SENZA CENSURA N.20

july 2006

editorial

In our discussions inside the editing staff but also in every occasione of comparison it emerges constantly a generalized confusion about the perspective of the political work, how to pledge with profit the little available energies, that "for whom and for what" that seems to accompany us day by day. And yet, now it seems such clear the situation, there are such and many unjustices, the abuses of power, the violences that we see everyday on the local plan and on the national and international ones, that finding ourselves in difficulty about what to do seems a contradiction, seems to confuse us still more. It's like there's a hole, between the most simple requirement of enhancement present in the conscience of everyone of us, made up of justice, solidarity, equality, dignity, and the reality which we live intoand that we toil to move, to contaminate, to transform. But it is not a matter of numbers: we are convinced that there are many people engaged every day in many activities, more or less relevant, more or less visible, but certainly characterized by the same desire of transformation, by the same intolerance for the suffocating oppression of a system that leaves always less spaces out of its control. Comrades, political militants, proletarians, workers, precarious, unemployed, students, mothers, fathers, inmigrants, prisoners, exploited... how many are we? Many, everyone fighting his/her resistance whereit's possible, untill he/her succeeds, every day.
And only sometimes, it seems almost for charm, these varieties cross themselves, recognizing themselves in some wide demonstration on unifying subjects, without anyone able to represent them and to organize them, without anyone succeeding to represent and organize himself, then coming again to dissolve himself in one thousand streams, often leaving the differentest political classes to dispute themselves something now dissolved. Or other times they are individual struggles, specific contradictions that escape from everyone's control, maybe thanks to the work of little militants and to the great rage of many, andthey recall to themselves everybody's attention for the force, the energy and originality they emit. Independently from the results and from the resistance character of the individual experiences, we think they represent always steps along that define some important thresholds of autonomy. This is the common feature of these experiences (and there were many during these last years) : to have broken the thresholds of compatibility established and to have compelled the opposing part to pursuit.
The difficulties described at the beginning we do not think they can simply be reduced to the fact that the opposing part is too strong. Certainty, it is surely stronger than us, it's obvious. But not so strong to succeed in resolving the actual contradictions, nor to succeed in masking them. It is not alone ideological conviction (it's many years that the test of profit falls, potentially...) : it's the reality to show us everyday the economical and social failure of the profit system. They must use strenght to allow their system go on and, above all, to defend it. But everyone of us knows, understands, lives on his/her own skin this failure. A failure that cannot mechanically breed the overcoming of the present system. The counter-revolution determined a common thought in the class very different from what has marked the fervor and the large dinamicity of the last cycles of struggle. Cycles of struggle developed into accumulation phases where the perspective, the common feeling, was represented from a possible sight of enhancement of the actual conditions of life. Quite different from today where it seems to prevail, perhaps also correctly, a sight quite more negative, represented from the risk of a worsening, a falling even more in lower part in the social staircase, to lose that little that in past was possible to reach. And so l' arroccamento, the unconscious but inexorable participation to the defence of the stronghold with the hope that this represents the same defence of actual interests.

From our point of view the big problem is another one.

There is a cancer, that grows up from a lot of years, and that is propagating, it is spread more near us, like a metastasis. A cancer that removes energy to our anger, that limits our perspective and that becomes a more mattering and effective tool in the enemy's hands. This cancer is reformism. Also in this case we do not report ourselves to an abstract concept, ideological, but to something of quite present and identifiable. We refer to a political cadre, the institutional Left, the whole Left, that in the last thirty years suicided the most large popular organization in Europe, the Italian Communist Party, in exchange of an institutional clearance that allowed to govern and to cover the higher offies of the State. A political situation that dismantled scientifically every class organization making it just burocracy. A political situation that contributed with its progressive withdrawal, to the dismantling of many economical and political conquests in every field of social life in this country.
A political situation that, during these years made of difficulties and withdrawal, planned its plan of perspective like the only possible and dragged in its ambiguous strategy of "opposition", thousands of political managers of base, removing them progressively any tension towards autonomy and transforming every "secure shelter" from the bad weather, into lethal traps. A political situation responsible to have made institutional this role of "opposition" and to have contributed in the last years, also across a tiring discussion about violence and legality, to place it inside a system, the bipolar one, that does not leave space to any real opposition. A bipolarism that cannot be and should not be seen only like internal to the middle-class crash but that works inexorably in anti-revolutionary key on the whole class and its subjectivity. A general situation in which the same struggle experiences more advanced and their search for a perspective of overcoming, risk to determine the maintenance of the same system if do not stretch out towards a clear and inexorable path of disruption towards reformism, limiting instead the actual intervention to where the precedents answered middle-class to the crisis (and/or the management Of "to remove their the chestnuts from the fire".

