Senza Censura N.4 - Marzo 2001

 

"RESTRUCTURING AND CONTROL" SECTION

 

Control : technologies and ideologies

 

“THERE IS NOT BETTER POLICE THAN SOCIAL CONTROL” (SAINT LUST)

 

Internationalization  and  precariousness  of job’s market, concentration of  property  and productive decentralization  are not just a  “tendency“ : they are part of a rebuilding of the  capitalistic way of production since twenty years.

A process  which is founded on  computerization of production that, as all great changes in the mood to produce, is started from the big factory to extend to other sectors ( finance, tertiary, trade, transport…).

Productive decentralization is based on the decomposition of working cycle in a plurality of pieces scattered on territory that are to productive mother units as they were  to single departments, in the previous organization form of the productive process.

This, together with a strong employment relationship precariousness , has took to  a territorial metropolitan order upsetting creating the requirement for the passage, as ideal place of proletariat political ricomposition, from big factory to territory and, as some comrades said more than twenty years ago, it is the condition that gives an esplicit content  to metropolitan proletariat class.

Now it is an exigence-consequence for capitalism to conform control  to productive system changes. So, even thanks to new technologies which allow to store enormous quantities of informations, we are present at a control extension on territory and subjects, ever more diffused and suffocating.

Daily use objects  ( mobile telephones, magnetic cards to do the shopping, to telephone, to withdraw the last money on the current account…) are formidable  control instruments  and , without theorizing panoptical city, everyone can realize that on  urban territory he is spied on hundred times a day by cameras set up everywhere.

Proletarian, comrades and revolutionaries must bring to account this reality. But don‘t believe in a “great brother” who slips into everyone’s houses controlling every single proletarian’s behaviour: control (on territory like in business) is the activity directed to obtain certain behaviour and in this meaning, it is different from the command which verifies behaviours compliance to prearranged rules. So , even on territory, it is not a function inclined to know single proletarians behaviour to eventually ratify them, but a real function of proletarian conflict government, and it is improbable to control every single proletarian subjectivity.

Instead we think that the logics acquainting control policies on multiple figures composing “metropolitan proletariat” ( not even coming from the fields: they were born  in metropolies even when they are foreigner, and they have in their psychic structure a greatest quantity of acquaintance and social relationships), they are logics classyfing  more important and active elements controlling the relationship which links them to territory and  substituting in this way, where possible, to the logic of repression that of prevention, committing  to the base level of parties, unions, squats…, the rule to  show to law’s secular arm  the crazy variables to send to the stake.

We talk about prevention  as a function. The policy of security and zero tollerance made in USA, is expanding even in the old Europe : the growth of control on territory does not go together with a lower imprisonement level which, instead, is increasing in Europe (Great Britain is the first  to accept United States policies, and with Finland and Austria as only countries in countertendency), even if with different times and moods, adapt to single states specific exigences.

In fact, cuttings to the welfare state, to wages, to work security ( the other aspect of general incarceration, of obliged job) depend not only on the word’s governators bad will,but they are measures imposed to slow up  the global crisis which

 grips  capitalistic way of production. Increasing the crisis, capital struggle to mantain its profit is strongest.

So, there’s an elaboration of new policies and hierarchies to  keep metropolies social question: mayors and municipiums  fully assumed into “public order committees”, standardization between police and military operations…

The same common language is controlled: internal repressive operation are called  “territory patrol” with police cars all the day (untill 70’S they stood only in police department parkings and they moved on call), are called  “territory improvement” operations (so it is in Napoli, where to remove some squatted homes many quarters have been militarized), and “coast security” (bombimgs or smugglers and underhands ship raming)…

Who relates in class struggle terms, for revolutionary people, understands that it’s a war;  today , even without a great proletarian conflict, it is very clear.

But let’s think about the concept of repression’s preventive function. In Italy and Europe we see many criminalization campaigns against immigration. These campaigns have a double objective: they are both functional to job marketing producing an underpayed  exploited and extortable  workers mass, and they criminalize also immigrants coming from countries supporting terrorism or  where terroristic organizations are present. This is an example extendible to many nationalities: intelligence USA structures have underlined  the passage  from a period when there were well organized groups (supported by         some countries’ financial and logistic help) to a phase of organized nets with various forms of support.

