunity’ for anyone with money and power and an upgraded, high-tech hell for the rest of us.
The latest ‘upgrade’ here in south London is the proposal to expand the tube network of hyper-speed exploitation down the Old Kent Road to Lewisham – a dirty deal between TFL and finance capital which is already yielding luxury developments, springing up like a rash. Rent, energy, food-price hikes which sow desperation and abject dependence on charity… The oppression of passing the days in mouldy, pest-ridden, flood-prone, flammable boxes… Limitless police-state controls on the neighbourhoods… These are just a few of the attacks being deployed.
Not everyone wants to accommodate themselves, fit in, bow their heads, conform to all this. And among those who want to fight back, not everyone wants to put their trust in political parties, trade unions, pressure groups, activists, university career-critics, community leaders, official organisations, federations, large social movements.
Some make the choice of individual revolt which can spread. These ideas and acts of rebellion have nothing to say to those in power, but instead speak directly to raging hearts. Each one in struggle to unleash their own freedom, breathing life into a self-organised struggle for the freedom of all.
This is what we want to explore in the South London Anarchist Bookfair – with discussions and publications, delving into ideas which are outside of time, outside of measure and popularity, out of control. We want to share and explore our choices in the struggle against power in all its disguises, here and now.