In a sentence, if the critic to the system has got as only perspective the same system, it becomes always functional only to its maintenance and to its reproduction.
But we yet said it : it's a squeaking system. We do not say it just for conviction but because we are sure that the many sparks of autonomy seen during are other than extinguished, and they are fed every day by the heaviness of social and economical contradictions imposed by this system. We should blow on the fire. This have to be our plan of perspective, in this direction we have to invest our political work, this have to be the meter of measure with which we verify the usefulness of our intervention. But also in this case we cannot entrust us to easy mechanisms waiting for the system's self-destruction or not considering the possibility that its degeneration is a fixed choice for its same maintenance, and therefore "governed" with decision.
We find ourselves therefore in the condition that we must facet the responsibility to find the road, to indicate it and to experience to travel it, verifying, defining time by time a serious balance for our progress. It's fundamental in every experience, small or large it is, trying to force the limits, the compatibility, to determine some disruptions, some stpes along. Not in the shape, but in the substance! To invert this tendency that today seems, on the contrary, to be made of continuous withdrawals, continuous renunciations, continuous compromises, continuous "legalities" ... Surely, this work has to be done with intelligence, without useless shortcuts: the criterion that should move every militant is wanting to safeguard always, in the respect of varieties, unity and solidarity.
It's possible to fight opportunism, but only if in the meantime we rebuild a practice and a culture of solidarity and complicity that supports us in the mistakes that inevitably will be committed in the walk and that protects us from the inexorable attacks that we will undergo, like we have seen during these last months, every experience that chooses to move itself outside from these armored compatibilities.

We think that l' present phase imposes an honest discussion and closed balance on the experiences developed during the last years and a reflection on the political paths undertaken by the comrades, with the aim to put at the center of the raising of the political initiative for the revolutionary orientation, the matter of the perspective, the method and the content of practice in an imperialist country like Italy. Without an adequate discussion it is inconceivable to do some steps along towards the discussion of an old matter: why we have the short breath in a reality that till now seems pregnant of explosive contradictions. We do not feel ourselves orphans of any previous political organization, nor we feel shipwrecked in the saving island of the institutional politics on which rules the protectorate of the political Left. Surely we cannot limit to criticize other people's mistakes, giving them the responsibility of our few incisive and building capacity.
The internity into present and future political and social movements, contributing to the development of a comprehensive sight of the crash, of a work method that doesn't delegate to any institutional force the construction of autonomy, of a sedimentation of organizational experiences able to lose the exclusively local and transitory character (like those that are given naturally by proletarians during a specific struggle) is important for a really incisive revolutionary practice. The steps along done by the real movement have to be potentially points of no return, in which the product of the crash serves to sediment and to to accelerate some dinamics of political and social polarization, if we don't want to advance rapidly to fold as much swiftly leaving to the enemy greater space than what conquerred. The work to build reference points for the class, more and more cosmopolitan and precarious also in our country, should not send again the matter of organization beyond the line of the knowledged horizon nor we have to give illsuions about the possibility to give immediately a formal shape to the revolutionaries' organization. Waiting and acting immediately are two opposite solutions that want to resolve a real problem: but neither only the development of objective contradictions, nor only the development of the subjective will, can resolve it. We think that the revolutionary process is a very long struggle that makes of its own, in its overcoming, the property of victories and defeats of those who "assaulted the sky", like the real weight of the preventive counter revolution today. But in the work of construction we are still a step under; perhaps because it's still necessary to probe the processes of taking conscience of the proletariat today and the construction of a revolutionary identity adequate to the complexity of reality, to explain the becoming relationship between the social subject of reference and the comrades which move themselves to transform radically the present social relationships. The contradictions become more and more homogeneous and the multinational portion of the class is more and more the bridge of communication between the expressed needs of the peripheric proletariat and the metropolitan one.
The war to the terrorism conduced by imperialism does not give truce in this sense to the possible welding between the two fronts by the subjective point of view, feeding the barbarity of war of everyone against everyone in the center of Europe like in the countries that it occupies militarily, even if, it's always good to remember, there is an important qualitative difference between waged war, low intensity war and social control into metropolie: even if more and more they interweave and they are called to work it the same subjects. It' s necessary to overcome euro-centralism and urban chauvinism, "learning to learn" from the movements of the "first world" as like the struggles of the tricontinent' s peoples, to reassert always, in every moment of resistance, the distance, if possible the animosity, from this system and its supporters.