This concept of “net organization” justified many criminalization campaigns, inquiries against islamic-religious terrorism and  widespread immigrants arrests in half Europe, coming from middle-east and maghrebian countries. It’s difficult to understand these inquiries because the only source of news are mass-media, which willingly give us misinformation.

But it’s clear that immigrants arrested because of small quantities of drugs or false papers pass many years in prison because they are included in international inquiries (without anything to justify the associative crime).

A judge from Bologna, after the arrest of some small  and very poor drug sellers , said that they used their money to support terroristic organizations.

We don’t know if they choosed to be saints or if they lived in a real poorness condition, but it’s a choice to have millions to arrest expulse and backbite.

With anti-USA and anti-NATO attempts alarm, and the american Rome embassy closing, this double criminalization campaign finds new strenghts (playing on the fear of public enemy number one: the omnipresent Osama Bin Laden).

Repressive measures are invoked and carried out against  clandestine immigration as islamic terrorism broth of culture. There is also a mad campaign against muslim religion mantained by clergy, mass-media, movements and  various little parties, that is functional only to proletariat division.

The religious origin is an ideological trap even for proletarian and comrades.

The fact that imperialistic middle-class sweating in middle-east and north  african areas is imposed through  cultural and consumistic models gives to their resistance a specific feature of anti-occidentalism and antimperialism.

 The space often assumed by religion and islamism as ideology of this resistance finds here and in the weakness of a communist revolutionary worldwide perspective its reason to be, but  it must not create confusion between ideologic-cultural espression and class origin of the struggle.

It is essential to gather the real dimension of the struggle in globalization  time, so to understand  the actual class composition,and if it is possible to open new   revolutionary struggles in our territory.

If we substitute the concept of stateless proletarian with that of citizen (citizen of imperialistic metropolis: sharing and beneficiary of the tricontinent’s exploitation); if we underestimate or read as a return to obscurantism the value of the sionist expulsion and the liberation of the Khiam jail prisoners in South Libano (strategic area for imperialism),so we don’t understand one of the principal functions of social control, that is to mantain a national and imperialistic division of proletariat.

“The importance of Khiam’s fall has not to be understood as the same liberation of an occupied territory, but in the light of a battle fought worldwide on the level of political detention. What happened there has a value  as if the antimperialistic’77 movement had assaulted Stammheim jail and brought to freedom  RAF members; or as if proletarian catholic slums of Belfast had allowed Maze and Long Kech  prisons to be closed during the 1981 hunger strike. And Khiam, Trani, Siviglia, Lannemezan are not very far” (Jean Marc Rouillan, Action Directe’s prisoner, 19.06.2000).

 

CHART:

In the last years the magistracy of some  italian cities has carried out (on clear indication by intelligence  and national or international security services)   many  warrants of foreigner people accused to be islamic terrorism supporters. The operations we report seem to be  the more sensational , refferring to mass media short news.

-1995: Ros (politic military police) capture in Milan and Napoli many “GIA’s supporters”. The inquiry fails and they are released.

-NOVEMBER 1996: operation “shabka” (net) in Torino. 22 people are arrested for “criminal association articulated on many lands of the national GIA’s territory, in operative connection  with similar  groups operating in other european states and in Algeria”. They are released after the terms of preventive detention have passed.

-1998: in june  Bologna’s magistracy, on the base of supposed interceptions, denounces the possibility of   “islamic” attempts

during french world soccer championship; in Torino, instead, three egyptians are arrested because they have got weapons and they are supposed to be linked to Bin Laden group.

-1999: in Bologna 23 people (12 italians) are arrested for traffic in drugs. The examining magistracy  says that the money  has the function of supporting the islamic terrorism net in Europe.

-2000: in october in Napoli Ros arrest 11 people accused to be part of islamic organization Hidjra Wal Tafkir (exile and anathema) supposed to traffic in weapons and false papers; after a short period of time the public prosecution’s office demands the warrant of other 11 people  suspected to support islamic terrorism.



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