Letter – Page 4 – Dark Nights

Almost two and a half years have passed since, after only 19 days’ prison – I’m telling you – 19 days, you decided to leave a declaration in a review trial, it was 26/2/19.

When I got to know of your decision at the time, sorrow and anger resurfaced as they did when the texts entitled “dotting i’s” and“I burabacio” made their appearance.

I ask myself and ask you: you declare you are anarchists and revolutionaries, you practice conflictuality in the neighbourhoods in daily life, you live in or frequent squatted places, you organize or take part in gatherings outside prisons, detention centres for migrants, benefits; but what do you talk about on those occasions?!

Empty talk, obviously, if you still haven’t understood when to keep quiet or what kind of declaration to make.

Everything seems as though you participate in order to have a clear conscience and to clock in.

Your declaration handed to a prosecutor is the umpteenth proof, even if some stupid anarchist hadn’t realized it, of the fact that it is we anarchists ourselves who give suggestions to prosecutors to create the famous differentiation between good and bad anarchists, between social and insurrectionalists. Continue reading “Italy: Ethics wanted – or – a fairy tale at times anarchist” →

Degenerations – Between pride and gender victimhood
(An article Degenerazioni – Tra orgoglio e vittimismo di genere
Published in issue 3 of the anarchist paper Vetriolo)

I am anarchist, I am not feminist because I see feminism as a sectorial and victimist withdrawal, I have never made any gender discrimination although I don’t use gender-friendly linguistic conventions, on the contrary I often use dirty politically incorrect language. I think that the annulment of gender privilege and similar oppression is already contained in the search for anarchy, that is to say in the practice of antiauthoritarian relations, and should be cultivated there. Ah, I forgot, I loathe consciousness-raising in public meetings and I also consider assemblies to be blunt instruments. I understand and also have the will to meet. But I see how all too often the assembly degenerates into sterile self-representation.

You see nowadays you risk having to start off with such a preamble in order to enter the thicket of clichés on gender and feminism, disentangling yourself in the intricate incapacity to relate to the anarchist galaxy, with a range of behaviours going from hyper-emotiveness to the bureaucratic calculation of what stand (and degree of negotiable compromise) to take in a struggle. I don’t think that authoritarian and sexist behaviour can be fought by trying to spread new linguistic conventions or by cooking up shreds of mainstream indignant rhetoric (among which #nonunadimeno [enough is enough], the feminicide count on TV, pride, red shoes and rainbow ribbons) in an alternative sauce.

Rather these should be recognized as signs of yet another operation of the deconstruction of real meaning and recuperation in act. Convinced that one is opposing them, in actual fact one is adapting to the very behavioural and normative codes conceded by dominion as ways of releasing tension.

It’s nothing new that economic and political power is tending to swallow up and redigest everything, faster and faster; consider for example the pearls of anti-sexist, antiracist or whatever it might be neo-conservatism and conformism that are being dispensed by the media every day. Continue reading “Italy: Degenerations – Between pride and gender victimhood by Anna Beniamino” →